Greens and Gloaming

The vitamin regimen started on a Tuesday. Mom slammed the bottle onto the kitchen counter like a gavel—judgment delivered.

"Your brother needs this for baseball season," she said, as if that explained everything. "You take it too."

The pills sat there, orange and accusing. I swallowed them dry, because that's what you do when you're the backup kid, the understudy in a family where your brother's already written his name in the varsity record book during sophomore year.

I'd been running cross country since middle school, not that anyone noticed. At dinner, it was always: "How's hitting coming along?" or "Coach thinks you could start at second base next year." They never asked about my five-minute miles or the meditative hell of hill repeats. They'd mentally assigned me to baseball by osmosis, like I'd absorb Jordan's talent through dinner conversation.

Then came the spinach incident.

I came home from practice to find my room empty—no piles of laundry, no scattered textbooks, no life. Just a tray of spinach on my desk, arranged with the precision of a threat.

"We ate all your junk food," Jordan called from the hallway. "Mom said you're welcome."

That night, I ran until my lungs burned, past the baseball field where the diamond glowed under floodlights like a stage set. I kept running, past the suburbs, past where the streetlights ended, until the road turned to gravel and my legs turned to lead. I lay in the grass behind the old elementary school and stared at the sky, thinking about vitamins and performance enhancements and how everyone wanted to optimize you into something they could brag about at parties.

My phone buzzed. Jordan: "Mom's freaking out. Where are you?"

I didn't text back.

I walked home in the dark, coming to something: I could keep choking down their vitamins and their expectations, or I could just... stop. My brother played baseball. I ran. Those were different sports, different lives. Nobody had to be disappointed if they stopped expecting me to be him.

The next morning at breakfast, I pushed the vitamin bottle toward Jordan.

"You need these more than I do," I said.

Mom stared. Jordan grinned, for once, like he actually saw me.

"Nice," he said. "Finally showing some backbone."

I grabbed an apple and headed out for a run. The air smelled like cut grass and possibility, and for the first time, nobody was watching. Just me and the road and the certainty that I was exactly where I needed to be.