The Last Inning

Marcus felt like a zombie. Three consecutive nights of studying for APUSH finals will do that to a person. He caught his reflection in the storefront window—his hair was doing this weird gravity-defying thing on one side, like it had given up on life entirely. He smoothed it down with sweat-slicked palms.

"You're not gonna make it," Maya had texted. "Bottom of the ninth. Lucas is actually killing it."

Baseball. Lucas's thing. The guy who'd been giving Maya heart-eyes since seventh grade, the same Maya who Marcus had been secretly low-key obsessed with since the homecoming dance disaster. The same Maya who was currently sitting in the bleachers watching Lucas crush it on the pitcher's mound.

Marcus started running.

His lungs burned like he'd swallowed fire. The baseball field glowed in the distance, that perfect golden-hour lighting that made everything look cinematic. This was it. The moment he'd been building toward all semester—working up the nerve to tell Maya how he felt, properly this time, not as some awkward joke.

He skidded through the gates, chest heaving. The scoreboard lit up: BOTTOM 9, TWO OUTS.

Maya turned at the sound of his arrival. Her face lit up in that way that made his stomach do somersaults. "You made it!"

"Yeah," Marcus wheezed. "Made it."

She held up a plastic baggie with water inside. A single goldfish swam in tiny, stressed circles. "Lucas won it for me at the carnival booth. Isn't it cute?"

Something in Marcus's chest deflated. Flatlined. The zombie feeling returned, but worse—the walking dead don't feel disappointment.

"Yeah," he said, and it came out more honest than he intended. "It's great."

He watched the goldfish swimming its endless tiny laps, trapped in clear plastic, completely unaware that Lucas was currently winding up for the final pitch that would win the game and probably Maya's heart too.

Sometimes being sixteen felt exactly like that goldfish—just swimming in circles, waiting for something to happen, not realizing you were already caught.