Electric Sunset

Maya's iphone buzzed in her pocket, lighting up with notifications she didn't want to check. Another party where she didn't belong, standing in Jordan's backyard while everyone else laughed in groups she couldn't penetrate. She sipped her orange soda, the fizz already dead, feeling like the worst version of herself—quiet, awkward, barely there.

Then she saw him.

He was sitting alone on the porch railing, rust-colored hair catching the last of the sunset like a fox's coat. Everyone called him Fox anyway, something about how he moved through school without being caught, without being known. Maya had never spoken to him, but she'd noticed how he seemed to exist slightly outside everything, like he was watching a movie everyone else was starring in.

The sky turned that impossible purple-orange that only happens for ten minutes, and Maya found herself moving toward him before she could talk herself out of it.

"Nice phone," Fox said, nodding at her death-grip on her iphone. "Or are you just hiding behind it?"

Maya almost laughed. "Both."

He slid over, making room on the railing. "I'm Fox, by the way. Actual name's Marcus, but apparently I look like a fox."

"Maya. And I apparently look like someone who needs to hide behind her phone."

"Nah," he said. "You look like someone who's figuring it out. We're all figuring it out."

A single streak of lightning cracked across the sky, purple-white and impossibly far away, followed by thunder that took forever to reach them. The party noise inside swelled, someone's phone speaker blasting a song that everyone suddenly knew the words to.

"You ever feel like you're waiting for something to happen?" Maya asked, surprised by her own voice. "Like, actual lightning. Not this pretending stuff."

Fox smiled, and it transformed his whole face—made him look less like something watching from the edges and more like someone who might actually be happy to be there. "Every day. But maybe that's not how it works. Maybe the lightning's already happening and we're just bad at noticing."

He hopped down from the railing. "Want to get out of here? There's a spot by the creek where the actual foxes live. They're cooler than the people in there anyway."

Maya looked at her phone, at the notifications, at everything she was supposed to care about. Then she looked at the orange glow fading from the sky, at this strange fox-haired boy who'd just asked her to notice the lightning.

"Yeah," she said, putting her phone in her pocket. "Yeah, let's go."