Strike Zone, Social Pyramid

The baseball sat heavy in my palm like a heartbeat I couldn't slow down. Tomorrow was varsity tryouts, and Coach Miller had made it clear: only three spots open, thirty guys trying out, zero room for error.

"Bro, you're overthinking it," Marcus said, flopping onto my bed. "You've got the arm. Just don't pull a Hermione Face during tryouts and you're golden."

Hermione Face. That's what he'd called my disastrous attempt to style my hair for spring fling last year—spent three hours with gel and somehow ended up looking like I'd stuck my finger in an electrical socket. After that incident, I'd just kept growing it out, but now it was this awkward in-between length that made me look like I was trying too hard... or not trying at all.

"What if I choke?" I muttered. "What if Jenkins makes the team and I don't, and suddenly I'm two rungs lower on the sophomore pyramid?"

Marcus sat up, dead serious. "Bro. Jenkins couldn't hit a beach ball with a tennis racket. You're worrying about nothing."

But I wasn't. At Jefferson High, everything was a pyramid. varsity sports at the top, then regular sports, then band, then... well, then came people like me, somewhere in the middle, constantly climbing or slipping depending on who noticed what.

"My cousin says she'll cut it," Marcus offered. "She did hers, it came out sick."

That should've been my first clue. Total bull.

But I was desperate. So that night, Marcus's cousin Chelsea showed up with a giant pair of kitchen scissors and zero actual experience.

"Trust me," she said, which is exactly what villains say in movies before everything goes wrong.

An hour later, I stared in the mirror. It wasn't just bad—it was impressively terrible. Like, how did you even mess up that badly? The left side was basically buzzed. The right side hung past my ear. It was asymmetrical in a way that symmetry itself would be jealous.

"It's..." Marcus started.

"Don't say it," I groaned.

"It's definitely a look."

I pulled a beanie over my head. "This is fine. I'll just wear it during tryouts."

"Coach doesn't allow hats during drills."

I stared at him. "You're kidding. That's a rule now?"

"Since forever."

I threw the baseball at my wall. It bounced off the poster of Mike Trout, leaving a dent in the paper. Perfect. Just perfect.

That night I couldn't sleep. I kept imagining walking onto the field with this monstrosity on my head, everyone laughing, Coach shaking his head, me at the bottom of the pyramid forever. Being a sophomore was already rough enough without being the guy with the disastrous hair and no spot on the team.

But somewhere around 3 AM, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, something shifted. So what if my hair looked like a lawnmower incident? So what if people laughed? Marcus was right about Jenkins—he couldn't hit to save his life. And I'd been throwing since I was seven.

The pyramid would still be there tomorrow. The hair would grow back. But varsity tryouts only came once a year.

I took off the beanie and looked in the mirror again. Yeah, it was bad. Yeah, people would talk. But they'd be watching me pitch, too. And that part? That part I could control.

Somehow, that made the bull look less terrifying. Not gone, just smaller. Something I could work around.

"Alright," I said to my reflection. "Let's see what you got."