Outfield Secrets

The baseball glove sat in my bag like evidence of a crime I hadn't committed but everyone assumed I had. My dad's dream, not mine. I'd been playing outfield for three years, mostly watching clouds while pretending to care about the game.

"You coming to Ben's party?" Tyler asked, slapping his catcher's mitt against his thigh.

"Maybe." I was definitely going. I just couldn't admit how much I wanted to.

I'd become a pro at this—spying on the conversations I couldn't quite join, picking up just enough slang to pass. My notes app was filled with observations: what people wore, how they stood, the way Jordana flipped her hair when she laughed. I was studying social dynamics like some undercover operation.

"You're so weird sometimes," Tyler said, but not meanly. That was worse.

After practice, I did what I always did: I went running. My feet hitting the pavement was the only thing that drowned out the overthinking. Left foot: *You don't belong.* Right foot: *Fake it till you make it.* Left foot: *They'll never really know you.* Running until my lungs burned, until the static in my head went quiet.

That's when I saw Jordana sitting on the curb, crying.

I almost kept going. She was on varsity everything, popular in that way that made her seem untouchable. But she looked small, and something in me cracked.

"You okay?" I stopped, sweating through my baseball t-shirt.

She looked up, startled. Then her face crumbled again. "Not even a little."

So I sat with her. We talked for two hours while the sun went down—about her parents' divorce, about how she felt like everyone expected her to be perfect, about how she'd started running at dawn because it was the only time she could breathe. I told her about the spying, about the notes app, about feeling like I was undercover in my own life.

"We're all just figuring it out," she said. "Even the ones who look like they have it together."

At Ben's party that weekend, I didn't pretend. I danced badly. I said stuff that wasn't cool. And Jordana—perfect, untouchable Jordana—grabbed my hand and pulled me into the chaos, both of us running toward something real instead of away from everything we feared.