I Tried to Hide My Love for Math from Everyone

So here's the thing. I'm a junior at Lincoln High and I've had this love affair with numbers since I was like seven. Yeah, it's kind of nerdy but who cares, right? Anyway, everyone knows me as the sports kid, you know, captain of the soccer team and all that. But what they don't know is my secret crush on algebra and geometry. It started when Mr. Johnson taught us about pi in middle school and ever since then, I've been hooked. I used to spend my nights doing extra math problems just for fun, trying to figure out how many ways you could arrange a deck of cards or how long it would take for me to run 10 miles at different speeds. It's pretty much the opposite of what people expect from someone like me. I mean, they see all these trophies and awards for sports but no one ever sees my perfect test scores in math class. I tried to keep it under wraps because, let's face it, being seen as a bookworm isn't exactly cool at this school. But sometimes I would get so caught up in thinking about numbers that I'd space out during practice or miss calls from my friends asking what we're doing after school. My coach even gave me the side-eye once when I was spacing out during a drill and had to pretend it was just fatigue. I thought maybe if I didn't talk about math too much, people would forget all about it. But honestly, keeping this secret has just made me feel like an imposter in my own skin. It's not that I hate sports or want to quit them; they're part of who I am too. It's more like, why can't I be seen for the whole person? And now here we are, and I'm still trying to figure out how to balance being passionate about math without losing my status as a jock. Maybe one day I'll just come clean and stop hiding it all.