Storm static

Maya's palms were sweating — literally. She'd spent the entire summer watching palm-reading tutorials on YouTube, convinced that if she could just read the lines on people's hands, she'd finally understand why everything felt so wrong. Why she was the only one at parties standing near the snack bowl, pretending to be fascinated by the host's goldfish.

"You're, like, really zoning out on Goldie there," someone said.

Maya jumped. It was Fox — everyone called him that because he somehow managed to skip class without ever getting caught, plus he had this weird sly grin. He was holding a tangled mess of coaxial cable.

"TV's out," he said. "Wanna help me fix it?"

Why she said yes, she didn't know. Maybe because Fox was the kind of mysterious cute that made your brain do that thing where you forgot how to speak properly.

They ended up on the back porch, rain drizzling, while he messed with connections behind the house. Maya stood there uselessly until she got bored enough to actually look at her palm again. The lifeline looked weirdly short.

"Let me see," Fox said suddenly.

"What?"

"Your hand. You've been staring at it like it holds the answers to the universe."

Maya hesitated, then held it out. Fox traced the lines with his thumb, and something strange happened — lightning split the sky overhead, electric and brilliant and totally cinematic, and for a second she wasn't thinking about how awkward she was or how to make conversation or what anyone thought of her. She was just standing there in the rain with someone who actually saw her.

"Your lifeline's fine," Fox said. "You're not gonna die at 17. That's not what that line even means, by the way."

Maya laughed. "I know that."

"Do you?" He grinned. "Because you look at your palms like they're gonna tell you something your gut can't."

Inside, someone yelled that the Netflix was working again.

Fox stood up. "Storm's passing. You coming back in?"

"Yeah," Maya said, wiping her palms on her jeans. "Yeah, I am."

She didn't look at her hands the whole way back. Sometimes you outgrow things in a single lightning flash. Sometimes that's enough.