The Pyramid Scheme of Fitting In

Freshman year hit me like a truck. One minute I'm living my best middle school life, next minute I'm at the bottom of the social pyramid, staring up at the seniors who moved like they owned the place. Everyone knew their spot in the hierarchy except me.

Then I discovered padel. Not tennis — too basic. Not pickleball — for old people. Padel was where it was at, the sport that somehow separated the cool kids from the...

well, from me.

"Bro, you coming to the courts?" Marcus asked at lunch. He was a junior, which made this automatically the most important moment of my life.

"Yeah, totally," I said, trying to sound chill while internally screaming. I'd never played, but YouTube tutorials counted as experience, right?

That afternoon, I showed up wearing my lucky baseball hat backward (cringe, I know, but anxiety makes you weird). The court looked like a glass box where social dreams went to die.

"You play?" asked Chloe, whose Instagram I'd been stalking since orientation.

"Uh, yeah," I lied. "Just not... recently."

First swing? I missed the ball entirely. Second swing? I hit the glass wall with a sound like a dying duck. Everyone stared.

But then something weird happened. I started playing like my life depended on it. Maybe it was the adrenaline, maybe the universe decided to grant me one (1) sports competency. I actually started hitting the ball back. I even scored a point.

"Not bad, hat boy," Chloe said.

Hat boy. I was hat boy. I'd take it.

Afterward, sitting in the bleachers, Marcus pulled out a gummy vitamin. "Want one? My mom's obsessed with these immune booster things."

"Sure?" I said, confused but willing to accept any offering from the upperclassmen.

"We're all just pretending to know what we're doing," Marcus said suddenly. "You know that, right? Even seniors. We're all just taking our vitamins and hoping nobody notices we have no idea what's happening."

I looked at my neon orange gummy like it contained the secrets of the universe. Maybe fitting in wasn't about climbing the pyramid. Maybe it was about finding the weirdos who were okay with being themselves, whether they were crushing it at padel or failing spectacularly.

"You wanna play again tomorrow?" Chloe called from across the court.

"Yeah," I said, adjusting my hat. "Yeah, I do."

Maybe freshman year wouldn't completely suck after all.