The Bear in the Dugout

The baseball thunked against my glove with a sound like a heart monitor flatlining. Tryouts in twenty minutes and my hands were sweating so much I could barely grip the bat.

"You good?" Marcus asked, leaning against the chain-link fence. My best friend since seventh grade, now suddenly six feet tall with a jawline that could cut glass. puberty hit him like a freight train; meanwhile I still looked like someone's misplaced little brother.

"Just peaching," I said, though we both knew I was lying. My brain felt like a browser with forty-seven tabs open—baseball stats, my recent garbage can discovery that Dad might be moving out, and the fact that Lena from history class had actually looked at me yesterday. Possibly. The lighting could've made it seem like she was looking at the rack of bats behind me.

Marcus finger-combed his hair (something he'd started doing recently, along with saying "lowkey" and "slaps" and calling people "bro" with alarming frequency). "You'll crush it. You've been working on your swing all summer."

"Yeah," I muttered. "Working on it while everyone else was at parties or beach trips or literally having lives. No pressure though."

Then Coach Miller blew his whistle and my stomach dropped like I'd missed a step.

The next hour was a blur of swinging, missing, fielding grounders that took weird hops, and trying not to look like I was about to throw up. Marcus was crushing everything, naturally, looking like he'd stepped out of a sports commercial. Meanwhile I was overthinking every micro-movement like my brain was running diagnostics on itself.

"Garcia," Coach Miller called out. "You've been staring at that ball for thirty seconds. You gonna hit it or ask it to prom?"

Someone snickered. I recognized that laugh—Tyler, whose backpack I'd tripped over yesterday because I was too busy staring at Lena to watch where I was going.

My next swing was so bad the ball literally rolled back to the pitcher's mound.

"Alright, bring it in," Coach Miller said. " roster goes up tonight at six. Don't blow up my phone asking about it before then."

Marcus and I walked to our bikes in the parking lot. The air still felt thick with August, even though it was September now. Everything was supposed to feel different this year, but so far it just felt like the same old script with slightly taller characters.

"You coming to my place?" Marcus asked. "New episode of that show drops."

"Can't. Mom's making a 'family dinner.'" I made air quotes. "She thinks it'll fix things or something. Spoiler: it won't."

"That's rough, man." Marcus hesitated. "Hey, you ever think about... I don't know. Trying out for something else? Like, no offense, but you look like you're being held hostage whenever you're at baseball."

The words hit harder than any fastball could have. I stared at him, and in that moment I realized he wasn't wrong—I was bear-ing the weight of expectations that weren't even mine. Dad's old varsity jacket hung in my closet at home, and suddenly it felt like a ghost I'd been letting haunt me all summer.

"I," I started, then stopped. "Yeah. Actually, I think I have been."

Marcus's eyes widened like he hadn't expected me to agree. "So...?"

"So maybe baseball isn't my thing. Maybe it was Dad's thing, or the thing I thought I was supposed to want. But that doesn't mean something's wrong with me. It just means I'm playing the wrong game."

The school bell rang in the distance, and I realized we should've been heading to class. But for the first time in months, my brain didn't feel like a browser with forty-seven tabs—it felt clear, like someone had finally closed the ones that had been freezing everything up.

"What are you gonna do instead?" Marcus asked, and for once he wasn't looking at his phone or checking his reflection in the bike's handlebar mirror.

"Not sure yet," I admitted. "But I think I'm gonna start by not checking that roster tonight."