Take the Bull by the Horns

Maya's hands shook as she gripped her iphone, staring at Jordan's contact for the thousandth time. The notification light blinked—his reply to her three-day-old text.

'Cool, yeah, homecoming would be chill.'

She'd done it. Actually done it. Now she just had to survive the next two weeks without dying of embarrassment.

The mirror showed everything wrong with her: frizzy hair from the humidity, a constellation of zits across her forehead, and the social confidence of a damp paper towel. Her mom shouted from downstairs about the county fair tickets. Great. Forced family fun.

At the fair, Maya's younger brother dragged her toward the midway. Jake was obsessed with winning something—anything—from the carnival games. Her parents gave them each ten dollars and disappeared toward the fried dough stand.

"I'm gonna win you something, May," Jake insisted, already lined up at the goldfish toss. Because that's exactly what a fifteen-year-old needed: a live animal in a plastic bag.

Thirty dollars later, they had three goldfish swimming in separate bags. Her brother looked triumphant. Maya looked like the embarrassed chaperone of three fish that would probably die before Monday.

Then she saw it: The Mechanical Bull.

A crowd had gathered. Some guy in a varsity jacket was getting bucked off in three seconds. People laughed. Maya's stomach did that thing it did before presentations in English class—the twisty, hollow feeling that made her want to disappear.

'You should go on it,' Jake said, like he was reading her mind.

'Hard pass.'

'Why not? You're always talking about how you wish you were braver.' He gestured at the goldfish bags. 'These guys don't even know they're in plastic. You think they care what people think?'

Maya stared at the orange fish darting around its tiny world, completely unbothered. A metaphor from her twelve-year-old brother. Perfect.

She looked at the bull. At the crowd. At her phone—Jordan had posted something new. A picture of the homecoming flyer. With a caption: 'Gonna be sick if nobody asks.'

Wait.

Maya's fingers flew across her screen. 'Um, I was asking if you wanted to go WITH me? Like, as my date?'

She hit send before she could overthink it.

'Oh,' came the reply almost instantly. 'Oh! Yeah, I thought—I mean, yes. Definitely yes.'

Maya's knees went weak. She looked at the mechanical bull again, then at her brother grinning beside her, holding three bags of living goldfish.

'Hold these,' she said, thrusting the fish into Jake's hands. 'I'm going to take the bull by the horns.'

Literally.

She lasted twelve seconds. The crowd went wild. Her hair was a disaster. She fell off laughing.

Jordan texted again: 'You're actually insane. I love it.'

Maya walked back to her brother, hair wild, heart pounding, grinning like she'd never grinned before. Sometimes you just had to ride the bull, fish in hand, and see what happened.