Hairless Cat Summer

My sphinx cat Cleo looked like an alien from a planet where everyone forgot how to grow fur. Her wrinkly pink skin and bat ears made normal cats look basic. I stared at her while doomscrolling through TikTok, watching everyone post about the padel tournament like it was the Super Bowl meets prom.

"You're lucky, Cleo," I muttered. "Nobody's judging your serve."

She sneezed in my face. Classic.

The problem wasn't that I couldn't play padel—it's that I was tragically mid at it. Not terrible enough to be funny, not good enough to be useful. Just awkward placeholder energy on a court where everyone else looked like they'd been training since birth.

Then there was Santiago.

His baseball cap sat backwards, his smile hit different, and somehow he made even the stupid dink shots look athletic. We'd been "talking" for three weeks—which meant we'd exchanged twelve fire emojis and one mirror selfie that took me forty-seven tries to capture.

"Yo, Jordan!" His voice echoed across the padel courts. "You coming to the baseball field tonight? Team's throwing a thing."

My stomach did that thing where it forgets how to organ. "Yeah! Maybe!"

I spent two hours straightening my hair and another thirty minutes messing it up so it looked effortless. Cleo watched from my bed like I was embarrassing myself on purpose.

The baseball field smelled like cut grass and teenage possibilities. Fairy lights hung from the backstop, and someone's Bluetooth playlist shuffled through songs we'd all memorized. Santiago stood near home plate, holding a drink, looking like main character energy was his full-time job.

"Jordan!" He waved me over. "This is Maya."

Maya. The softball pitcher with the killer curveball and the hair that defied humidity. She was wearing his varsity jacket.

"Nice to meet you!" Her smile was genuine. "Santi said you're into sphynx cats? My aunt breeds them!"

"Yeah! I have one named Cleo. She's—"

"So weirdly cute, right? Like tiny naked grandmas!" We both laughed. Santiago looked confused.

The night blurred. Bad baseball puns, worse punchlines, Santiago's hand brushing my arm when he laughed, then drifting away. The bear mascot costume someone had brought out for photo ops. Maya posting stories where Santiago looked at her like she invented weekends.

I walked home under streetlights, Cleo's weird pink face waiting in my window. Some stories don't have plot twists. They're just—you're the sphinx cat in a world of fluffy golden retrievers, and that's not sad. It's just different.

I scratched Cleo's head. "At least we're iconic together." She purred like she knew she was the main character all along.