Spinach Teeth & Orange Soda

Maya's reflection in the bathroom mirror showed everything wrong with fifteenth year: the frizz haloing her hair, the way her jeans refused to settle at her waist, and the bright green **spinach** wedged between her front teeth.

"Are you kidding me?" she muttered, digging with her pinky nail. Her phone buzzed—Jordan, the group chat blowing up about Jackson's party tonight. The party she'd promised to attend even though parties made her stomach feel like a washing machine on spin cycle.

The mirror showed the spinach was gone, but now her eyes looked too wide, too desperate. She splashed cold **water** on her face, trying to calm the freak-out. Her mom called from downstairs: "Maya! You promised Mrs. Chen you'd help with the garden today!"

"Coming!" Maya yelled back, but her voice cracked. Something about being fifteen meant every adult demand felt like a personal attack on her carefully constructed independence.

Three hours later, she stood in Jackson's crowded kitchen, clutching a warm can of **orange** soda like it was a lifeline. The bass from the living room vibrated through her sneakers. Everywhere she looked, people moved with that easy confidence she'd been trying to fake since seventh grade—laughing with their heads thrown back, standing too close, knowing exactly where to put their hands.

Then she saw Chelsea. The girl who'd been her best **friend** since second grade, who now sat at a different lunch table with people who wore lip gloss and talked about college applications like they were discussing reality TV. Chelsea was alone on the back porch, looking weirdly small.

Maya's feet moved before her brain could overthink it. She pushed through the sliding door.

"Hey."

Chelsea jumped. "Oh. Hey."

They stood there, three feet of awkward silence stretching between them like a tightrope.

"I have spinach in my teeth, don't I?" Maya blurted, because sometimes saying the wrong thing was better than saying nothing.

Chelsea laughed, and it sounded like second grade again. "No. But your hair's doing that thing."

"That thing?"

"The rebellious thing. It refuses to be tamed."

Maya sat down beside her. The orange soda can sweated in her hand. "This party sucks."

"Yeah. But Jackson's mom ordered pizza." Chelsea paused. "I miss your mom's garden. Remember when we tried to grow tomatoes and ended up with basically a jungle?"

"They were野生 tomatoes. That counted."

"They were weeds, Maya. We were eleven and growing weeds."

They sat there until their legs went numb, and later when they walked inside together, Maya's soda was warm and flat and perfect, and Chelsea's lip gloss was smudged, and for the first time in months, being fifteen didn't feel like a sentence but like something—messy and weird and maybe, actually, okay.