Three Seconds on the Mound

The baseball smacked into my glove with that perfect sound — the kind of echo that means you didn't even have to look. Marcus stood at home plate, bouncing on his toes like he used to when we were kids and the biggest stakes were who got the last slice of pizza. Now the stakes were different. He'd made varsity, gotten the girlfriend, started sitting at the lunch table where people actually talked about colleges that weren't community colleges. And I was still the same Leo, the guy who could catch anything but couldn't seem to catch a break when it came to growing up.

"You gonna throw it or what?" someone yelled from the dugout. One of Marcus's new friends. The ones who said "no offense" before saying something offensive and called everything "cringe" like they'd invented the concept.

I wound up and let it fly. Marcus's bat connected — a solid hit that sailed past me into the outfield. He rounded the bases, slowing as he passed second, giving me this look. Half smirk, half something else. Maybe guilt? Maybe nothing at all.

After the game, I found him sitting on the hood of his car behind the concession stand. He was holding a plastic bag with a goldfish swimming inside, the kind they give away at carnivals when they want you to feel like you won something worth having.

"Won it for you," he said, not looking at me. "Remember when we were twelve and we said if we ever got one of these, we'd name it Captain Fin?"

The name hit me harder than the baseball had. Captain Fin. Our inside joke from before everything got complicated and hierarchical and stupid. I looked at Marcus — really looked at him — and saw what I'd been too wrapped up in my own insecurity to notice. He was miserable. The popularity thing wasn't working. The cool friends made him feel small. The varsity jacket was heavy.

"Captain Fin," I said, taking the bag. "You know these things usually die in like, a week, right?"

Marcus laughed — really laughed, like the old days. "Yeah, well. We'll give him a proper burial when he does. Navy style, like we planned."

"You still remember that?"

"Leo, I remember everything." He hopped off the car. "You coming over? We can set up the tank. My mom's got that gravel stuff from when she tried keeping that betta fish alive."

The goldfish swam in tiny circles, unaware it was becoming the centerpiece of something bigger than a carnival prize. Marcus threw his arm around my shoulder like he used to, and for the first time in months, I didn't feel like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Friendship, I realized, wasn't about staying the same. It was about making space for who we were becoming — even when that took longer than we wanted.

"Race you there," I said.

"You're on, loser."

And just like that, we were twelve again, running nowhere important with a dying goldfish and everything still ahead of us.