The Orange Incident

Okay, so this is the part where I tell you how I literally turned myself into a human traffic cone.

It started two weeks before summer swim team tryouts. I'm not talking about your casual 'let's do a few laps' swimming—I'm talking about the varsity jacket, Friday night lights, everyone knows your name kind of swimming. The problem? I'd barely passed gym class swimming the year before. My breaststroke looked more like a distressed frog. My dive? Let's just say the pool didn't so much welcome me as politely tolerate my existence.

But Jordan—the senior who'd placed at regionals last year—had mentioned something about nutrition. Offhand. While I was eavesdropping behind a vending machine.

'Carrots, sweet potatoes, anything with beta carotene,' she'd said. 'Loaded with vitamin A. Gives you that competitive edge.'

I took 'competitive edge' and ran with it. Straight to the grocery store, where I proceeded to buy every orange-colored item in the produce section. Carrots. Butternut squash. Cantaloupe. And—because my mom had recently decided we needed to 'expand our culinary horizons'—papaya.

Let me tell you something about papaya: it looks like what would happen if a cantaloupe and a pear had a weirdly long baby. It tastes like someone described 'tropical' to a computer and the computer tried its best. But I was committed. I was COMMITTED to being the swimming version of myself that Jordan would finally notice.

Two weeks. Fourteen days of eating nothing but orange foods. My skin started taking on this ... glow. I thought it looked healthy. Athletic, even. My mom asked if I'd started using self-tanner. I told her it was just natural radiance from all the antioxidants. I felt powerful. I felt ready.

Tryout day arrived. I walked up to the pool deck feeling like a warrior. I had my orange towel. My orange goggles. My orange-tinted confidence.

Then I saw the crowd. Then I saw Jordan. Then I looked down at my arms against the stark white tiles of the pool deck and realized—oh no. Oh no no no.

I wasn't glowing. I was orange. Like, ACTUALLY orange. Like a walking glass of orange juice. Like someone had dipped me in highlighter fluid.

'Whoa,' said this guy I'd had a crush on since seventh grade. 'Did you ... fall in a bag of Cheetos or something?'

The whole pool deck went quiet. Then someone laughed. Then everyone laughed. I could feel my face—which was somehow even MORE orange than my arms—burning with a humiliation so potent I thought I might spontaneously combust into a literal flame.

But here's what nobody tells you about hitting rock bottom in front of fifty people: once you're there, there's nowhere to go but up. So I did the only thing I could think of. I raised one very orange hand and said, 'Actually, it's from all the vitamin A. Extremely intentional. Very athlete.'

Jordan looked over. For a second. Then she smiled.

'The smoothie bar,' she said. 'They have one with orange and papaya. Try it before your heat. Way faster than turning yourself into a carrot.'

I didn't make the team. Not that year. But I did make Jordan laugh. And I learned that maybe the 'competitive edge' isn't about being perfect—it's about being the person who can laugh at herself when she shows up to swim tryouts looking like a humanoid fruit.

Also, I learned that normal food exists. And that's important too.