Summer of Second Chances

The Florida heat made everything feel like a dream I couldn't quite wake up from. I'd spent the entire July moving like a **zombie** between the resort's padel courts and my room, my brain fried from humidity and the weight of things I couldn't say.

"You're up, Miles," someone called, and I gripped my racquet tighter. Padel was supposed to be my thing this summer—the sport that would finally make me interesting at Northwood High. But three weeks in, I was still terrible, and everyone knew it.

I lost. Again. The ball sailed past me, and so did my chances with the varsity crowd watching from the **palm**-fringed benches.

Afterward, I hid behind the maintenance shed, where the resort's golden retriever, Buster, found me. He nudged my hand with his wet nose, like he knew exactly how much it sucked to be fifteen and average at everything. I leaned back against the stucco wall and cried into his **dog**-fur shoulder, letting salty tears mix with the ocean breeze.

"There you are."

Maya. The girl from the front desk with the half-shaved head and eyes that saw too much. She sat beside me, not close enough to touch, but close enough that I could smell her coconut perfume.

"My **goldfish** died yesterday," she said, like it explained everything. "Won at a carnival, lived for three weeks in a bowl on my nightstand. His name was Gladiator." She paused. "It's stupid to miss a fish, right?"

"No," I said. "It's not stupid."

She turned to me then, really looked at me. "You know what my therapist says? That we're all just waiting to figure out who we're becoming. That some years feel like you're stuck underwater, and others—" she gestured at the setting sun painting everything gold "—you finally break the surface."

We sat there as the resort lights flickered on, two kids hiding behind a shed, both pretending we weren't relieved to have found someone who understood. For the first time all summer, the zombie feeling lifted. Maybe average was okay. Maybe I didn't need to be good at padel to be worth knowing.

"Want to feed the turtles in the lobby fountain?" Maya asked.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I do."