Three Strikes at Friendship

The baseball cap sat three rows back, lonely as a ghost at a birthday party. I'd been running from everything lately — my parents' divorce conversations, my GPA's freefall into the abyss, the way Maya looked right through me in the hallways like I was made of glass.

"You're up, Cameron," Jake said, tossing me a bat like it was no big deal. Jake, who'd been my best friend since we'd compared Scooby-Doo lunchboxes in kindergarten. Jake, whose varsity jacket now had his name stitched on it like he was someone I'd never met.

"I hate baseball," I muttered, gripping the bat. "You know this. I'm literally the kid who got hit in the face with a dodgeball in seventh grade and everyone still calls me 'Target.'"

"Just swing," Jake said, already turning toward his actual friends, the ones who didn't have to be coerced into spending Friday afternoons at the batting cages.

I adjusted the helmet, my palms sweating. The pitching machine whirred like a judgmental robot. First pitch — I swung at nothing but air. Second pitch — foul tip, weak and pathetic. Third pitch — whiffed completely, spinning myself into a stumble that had Jake's friends snickering.

That was it. I was done. I dropped the bat and started running — toward the exit, toward anywhere but here, toward the Cameron who existed before everything got complicated.

"Hey!" Jake's voice cut through my escape route. He wasn't laughing. He was actually jogging after me, leaving his cool friends behind. "Where are you going?"

"Away from this," I snapped, my voice cracking. "Away from you trying to fix me with baseball when you're the one who changed."

Jake stopped. For the first time all afternoon, he looked like the friend I actually remembered. "I didn't invite you here to fix you, dumbass. I invited you because you're the only one who knows what it's like to feel like you're pretending to be someone you're not."

The silence stretched between us, heavy with things we'd both been avoiding.

"My dad's been on my case about 'being a man' and making the team," Jake said quietly. "I thought if we did this together, maybe it wouldn't feel so stupid."

I looked at him — really looked at him. Behind the varsity jacket and the new friends, Jake was just as lost as I was.

"I'm still terrible at baseball," I said.

"Yeah," Jake cracked a genuine smile. "But you're my friend, and you're the only one who sucks worse than I do."

So we went back. Not because we loved baseball, but because sometimes you keep showing up for the stuff that sucks when you realize you're not running away from it alone.