Spinach And The Social Suicide Protocol

Leo's first mistake was letting Sarah talk him into padel tryouts. "It's basically tennis but cooler," she'd said, which was exactly the kind of thing Sarah would say when she'd never actually played padel in her life.

Now here he was, standing in the school gymnasium holding a racquet like it might bite him, while a varsity jacket guy named Chad kept doing that annoying lean-against-the-wall thing that apparently screamed confidence but mostly just screamed douchebag.

"You nervous, freshman?" Chad asked, and Leo was about to mumble something deflective when his stomach made a sound like a dying whale.

His mother's green smoothie experiment. Never again.

"Just hungry," Leo said, which was technically true if you counted the violent rejection of breakfast as hunger.

"Whatever," Chad said, already losing interest. "Just don't bear down too hard. Wouldn't want you to embarrass yourself."

Wait, did people actually say "bear down"? Was that a thing? Leo filed it away to google later, along with "how to appear athletic when you are approximately as coordinated as a newborn giraffe."

The coach blew the whistle and Leo somehow managed to hit the ball. Once. It was a miracle. Then Chad served, and the ball ricocheted off Leo's racquet frame and sailed directly into the face of the quiet girl in the corner who'd been sketching in a notebook instead of, you know, participating.

She didn't even look up. Just wiped a smudge of something green from her cheek—spinach?—and kept drawing like this was exactly how she'd planned to spend her Tuesday.

After tryouts, Leo found her sitting on the bleachers, still sketching. A calico cat was winding through her backpack straps like it owned the place, which made zero sense because they were indoors.

"Your cat," Leo said brilliantly.

"Her name's Potato," the girl said, finally looking up. "And you have spinach in your hair."

So this was it. This was rock bottom. Not getting cut from the team—he'd find that out tomorrow—but standing here with green smoothie in his hair while a stranger's cat judged him silently.

"It's a long story," he said.

"I've got time," she said, and something about the way she said it made Leo think maybe, just maybe, his socially catastrophic freshman year was about to get interesting.