The Dugout Sphinx

Leo sat on the end of the bench, his baseball cleats digging into the cracked concrete. Tryouts were tomorrow, and his hands were shaking like he'd chugged three energy drinks. Which, okay, he kinda had.

"You good, bro?" Marcus asked, dropping beside him and bumping his shoulder. Marcus had been his best friend since seventh grade, back when they both sucked at everything and it didn't matter.

"Just nervous," Leo admitted. "Tyrell's been talking so much crap about how I'm gonna choke."

"Don't let that bull get in your head," Marcus said, then immediately cringed. "Sorry. That sounded like my dad trying to be hip."

Leo snorted. "Please never say 'get in your head' again. Or 'hip.' Just, no."

The laugh helped, but the knot in Leo's stomach didn't totally untangle. Tyrell had been making his life miserable since October—loud comments in the hallway, 'accidentally' bumping into him, staring him down in the locker room. The worst part was everyone acting like it was no big deal. Just boys being boys. Just playing around.

Whatever.

That's when Leo noticed her—the new girl, sitting alone on the bleachers behind home plate. She'd been at school for like two weeks, and Leo didn't think he'd heard her say more than five words total. Just watched everything with this unreadable expression, like she was solving some puzzle no one else could see.

"Who's that?" Marcus asked, following his gaze.

"The sphinx," Leo said. "Seriously, what's her deal?"

"Amaya, I think. She's in our English class."

Right. Amaya. Leo had seen her there, always in the back, always watching. He'd caught her staring at him once during group work and immediately looked away, because his brain had short-circuited and he was awkward and terrible.

"Hey," Marcus said, suddenly straight-up beaming. "I have the dumbest idea."

"Your ideas are always dumb."

"What if we ask her for advice? Like, about Tyrell? She seems like she knows stuff."

Leo was about to say absolutely not, are you kidding me, but then—Amaya looked over at them. Just looked. But somehow Leo's feet were already moving.

"So," Marcus said when they reached the bleachers, smooth as ever. "You got any wisdom for the persecuted?"

Amaya's expression didn't change, but something flickered in her eyes. "Depends. What's the riddle?"

"Riddle?" Leo repeated.

"Everything's a riddle," she said. "So. What's yours?"

Leo found himself telling her everything—about baseball, about Tyrell, about being so terrified of messing up in front of everyone that he could barely breathe. Marcus jumped in with the worst parts, the stuff Leo hadn't wanted to say out loud.

When he finished, Amaya was quiet for so long that Leo started sweating.

"You know what a sphinx is, right?" she finally asked.

"A monster thing? Riddles?"

"In the story," she said, "the sphinx guards the gate. It asks a question, and if you can't answer, it eats you alive. But if you can—that's when you get to pass through."

She stood up, slinging her bag over her shoulder.

"Your riddle isn't about Tyrell," she said. "It's about whether you're gonna let yourself be scared. The gate's right there. Either figure out the answer or get eaten."

She walked away without another word.

Leo stood there for a long time.

"Well," Marcus said, breaking the silence. "That was aggressively cryptic."

"Yeah," Leo said, and realized something as he said it—the knot in his stomach was gone. "Yeah, it really was."

The next day at tryouts, when Tyrell smirked at him from the dugout, Leo didn't look away. Just picked up his bat, walked to the plate, and thought about gates and riddles and sphinxes who didn't give you easy answers but somehow gave you exactly what you needed.

He crushed the first pitch into center field.

Behind the backstop, Amaya was watching. She didn't smile, exactly. But she nodded, once, and that somehow felt better than a smile would have.