Spinach in My Hair on a Zombie Day

Some days you just wake up feeling like a zombie, and today was definitely one of those days. My hair was doing this weird flip thing on the left side — you know, where it decides to defy gravity and all laws of physics simultaneously. I'd spent twenty minutes with a straightener trying to tame it, but nope. Hair: 1, Maya: 0.

Third period lunch was where things went completely sideways off the rails. I was sitting with Jake, who I'd been crushing on for like three months, trying to play it cool and act like I wasn't absolutely dying inside every time he made eye contact with me. We were having this actually decent conversation about the new Marvel movie when I took a bite of my salad.

You see where this is going.

"Maya," Jake said, with this weird half-smile. "You have some... spinach in your hair."

SPINACH. In my HAIR. Like, how does that even happen? I had somehow managed to get a piece of spinach stuck not just in my teeth (which would have been embarrassing enough) but literally tangled in my already-messy hair. I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole. I wanted to delete myself from existence.

Instead, I just laughed, because apparently my body's default response to maximum awkwardness is nervous giggling.

"That's actually kind of iconic," Jake said, and his smile wasn't mocking anymore. It was genuine. "Like, who else can pull off the spinach-hair look? It's giving avant-garde fashion."

I felt my face burning, but somehow we were both laughing now. And yeah, my hair still looked like a confused poodle had attacked it, and I probably had spinach somewhere else I didn't even know about, but Jake was still sitting there. Still talking to me. Still smiling.

Maybe being a zombie isn't so bad when you find someone who doesn't mind that you're a little bit of a mess. Some days the spinach wins, and that's okay. You just own it. You just rock the weird hair and the green stuff in it and hope someone thinks it's avant-garde instead of a disaster.