Riddles on the Court

The summer I turned fifteen, my parents dragged me to Shadow Creek Resort — basically fancy jail for teens who failed at having friends. I spent the first week avoiding eye contact and pretending my phone had died, which worked great until I literally walked into someone while doom-scrolling.

"Watch it, Sphinx-face," she said, then blinked. "Wait, you're the new kid."

"I'm Marco."

"Lexi. And that's a sphinx tattoo on your wrist? Seriously?"

I looked down. The fake tattoo my best friend back home had stuck on me three days ago had faded into something that definitely resembled nothing.

"It's... complicated."

Lexi laughed, actually laughed with her whole body like she didn't care who was watching. "Everything's complicated when you're fifteen. Come on."

She dragged me to the padel courts, where a bunch of incredibly shiny teenagers were absolutely demolishing each other at this tennis-adjacent sport I'd never heard of.

"You play?" Lexi asked, already knowing I didn't.

"I'm more of a... observer type."

"Perfect. You're with me."

We spent the rest of the summer as the worst padel team in resort history, which was exactly as embarrassing as it sounds and somehow the best thing that had ever happened to me. Lexi taught me that the trick to the game wasn't power — it was angle, spin, and occasionally just smashing the ball and hoping for the best.

"Life's a riddle," she said once, sitting on the court edge while our opponents destroyed us 6-0. "The sphinx asks questions because she wants to see if you'll stop to think, or if you'll just walk off the edge of a cliff trying to look like you know where you're going."

"That's incredibly deep for someone who just hit the ball into the pond."

"I'm multitalented."

The last day, she gave me a piece of paper with her number and a single question written underneath: What runs but never walks?

I stared at it all the way home. A river. Time. A nose.

Or maybe, I thought, smiling as my mom asked how my summer was — maybe some riddles aren't meant to be solved alone. Maybe the point is finding someone who'll help you figure it out, one terrible game of padel at a time.