Summer of the Sphinx

The hat was everything. It hid the unfortunate cowlick I'd been battling since seventh grade, and more importantly, it hid me. At Carter's pool party, I was ready to be invisible.

"Yo, Marcus! Take that off, you're not inside!" Carter yelled, already doing a cannonball that displaced half the water onto innocent bystanders.

"Nah, I'm good," I mumbled, adjusting the brim. My social battery was at 3% and dropping.

That's when I saw her—the sphinx. Okay, not literally. But Maya had this way of looking at you, half-smile playing on her lips, like she knew something you didn't. She was perched on the pool edge, legs dangling in the water, watching everything with this ancient, all-knowing energy.

"Nice hat," she said, sliding over as I pretended to be fascinated by a loose thread on my swim trunks. "What's underneath?"

"Just hair. Bad hair."

"We all have bad hair, Marcus. Some of us just own it." She flipped her own dark curls, which were definitely not bad.

Her golden retriever, Buster, chose that moment to shake pool water all over both of us. Maya laughed, and I found myself laughing too—actually laughing, not the fake polite laugh I used with teachers and my mom's friends.

"Sorry about him," she said. "He thinks he's a person."

"Better than my brother, who thinks he's an influencer."

We sat there while people splashed and screamed and Carter attempted increasingly dangerous diving tricks. Maya told me about her Egyptian grandmother who called her "little sphinx" because she was always asking riddles instead of giving straight answers. I told her about moving here in sixth grade and never quite finding my people.

"You know," she said, "my grandma also says sphinxes guard important things. Maybe you're guarding something too."

"Like what?"

"Like yourself." She stood up. "Take off the hat, Marcus. The real you can't hide forever."

Later that night, I lay in bed staring at my ceiling fan, thinking about sphinxes and pool parties and girls who somehow saw right through you. Buster had tracked pool water across my favorite sneakers, and my hair was probably terrible from swimming hatless for three hours.

But for the first time in forever, I didn't care. Some riddles you solve by asking questions. Some you solve by jumping in. And some? Some you solve by just taking off the hat and letting yourself be seen.