Swallowing Pride

I considered **palm** reading might explain my teenage struggles more accurately than my mom's daily **vitamin** routine. At sixteen, I felt like every social interaction required supernatural interpretation.

The padel court at our community center became my unexpected stage. I'd never played, but when Isabella invited our friend group, I couldn't say no. She was the kind of effortlessly cool person who made everything look easy.

"You coming?" she asked, twirling her racquet.

"Yeah," I managed, while internally calculating how to avoid complete humiliation.

My weird **dog** Buster had other plans. As we walked to the courts, he bolted after a squirrel, dragging me through someone's meticulously landscaped garden. I tripped over a **papaya** plant—because apparently, Mrs. Henderson grew tropical fruit in suburban Ohio—and face-planted into the mulch.

Isabella laughed. Not mean laughing, but the genuine kind that made my stomach do flip-flops.

"You okay?" She offered a hand. Her palms were warm, slightly calloused from padel.

"Peachy," I said, wiping mud from my cheek. "Just thought I'd check the soil quality."

On court, my coordination abandoned me completely. I swung at air. I hit the fence. Once, I somehow struck myself in the shin with my own racquet. Through it all, Isabella played with patient grace, somehow making my failures feel like part of the fun.

"You're overthinking it," she said between points. "Just hit the thing."

Afterward, sitting on the bench while Buster attacked his water bowl, she pulled something from her bag.

"My mom's obsessed with these." She handed me a piece of **papaya**. "Supposedly amazing for, like, everything."

I took it. "My mom makes me take these giant **vitamin** tablets every morning. They smell like sadness."

She laughed again. "Mine too. But my grandmother says swallowing them is basically a character-building exercise."

"What doesn't kill us makes us stronger?"

"Exactly." She nudged my shoulder. "Like padel. Or embarrassing ourselves in front of people we're trying to impress."

My heart stumbled. Did she mean—

"You know," she continued, "Buster's pretty great. And you're actually not terrible at padel for a beginner. You just need to stop trying so hard."

I looked at my **palm**s, still slightly calloused from today's failures, then at her sincere smile.

"Yeah," I said, finally breathing. "I'm working on that."

Some lessons you can't learn from a bottle. Sometimes you just have to eat weird fruit, embarrass yourself repeatedly, and trust that eventually, you'll figure out how to just hit the thing.