Palm Read at Midnight

Maya's palm was sweating so much that when Kai grabbed her hand to read it at Sarah's party, she literally flinched.

"Whoa, chill," Kai laughed, flipping on his flashlight app. "I'm not gonna bite. I'm just checking your lifeline."

"Dude, since when do you read palms?" Jordan cracked, passing Maya a Capri Sun. "Since when is that a thing that guys do?"

"Since I watched like twelve YouTube videos about it today," Kai said, like that was a normal thing to do on a Tuesday. "Okay, Maya, your lifeline is crazy long. You're gonna live to be, like, a hundred."

Maya tried to look chill, even though her heart was basically running a marathon in her chest. This was her first real party — not counting that one birthday sleepover in seventh grade where they just talked about boys the entire time — and she'd been stressed about it for literal weeks.

"What about my love life?" she heard herself ask, immediately wishing she could delete that from existence.

"Oh, that's the good part." Kai traced a line on her hand, and Maya tried to focus on literally anything else. The basement wall. The leftover pizza boxes. Jordan's weird obsession with that vitamin water he'd been nursing all night.

"You're gonna meet someone when you least expect it," Kai said dramatically, like he was in a movie. "Probably doing something brave."

"Brave?" Jordan snort-laughed. "Maya, the only thing you're brave at is correctly identifying when a cafeteria lunch looks questionable."

"Shut up, Jordan," Maya said, but she was smiling. Because here was the thing — Kai was still holding her hand, and his fingers were kind of warm, and earlier he'd complimented her outfit, and okay, maybe Jordan was right about her being basically allergic to bravery, but this felt like something.

"Your headline line is super strong too," Kai added quietly. "Means you're gonna do something big. Like, change-the-world big."

"Palm reading isn't real," Jordan said, but he said it with this weird softness that made it sound like he didn't actually mind.

"Maybe not," Maya said, pulling her hand back but not, like, angrily. "But I'm definitely gonna do something big."

She could feel it happening — that thing adults talked about, where suddenly you're not just waiting for your life to start but actually, like, living it. Running toward it instead of away from it.

"Starting with what?" Kai asked, and he was smiling at her in this way that made her stomach do this whole situation.

Maya looked at Jordan, who was already on his phone, and at Sarah, who was dancing in the corner with complete zero embarrassment, and at Kai, who was still looking at her like she was actually worth paying attention to.

"Starting with this," she said. "Starting with being here."