Sphinx Girl Summer

The sphinx costume smelled like every middle school dance ever held in a gymnasium—cheap polyester and teenage desperation. Maya adjusted her papier-mâché headpiece, the fake gold paint already chipping near her left ear, and checked her iPhone for the third time in two minutes.

Still no reply from Kai.

"You okay in there, Sphinx?" her manager yelled through the dressing room curtain. "Mini golf needs its guardian."

"Coming," Maya called back, sliding her phone into her ancient sweaty costume. The sphinx job at Pharaoh's Putt-Putt Paradise wasn't exactly the summer she'd envisioned when she'd screenshot those aesthetic Pinterest boards about finding herself. But her parents had been clear: get a job or learn to love spinach smoothies every morning.

She'd chosen the sphinx.

Now she stood motionless beside the seventh hole, pretending to be an eternal guardian while groups of sixth graders took selfies with her. The height of irony: the Sphinx, ancient keeper of riddles, stuck watching actual humans live their actual lives while she literally couldn't move.

Her phone buzzed against her ribcage.

Maya's heart did that stupid flippy thing it always did when Kai's name appeared on her lock screen. *Wanna hang later?*

She'd been waiting three weeks for this text. Three weeks of liking his Instagram stories (but not too many), three weeks of strategically placing herself in the cafeteria near his table, three weeks of her friends being absolutely insufferable about how "obviously" he liked her back.

*Yes!* she started to type, then paused. Her sphinx headpiece felt suddenly heavier. Was she supposed to play it cool? Was she supposed to wait exactly as long as he'd waited to text her? (Four hours and seventeen minutes, but who was counting?)

"Excuse me, Sphinx lady?" A little girl in a rainbow shirt tugged at Maya's cardboard paw. "Are you real or are you a person?"

Maya looked down at the kid, really looked at her, and something shifted. How much time had she spent freezing herself into stone, waiting for someone else to decide whether she was worth moving for?

She pulled off her sphinx head, her hair sticking to her forehead with sweat, and grinned at the girl.

"I'm definitely real," Maya said. "And I'm about to do something very un-sphinx-like."

She Kai back immediately: *Pick me up at 8?*

That night, as her mom served spinach for dinner (which Maya actually kind of liked now, not that she'd ever admit it), her phone buzzed with Kai's response. Maya didn't play it cool. She didn't wait three hours or pretend she had other plans. She just smiled, feeling more real than she had all summer.

Some riddles didn't need answering. Some sphinxes were meant to walk away from their post.

The mystery wasn't the point anymore. Being real was.