Palms Sweaty, Spinning Lies

Maya's palms were sweating so bad they'd literally leave prints on her phone screen. Senior year was supposed to be cinematic moments and core memories, not her crouched behind the cafeteria's recycling bin like some incompetent FBI wannabe, spying on Bryce talking to softball-girl Jessica.

"You're being ridiculous," Kyra had said earlier that morning, watching Maya frantically pop her third vitamin D gummy of the week. "It's not even winter. You're not gonna get scurvy from heartbreak."

"Shut up," Maya had muttered, though her vitamin stash had quadrupled since Bryce started ghosting her texts three weeks ago. Now here she was, reduced to playing amateur detective while trying not to be seen by half the junior class.

Bryce was laughing at something Jessica said. Maya's chest did that awful hollow thing where she could practically hear her own disappointment. She was about to bail—let's be real, this was pathetic behavior—when Bryce's eyes suddenly locked onto hers from across the cafeteria. Her fight-or-flight response kicked in hard. She turned to flee, hair whipping dramatically, and slammed directly into someone's lunch tray.

Spinach. EVERYWHERE. All over her white vintage thrift-store cardigan that she'd spent thirty minutes ironing that morning because appearances mattered even when you were spiraling.

"Oh my GOD," she choked out, fighting back tears because she refused to let Bryce-who-clearly-moved-on see her cry over something as unglamorous as cafeteria spinach. "This is literally bull."

But then someone was helping her scoop spinach off her sleeve, and it was Jessica. Not soft-stealing Jessica, but actual kindness-Jessica, with genuine concern written all over her face.

"Are you okay?" Jessica asked, while Bryce stood there looking guilty as hell. "Bryce was just telling me about..." She paused, glancing between them. "About how he was gonna ask if you wanted to come to Alex's party with us. As friends?"

Maya froze. The spinach on her cardigan suddenly seemed way less catastrophic than the realization that she'd spent three weeks spiraling over literally nothing. Bryce wasn't ghosting her—he was just, like, bad at texting. The realization hit her: maybe her senior year didn't need to be about boys or core memories or cinematic perfection. Maybe it could just be about messy friendships and public embarrassments and learning to stop overanalyzing everything.

"I'm good," Maya said, and for the first time in weeks, it wasn't a complete lie. "But someone's gotta tell me if I've got spinach in my teeth. This level of embarrassment needs to be contained."