Papaya Stains at Third Base

The baseball sat heavy in my glove, mocking me. Third base. Of course Coach put the new kid at the position where failure happens in slow motion.

"You got this, Marcos!" Leo yelled from the dugout. My sort-of-friend, who'd taken me under his wing approximately three days ago when I transferred to Oak Creek High. His loyalty was sweet but possibly misplaced.

The batter squared to bunt. I charged. The ball trickled foul, and I—展示ing all the grace of a baby giraffe on ice—tripped over my own cleats and landed face-first in something squishy and orange.

A papaya. Behind the backstop. Who brings papayas to baseball practice?

"Yo, you okay?" Leo's voice came closer, followed by the sound of someone running. The team gathered. Great. Exactly what a transfer student needs: an audience while he wipes tropical fruit from his chin.

Then chaos erupted. A dog—a massive, enthusiastic golden retriever—burst onto the field, clearly liberated from someone's backyard, and bee-lined for the fallen papaya like it was the Holy Grail of snacks.

"Buster!" A girl with teal-streaked hair sprinted after him. "I am SO sorry, oh my god."

The dog skidded through the mess, coating himself in orange pulp, then shook vigorously—spraying papaya spatter across three of our starters.

The silence lasted exactly three seconds before someone snorted. Then Leo lost it. Then the girl. Then, against my better judgment, me.

"I'm Maya," she said between gasps, trying to wrangle her papaya-covered dog. "And apparently Buster really likes exotic fruit."

"Marcos," I said, wiping sticky sweetness from my cheek. "And apparently so do I."

Later, Leo's mom drove us to his house so I could borrow a jersey. Maya and Buster came too. We sat on his back porch eating pizza (NOT papaya), and nobody mentioned that I'd face-planted into fruit in front of the entire varsity team.

Sometimes the worst moments—the embarrassing, sticky, ridiculous disasters—become the good stories later. And sometimes you find your people through papula-related incidents involving escaped dogs and baseball fields.

Not gonna lie, though: I still can't look at papayas without flinching.