Sphinx Moth Summer

Maya's palms were sweating. Again. She wiped them on her denim shorts for the third time, feeling ridiculous. It was just a backyard party. Not even a rager, just Jordan's chill thing before school started.

"You good?" Chloe appeared beside her, holding an orange Fanta like it was a crown. "You look like you're about to puke."

"I'm fine," Maya lied. Her crush had been here for twenty minutes and she hadn't managed a single word. "Just... hot."

"Same." Chloe fanned herself with her phone. "This heat is straight-up disrespectful."

The orange soda can sweated condensation onto Chloe's hand. Across the yard, someone laughed too loud. Maya felt that specific teenage ache—the wanting to be here, wanting to be anywhere else, wanting to be seen, wanting to disappear.

Then she saw it.

A moth, huge and impossible, resting on the porch light. But not like the dusty brown ones that banged against windows. This one was something else—elegant, strange, with patterns that seemed to shift in the twilight.

"What IS that?" she breathed.

Jordan appeared, already sliding into his explanation voice. "That's a sphinx moth. They're sometimes called hawk moths. They're actually fascinating—"

"Fascinating," someone echoed drily.

But then Alex was there. Alex, who'd sat behind her in bio last year, who'd loaned her a pen she'd never returned, who she'd thought about approximately ten thousand times this summer.

"My grandma had one of those in her garden once," Alex said. Their fingers brushed when they both leaned in closer. "She called them hummingbird moths because they hover like tiny hummingbirds when they feed."

Maya's palms stopped sweating.

"That's so much prettier than sphinx moth," she said, and Alex actually smiled.

"Yeah. She said they were lucky. Like finding one meant something good was coming."

Something good. Maybe this. Maybe right now, standing under the orange glow of the patio light while the sphinx moth's wings caught starlight, while Alex's shoulder pressed against hers, while the party noise faded into something like possibility.

"Your hands are cold," Alex said, not moving away.

"Yours too," Maya replied.

The sphinx moth lifted into the dark, carrying something unspoken between them. Something beginning.