Sphinx & Smoothies

Maya Lin moved like a **sphinx** through the cafeteria — silent, mysterious, impossible to read. I'd been basically **spying** on her since sophomore year started, watching from my usual table while she sat with the popular crowd, laughing at jokes I couldn't hear.

"You're being creepy again," Jordan said, sliding into the seat across from me.

"I'm observing. There's a difference."

"You're staring like she's a zoo exhibit." He pushed his tray toward me. "You want some of this?"

I wrinkled my nose. The cafeteria's **spinach** looked like it had been boiled since the Bush administration. "Hard pass."

The weird thing was, I actually had a reason to talk to Maya now. Our PE class had started playing **padel**, and somehow we'd ended up partners for the tournament. Padel was like tennis meets squash, and I was terrible at it.

But Maya? She played like she'd been training for the Olympics since birth.

"You ready to get destroyed today?" she asked when I met her at the courts.

"I'm ready to not embarrass myself completely," I said. "That's the goal."

She laughed — really laughed, not the polite laugh I'd seen from across the cafeteria. "Let's see."

We were warming up when her phone pinged from her bag. She checked it, then frowned.

"Everything okay?"

"My charging **cable** is shot," she said, holding up a frayed wire. "Phone's at 12%."

"I've got a portable charger in my locker."

She looked at me like I'd just offered her a kidney. "Seriously?"

"Yeah, no problem."

When I came back with the charger, she was sitting on the bench, messing with something in her lunchbox.

"What's that?"

"Spinach smoothie," she said, pushing a container toward me. "My mom's obsessed with me getting enough iron. Want some?"

It was actually good — sweet with strawberries, you could barely taste the spinach.

"Weird flex," I said, "but I respect it."

"My life is just a series of weird flexes," she said. "Like how I'm secretly obsessed with ancient Egypt. Hence the sphinx thing."

"You noticed me staring."

"You were about as subtle as a fireworks display." She grinned. "But I didn't mind."

We lost the tournament, but as we walked to our lockers afterward, Maya said, "Same time next week?"

"For what?"

"Padel. Smoothies. You figuring out I'm not actually mysterious." She bumped my shoulder with hers. "I'm just awkward, same as everyone else."

The sphinx had riddles after all — just not the kind I'd expected.