The Season of Trying Everything

Jace was fifteen and entirely undecided about who he was supposed to be. His older brother was the baseball star — varsity since sophomore year, already getting college recruitment letters. His little sister was a swim prodigy, waking up at 4:30 AM for practice, smelling permanently of chlorine and determination.

And then there was Jace, who had tried everything and nothing had stuck.

"You'll find your thing," his mom said, which was mom-speak for "I'm worried you're going to spend your entire adolescence playing Fortnite in your room."

So when his friend Maya suggested padel, Jace said yes before he even knew what it was. Turns out it's like tennis meets squash, played on a tiny court with walls you can hit off. He was terrible, but Maya was worse, and they spent the whole time wheezing with laughter, smashing the ball into each other's shins by accident, inventing new rules when they forgot the real ones.

The next week, he tried joining the cross-country team because apparently running clears your mind or whatever. Two miles in, his lungs felt like someone had replaced them with actual fire, and he realized some people's minds are just fine being unclear. He walked home, dignity fully intact, waving at the real runners who were actually, impossibly, still going.

His neighbor's cat, Barnaby, watched all of this from various front porches. Barnaby was ancient, missing half an ear, and entirely unimpressed by human attempts at self-actualization. Jace would sit with him sometimes, petting his soft orange fur while explaining his latest identity crisis.

"I'm not good at anything," he told Barnaby after the padel disaster. "Maya's naturally athletic. My siblings are prodigies. I'm just... here."

Barnaby sneezed on his sneaker, which felt like a fair point.

The breakthrough came accidentally. Jace was at his brother's baseball game, bored in the bleachers, when the team's regular scorekeeper got sick. Someone thrust a scorebook into his hands. "You're good at math, right?"

He wasn't particularly good at math. But he was meticulous. He noticed patterns. By the third inning, he could predict what the pitcher would throw based on the count. By the sixth, the coach was asking his opinion on pinch hitters.

After the game, his brother clapped him on the shoulder. "That was actually kind of legendary. You've got, like, a database brain."

Jace thought about it later, sitting on his porch with Barnaby draped across his lap like a judgmental orange blanket. Maybe his thing wasn't doing — it was seeing. The patterns, the details, the way everything connected if you looked closely enough.

"I think I'm a statistics nerd," he told Barnaby.

The cat closed his eyes and began to purr, which was basically an endorsement.

He didn't become a jock. He didn't become a prodigy. But he started showing up to games with a notebook, started helping Maya analyze her padel serve, started tracking his little sister's lap times. And for the first time, when people asked what he was into, he had an answer.

"I'm the guy who knows stuff," he'd say, which sounded simple but felt like everything.