The Orange Peel Prophet

The cafeteria pyramid was real, and it was brutal. Everyone knew the hierarchy: varsity jocks at the apex, then the cool kids, then the normies, then us — the ones who existed in the background like NPC texture. I sat somewhere near the base, geometrically invisible, peeling my second orange of the week.

"You're gonna get scurvy," Jordan said, sliding into the seat across from me. "That's, like, five oranges in three days."

"It's fine," I muttered, though my fingers were sticky with citrus and my backpack probably smelled like a Florida grove.

I was nervous. Baseball tryouts were tomorrow, and I'd been stress-eating vitamin C like it was a coping strategy. Baseball — because apparently nothing says 'I'm a Normal Teenage Boy' like swinging a wooden stick at a ball for three hours. My dad's idea, obviously. He'd played in college, which meant I had to at least try.

The real problem wasn't the tryouts. It was Chloe, the varsity shortstop who sat two tables up the pyramid. She'd caught me watching her during lunch on Tuesday, and now I was determined to Impress Her By Becoming Good At Baseball despite never having successfully hit anything in my entire life.

"You're spiraling," Jordan said. "Just breathe. Also, your hands are literally orange-stained. It's weird vibes."

I stared at the peel strips on my tray. They formed this chaotic orange web, like I was some kind of citrus prophet predicting my own doom.

"What if I just," I lowered my voice, "brought her an orange tomorrow? Like, a peace offering? Pre-game ritual luck?"

Jordan's face said everything: Dude, no.

But I did it anyway. Because when you're fifteen and trapped in the pyramid's gravity, sometimes you just gotta climb up armed with nothing but fruit and desperation. I walked onto that field with an orange in my pocket like a total idiot, and Chloe looked at me like I was insane.

"Is that... for luck?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said, suddenly confident. "Vitamin C for the win."

She laughed. And then she hit a double, and I somehow made it onto the JV roster, and sometimes — just sometimes — the pyramid isn't a prison. Sometimes it's just where you start climbing.