Teeth Stuck in the Spotlight

Maya's stomach did nervous backflips as she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. The homecoming dance was in two hours, and she was stuck with a massive piece of spinach lodged between her front teeth. How had she not noticed until now?

"Maya! Your aunt's here with her dog!" her mom shouted from downstairs.

Great. Just great. Aunt Sarah's pug, Buster, was basically a vacuum cleaner for embarrassment — last Christmas he'd humped Maya's crush's leg at the family party.

Maya jammed her teeth with floss until her gums throbbed. Nothing. The spinach green monster remained, taunting her like neon sign that said SOCIAL SUICIDE.

Her phone buzzed. Group chat blowing up about who was going with who. Tyler, the guy she'd been lowkey flirting with since September, had posted a story in his orange button-up — the same one she'd jokingly said she liked three weeks ago. Was that a sign? Or was she reading too much into everything like always?

She zombie-walked downstairs, feeling dead inside from pre-party anxiety. The smell of her mom's cooking hit her — something with orange glaze, naturally, because the universe wanted to remind her of Tyler's shirt.

"Maya, honey, you okay?" Aunt Sarah asked. "You look like you haven't slept in a week."

"Fine," Maya mumbled, reaching for an orange from the fruit bowl to avoid actual conversation.

Buster chose that exact moment to jump on her, leaving paw prints on her dress AND knocking the orange onto the floor, where it rolled under the couch like it was trying to escape this disaster too.

"BUSTER! No!" Maya scrambled after the orange, came up with it, then caught her reflection in the hallway mirror.

The spinach was gone. Either from all the flossing or from her aggressively smiling in the mirror while mentally screaming.

"Maya, you're smiling weirdly," her little brother observed.

"I'm not smiling. This is my resting face now."

But later that night, when Tyler showed up wearing that orange button-up and cracked a joke about feeling like a zombie from dance practice, Maya actually laughed. And for the first time all night, she wasn't worrying about her teeth or what her hands were doing or whether her laugh was too loud.

Sometimes the stuff that feels like the end of the world is just spinach in your teeth — annoying, yeah, but not worth losing it over.