Three-Second Memory

The goldfish floated belly-up in its bowl, and honestly? Same, Bart. Same.

I stared at him through the glass, my phone blowing up with notifications I wasn't ready to face. Marcus had posted fifteen new photos from freshman orientation, each one tagged with new friends I'd never met. Apparently, high school meant getting upgraded social circles like some software update I hadn't downloaded.

"Your friend is gone," Mom said from the doorway, and I hated how she put it in past tense. Marcus wasn't gone. He was just... elsewhere.

Bart was definitely gone, though.

"We can get another one," she offered, like goldfish were interchangeable. Plug and play.

"It's fine," I said, which was the wrong answer but the easy one.

Monday brought the orange poster: PADEL CLUB TRYOUTS. Because obviously my new high school had a pa**del club, because apparently tennis needed to be more exclusive. Marcus would've made fun of it. Old Marcus, anyway.

I wound up at tryouts anyway, racket in hand like a liability, wearing my brother's old gym shorts that were somehow too short and too long simultaneously. The court smelled like rubber and teenage desperation.

"You're Jamie, right?"

She was leaning against the fence, orange hoodie tied around her waist, hair that looked like she'd run through a hurricane and came out looking better for it. Elena. She'd been in my homeroom for two weeks and I'd successfully said approximately three words to her.

"That's me," I said, brilliantly.

"You any good?"

"I once hit a tennis ball into a neighbor's pool from two houses away."

"Precision or anger issues?"

"Yes."

She laughed, and I realized I'd been holding my breath.

We partnered up for drills. Elena moved like she'd been born holding a racket, calling shots like she was speaking another language. I swung at everything, connected with nothing, and somehow managed to hit myself in the shin with my own racket.

"Smooth," she said.

"My goldfish had better coordination."

"Goldfish have a three-second memory. They forget everything. That's basically the opposite of coordination."

I stopped. "Wait. They REMEMBER?"

She grinned. "Urban legend. They can remember stuff for months."

Something about that hit me wrong. Bart was dead, and I'd spent the whole weekend thinking he'd lived in this perpetual now, swimming the same three seconds over and over. But he'd remembered. He'd known the shape of his castle, when I fed him, the way I tapped the glass before bed.

"You okay?"

"Yeah," I said, and surprisingly, I kind of was. "Just processing some fish existentialism."

"Relatable."

Elena's phone buzzed — Marcus's Instagram story lighting up her screen, him and his new friends at some party. She swiped it away without looking.

"You guys friends?"

"Used to be," I said, and it came out easier than I expected. "Now I think we're just... archived."

"That's the thing about high school," she said, bouncing a ball on her racket face. "You think you're supposed to hold onto everything. But some stuff's just training wheels."

I thought about Bart, his three-second memory actually being months of knowing. About Marcus, who'd known me for seven years and somehow forgotten me in two weeks. About the way Elena's orange hoodie looked against the court's blue surface, bright and impossible to ignore.

"Training wheels," I repeated.

"Hey," she said, tossing me a ball. "Wanna play for real? No drills."

I caught it, feeling the weight of it in my palm. "I'm gonna lose."

"Obviously. But I promise not to document your failure on Instagram."

I smiled — actually smiled, not the fake one I'd been wearing since orientation. "Deal."

Bart was gone. Marcus was gone. But as I served the ball into the net and Elena laughed, not unkindly, I thought about goldfish and their supposed three-second memories, and how maybe the point wasn't remembering everything. Maybe the point was learning what to forget.

"Again," Elena called, and I grabbed another ball from the basket.

Some things, you don't need to keep. Some things, you just need to play through.