Page 13

THEO

Class was, as usual, too long.

I prided myself on avoiding the major athlete stereotype of having zero interest in school—GJ was unsurprisingly the worst offender on our team—but that didn’t stop me from getting antsy.

An hour and a half into my three-hour lecture, and all I could think about was how badly I wanted to be moving my body.

Now that the season had officially started, I felt like someone had started me up like a wind-up toy.

Everything was about getting to the next game.

We played around two games a week throughout the season and our next one was on Sunday. We had two away games next week and it would go on just like that—back and forth between home and somewhere else in the United States—for the next couple of months.

I felt like the luckiest person alive every time I thought about how I got to play D1 basketball.

All of the flights, the time spent playing, the winning alongside my team.

This was what I’d spent my entire career working toward.

It was all worth it now—all of that time as a kid in the car and at practice instead of out, the parties I skipped out on in high school because I had a travel game the next day or was out of town for a game.

And as much as I wanted to have a contingency plan with a decent degree and professional connections, it did not feel worth sitting through a mandatory Friday morning lecture.

I tapped my foot, looking around to see if anyone else felt as restless as I did.

As one of the only seniors on the team, I was the only person from my basketball team in this class.

It wasn’t usually like that; we typically moved in packs, especially when it came to summer and winter session classes.

We all tended to be in similar majors with similar attitudes toward school.

Normally, it meant I had at least one ally in having the urge to run laps after sitting for too long. But it was just me in this class.

I stood up to go stretch my legs. The professor usually gave us periodic five-minute stretch breaks, but I couldn’t wait for the next one.

I had to get up now. We were in a small, theatre-style classroom with so few of us that we could all keep two or three seats between each other.

I cut easily through my row and then down the steps, acknowledging my professor on the way out.

Once I was out in the hall, I paced and shook out my shoulders. I reached for my phone, chewing on my lip.

Now that I was off the court and no longer riding the high of playing and winning, I wasn’t feeling so confident with Maya.

She hadn’t messaged me all last night—not that I’d noticed—and I still hadn’t seen anything from her this morning.

It could’ve been for any combination of reasons, like she got busy or forgot.

I’d been resisting the urge to check every couple of minutes to see if she’d sent anything.

I didn’t have my notifications on because my phone would be unusable, which then forced me to actually open the app and see if she’d sent anything.

I’d slept like shit last night, my brain resisting the urge to sleep just in case Maya happened to message me at two in the morning.

I’d spent the entire party last night sneaking glances at my phone, willing her to send me something. Or at least follow me.

I’d been unsuccessful in fighting off my growing social media addiction; if anything, the more time went by, the more frantically I was checking, like I was worried her message had slipped by me. I was certain my screen time for Instagram had never been so high.

I went into my messages from accounts I didn’t follow—doing it with the same anxiety levels and discrete approach of someone doing something illegal—and nearly dropped my phone when I saw I had a new message from a girl who looked just like her.

My heart raced as I clicked on it. Maya Healy .

That was her name. She was unsurprisingly photogenic.

The picture she’d chosen for her profile picture was cute; she had a giant smile on her face, and she was bundled up and out in the snow, probably in the mountains around here.

I scrolled through the pictures she posted.

Most of her grid was made up of group photos, but she occasionally posted pictures of just herself.

I couldn’t deep dive now, but I knew I was inevitably going to when I had free time later.

I followed her before even fully reading her message. I so badly wanted to see more of her—see her friends, where she was from, what her interests were. I wanted to find something we had in common, or something I could learn more about.

Anything to keep the conversation going with her.

After sending my request, I went back to her message and looked at the preview: Wow, we move fast .

I blinked at it for a second, wondering what she meant.

My heart sank. It couldn’t possibly be that she was worried me asking for her to DM me would be moving too quickly.

To me, it felt like we were doing everything at a glacially slow pace.

I’d been dying over here wanting to talk to her, but maybe the feeling wasn’t mutual.

I clicked on the full message and saw that she’d sent an image with the text. But the image was blurred, probably as a security measure. My heart raced as I clicked accept on the message so I could see what she’d sent me.

When I saw what it was, I almost burst out laughing from surprise.

When was someone going to tell me I was off the market?

I wrote back, not wanting to overthink it.

If I started stressing, I wouldn’t respond to her for another couple of hours at least, and then I would probably talk myself out of responding at all.

Or I’d respond with something like lol because I talked myself out of any other type of response .

I looked back at the picture. The person who captioned it wasn’t wrong; it really did look like I was off the market.

Maya and I were leaning toward each other, our eyes and attention completely focused on each other.

Despite the obvious commotion around us, we were deep in conversation.

I was grinning at her in a way I’d never seen myself grin before, and I was mortified I was capable of looking that down bad.

But Maya also looked completely invested. If I was down bad, Maya seemed to be too.

I dug around on Twitter to find the original tweet and scrolled through the responses.

I was surprised to see how many people had something to say about the photo and how far it’d gone online, mostly because my teammates hadn’t said anything to me about it, and they spent way more time on social media than I did.

I would be shocked if none of them had seen it based on how big it had gotten literally overnight.

The comments were admittedly hilarious: That should be me. Theo, I can treat you better than she can. I can’t believe my wife has a girlfriend.

There were a handful that referenced not realizing I was gay, which was fair enough since it wasn’t a secret, but it also wasn’t super public information.

I’d never had a public girlfriend, and everyone on the team, including the straight players, did things like publicly celebrated pride month.

I felt like it was obvious just by looking at me, but people must not want to be presumptuous .

I glanced at my phone clock and realized I’d been out here for way too long. I took one last glance at the photo, wanting to memorize every detail of it, before I headed back to class.

I spent the entire rest of my class wondering if Maya was going to respond and how long it would take to hear back from her. Class somehow moved at an even slower pace than before. I’d never been so tempted to sneak glances at my phone, but I refused to let myself develop that habit.

When I got out of class, what felt like a year later, I had another message from Maya waiting for me. I was supposed to tell you, but everyone spoiled the surprise.

I bit back the world’s stupidest grin on my face and put my phone in the pocket of my sweatpants.

I was going to respond to her, but I wanted to sit on this one longer.

I liked holding onto the feeling for a second of knowing I could respond to her, and I wasn’t waiting pathetically for her response, wondering if each one was going to be her last.

Before heading home, I grabbed a coffee from the coffee stand outside my classroom. As I waited for my order to be ready, my phone started blowing up—vibrating once, then twice, then too many times to possibly know how many messages were coming in.

I fished my phone from my sweatpants pocket and checked.

As usual, it was the team group chat—the only reason my phone ever went off like that.

We had a couple of different chats between the different social groups on the team, but the main one between all of us was the one we all used the most. We were fortunate to have a strong sense of camaraderie.

I didn’t think anyone could top the high school team I’d been on, but the relationship I’d built with the Lakeside girls was something else entirely.

Before I even opened the messages, I could already guess what it was going to be about.

It seemed the photo was finally making its rounds; everyone had probably just woken up from how hard we’d all partied last night.

Coach Darlene had been generous in giving us the morning off since it’d been the first win of the season, the exchange being an extra-long workout this evening.

It seemed like everyone other than me had skipped class to relish in the rare late morning.

Get it, McCall!!

Since when do you have a girl?

Y’all fucking??

I nearly rolled my eyes, fighting off a laugh. The group chat went on and on, teasing me about the dramatic responses people were posting about the picture and the amount of buzz the photo had gotten.