Three Strikes at Being Cool

The sweat pooling in my baseball cleats had nothing on the sweat dripping down my neck. Tryouts for the varsity team were in ten minutes, and I was about to humiliate myself in front of the entire school.

"You good, bro?" Marcus asked, leaning against the dugout fence like he owned it. Marcus, with his perfect swing and his perfect hair and his 2,453 Instagram followers documenting every perfect moment of his perfect life.

"Yeah," I lied. "Just warming up."

My phone buzzed in my back pocket—my old iphone with the cracked screen, the one Marcus had jokingly called "vintage" yesterday, which had sent me into a spiral of overthinking at 2 AM. I resisted checking it. Whatever notification it was could wait.

Coach blew his whistle. "Batter up!"

I stepped into the box, gripping the bat until my palms were slick. First pitch—swing and a miss. The ball hit the catcher's mitt with a sound like a final exam grade you definitely failed.

"Easy out," someone muttered. Probably Marcus. Or maybe I was paranoid.

Second pitch—foul tip. Third pitch—another miss. I could feel the heat rising up my neck as I walked back to the bench, fighting the urge to sprint straight home and never show my face at school again.

Lunch was worse. I got my tray—overcooked pizza, a sad applesauce, and a scoop of spinach that looked like it had seen better decades—and sat alone at the edge of the cafeteria. Naturally, that's when Maya from my English class decided to appear.

"Hey," she said, sliding onto the bench across from me. "You okay? You look like you're plotting someone's murder."

"Just tired," I said, instinctively reaching for my phone. A defense mechanism.

"Tryouts didn't go great?"

I froze. "You saw?"

"Everyone saw." She shrugged. "Marcus posted about it."

Of course he did.

"Whatever," I said, finally looking at my phone. Three likes on my last post. Marcus had posted something about tryouts and gotten eighty-seven in five minutes.

Maya reached across the table and gently pushed my phone down. "You know what's weird?"

"What?"

"You're actually good at baseball. I've seen you at the park. But today you were so busy checking if people were watching you that you forgot to actually play."

I stared at her. A piece of spinach was stuck between my front teeth—I could feel it with my tongue. This couldn't get more humiliating.

"You have spinach in your teeth," she said, cracking a smile.

"I know," I groaned.

"It's fine. I have it too." She pointed to her own teeth, where nothing was visible. Then she actually laughed. "Made you look."

I couldn't help it—I laughed too.

"Look," she said, "Marcus has 2,000 followers because he treats people like content. You want real friends, not an audience. Maybe try tomorrow like no one's watching. Like, actually no one. Not even for the story."

The next day at tryouts, I left my phone in my locker. My palms still sweated. I still missed the first pitch. But by the third one, I connected—solid contact, right over second base. As I rounded the bases, I caught Maya's eye from the bleachers. She gave me a tiny thumbs-up.

Marcus was probably posting something else. But for the first time in forever, I didn't care to check.