Riddles in the Rain

The rain plastered my hair against my forehead—classic bad hair day vibes—yet somehow I was still nervous about tonight. Mia's text had been cryptic even for her: 'Meet us behind the old Cox **cable** building at 11. Bring snacks.'

**Running** through the downpour, I spotted them: Mia, Leo, and that quiet sophomore kid everyone called '**Fox**' because he moved through hallways like he was ghosting them. Fox had this uncanny ability to appear exactly when needed and vanish before teachers could mark him present.

'You made it!' Mia high-fived me with a **palm** sweaty from either nerves or the humidity. 'Fox found something insane.'

Behind the abandoned cable building, half-buried in mud and weeds, sat the weirdest thing I'd ever seen: a concrete **sphinx** statue, minus its nose, staring blankly at us with empty eye sockets.

'It's been asking riddles,' Fox said, completely deadpan.

Leo laughed. 'For real? Like, out loud?'

Fox shrugged. 'In my head. Or maybe I'm losing it. But it asked me something: 'What walks on four legs, then two, then three?' And I almost said 'a human' but then I thought... no, that's too easy. What if it's about us? Like, crawling as babies, then **running** through our teens, then...' He gestured at his injured leg—the brace he'd worn since the accident last year. '...then needing a cane.'

The sphinx felt suddenly less like ancient mythology and more like all of us: broken, asking impossible questions, waiting for answers we weren't ready to give.

'So what's your answer?' I asked Fox quietly.

He smiled, almost imperceptibly. 'That the question's wrong. We're not walking through stages. We're just... figuring out how to stand.'

Later, eating lukewarm pizza in Mia's garage while Fox finally told us the real story behind his accident, I realized something: The scariest riddles aren't the ones sphinxes ask. They're the ones we ask ourselves about who we're becoming.

And maybe that was okay. Maybe we weren't supposed to have all the answers yet. Maybe we just needed friends who'd help us figure them out, one rainy night at a time.