The Third-Out Theory

Marcus's palms were sweating through his jeans—again. Like, actually pooling in his pockets. Which would've been fine if he was anywhere else, but he was stuck behind home plate at the spring baseball game, trapped between Tyler (the guy who'd gotten high-top fades before they were cool) and Brianna (whose Instagram stories had somehow become legendary before freshman year was even over).

"Dude, you good?" Tyler asked, probably because Marcus had been staring at the same crumpled popcorn bag for seven innings.

"Yeah. Just hot."

"Bro, it's April."

Right.

The whole spying thing had started two weeks ago when Marcus's older sister Jayda had caught him scrolling through someone's Instagram for forty-five minutes straight. Not even liking. Just watching. She'd called it 'low-key stalking behavior,' which, rude, but also maybe not wrong? Because now Marcus couldn't stop feeling like everyone was doing it back—like the entire student body was secretly watching his every move, waiting for him to do something cringe.

Which was exactly why he couldn't just talk to Brianna like a normal human being.

The baseball game droned on. Someone hit a foul ball into the parking lot. Coach Miller yelled something about fundamentals. Tyler and Brianna debated whether the pitcher's slider was actually impressive or if the batters were just overthinking it.

Marcus thought about how weird it was that baseball was basically the only sport where you could fail seven out of ten times and still be considered good at it. Like, that was literally the batting average statistic. Failure as success. What kind of capitalist conditioning was that?

"Hey." Brianna turned toward him suddenly. "You're in Mr. Harrison's English, right? Did you get the reading log?"

His palms had somehow gotten sweatier. This was it. The moment. His brain was already preparing a worst-case scenario where he said something weird and everyone laughed and somehow it ended up on Twitter and he had to transfer schools.

"Yeah, I can send it to you."

"Sweet, let me get your Insta."

They exchanged handles like actual normal functioning teenagers. The universe did not implode. Coach Miller yelled at the umpire. Tyler made a joke about how this game was going to extra innings, again.

Marcus thought he might actually survive high school. Possibly. His palms were still sweating, but whatever. That was just his brand now.