Fox in the Hallway

Maya's therapist said her new vitamin D supplements would help with the 'seasonal affective disorder,' which was just a fancy way of saying she'd been spending too much time in her room doom-scrolling through other people's highlight reels. Meanwhile, half the girls in sophomore year had suddenly decided orange was their signature color — orange nail polish, orange hoodies, even those ridiculous orange-tinted sunglasses that made everyone look like they'd been photobombed by a sunset.

But nobody noticed anything Maya did. She was basically a NPC in her own life, hovering in the background of group photos that never made it to Instagram.

Until the day Lucas Chen called her 'fox.'

She'd been scrambling to pick up her exploding backpack — honestly, why did she need seven different gel pens? — when he'd stopped to help. Lucas, who ran track and had that effortless cool that made everyone else look like they were trying too hard. He'd handed her a stray mechanical pencil and said, 'You move quick, fox.' And then he'd just walked away, leaving her there on the linoleum, pink-eared and weirdly exhilarated.

Fox. Like she was clever, slippery, something worth hunting.

The nickname stuck. Not because Lucas kept using it — he didn't — but because Maya decided to adopt it. She started sitting differently, chin up, eyes forward. She wore that old orange scarf her grandma gave her, the one she'd thought was too loud before. She even started raising her hand in English class, voice steady even when her heart hammered like it was trying to break out of her chest.

Three weeks later, when she finally worked up the courage to sit at Lucas's lunch table, he barely looked up from his phone. But Maya didn't even care. She was too busy laughing at something someone else said, loud and genuine, feeling like she'd finally stepped into the main character role she'd been waiting for.

The vitamins probably hadn't hurt, either.