The Vitamin Water Summer

Jordan slumped against the chain-link fence, watching the baseball practice from the wrong side of the field. Again. His cousin's team had made regionals — big deal — while Jordan was stuck补水ing on some glorified vitamin water his mom swore would help him grow. At fifteen, being five-foot-nothing in a family of giants was its own special kind of torture.

His phone buzzed. A text from Maya: cable's out. bored. come over?

Maya lived in the cul-de-sac behind the middle school, the one with the backyard full of junked appliances and mystery items. Last week they'd built an entire pyramid out of empty Red Bull cans her older brother left behind. Four levels high. It stood for three whole hours before her mom knocked it over and made them clean it up.

"You're still doing that vitamin thing?" Maya asked when he climbed through her back fence, dodging the thorn bushes that always snagged his hoodie. She was lying on a patio chair, her hair in those complicated braids she spent forty minutes on every morning but somehow managed to make look effortless.

"Shut up," Jordan said, dropping onto the grass beside her. "It's supposed to help with growth."

"You're fine the way you are," she said, not looking up from her phone. "Besides, Tommy from the baseball team came up to my shoulder yesterday. You've got like two years on him."

Jordan felt something weird in his chest. Not the usual achy feeling when someone mentioned height, just — something else. "Yeah, well, Tommy's mom is four-eleven. It's genetic."

"Whatever." Maya kicked his shoe with hers. "Wanna build something?"

They ended up making a pyramid out of all the random stuff in her garage: old tennis trophies, a cable box her dad replaced last year, some baseball cards Jordan's uncle gave him when he was twelve and still thought Jordan might play. They stacked it until it leaned precariously against the workbench, a monument to everything they weren't doing this summer.

"This is so dumb," Jordan said, but he was grinning.

"Totally," Maya agreed, and then she did that thing where she looked at him for a second too long, like she was seeing something new.

Later, Jordan would think about that moment — the way the sun hit the stupid pyramid of junk, how Maya's hair caught the light, how for once he didn't mind being the guy on the wrong side of the fence. But right then, he just grabbed another vitamin water from his backpack and wondered if maybe this summer wouldn't be so bad after all.