The Summer I Learned to Fake It

My mom's new obsession with **padel** was literally ruining my life. Apparently, all the cool kids in Barcelona were playing it, which meant I—Maya, fifteen and tragically uncoordinated—needed to be on a court by 8 AM every Saturday. The fluorescent green ball ricocheted off walls I couldn't even see properly through my sleep-deprived squint.

"You need your B-complex," she said, pressing a fluorescent **vitamin** gummy into my palm like it was contraband. "For energy. For focus. For—"

"For looking like I'm trying too hard?" I muttered, already feeling the weird aftertaste of artificial strawberry coating my tongue in shame.

The real problem wasn't the padel. It was Lucas.

Lucas, who sat behind me in pre-calc and smelled like cedar and poor decisions. Lucas, whose life apparently revolved around **baseball**—or at least, the varsity jacket he wore even in May. I'd started strategically walking past the baseball diamond after school, which was pathetic, except that one time he nodded at me and I nearly walked into a trash can.

"You should come to a game," he'd said on Tuesday, and my brain had short-circuited so thoroughly that I'd just made a sound like a dying cat.

So that was the situation: faking my way through padel matches I hated, choking down vitamins I didn't need, all while spiraling over a boy who probably thought I was weirdly committed to loitering near chain-link fences.

Then came the Saturday everything shifted.

I was supposed to be at padel. Instead, I found myself **running**—actually running, not the metaphorical kind—down the bike path behind the baseball field, my Consoles absolutely not made for this, my hair escaping its careful arrangement in chunks. The air smelled like cut grass and distant rain, and my lungs burned in that weirdly satisfying way, and suddenly I wasn't thinking about Lucas or my mom's perfectly curated vision of my summer.

I was just moving. My legs, my choice, my terrible sneakers slapping against pavement.

Behind the backstop, I could see the team warming up. Lucas laughed at something his teammate said, throwing his head back, and I realized—with a jolt that felt like swallowing that gummy vitamin whole—that I didn't actually want to be at his baseball game. I wanted to be exactly where I was: sweaty and alone and absolutely free.

I kept running.

Later, I'd text my mom that padel was cancelled. I'd stop walking past the field. I'd trade the neon gummies for actual food. But right now, the sun was breaking through the clouds, and for the first time all summer, I wasn't performing anything.

I was just a girl in unfortunate shoes, running toward nothing in particular, and it was completely enough.