The Great Spinach Incident

Maya's sphinx cat, Mr. Wrinkles, stared judgmentally from his perch on the bathroom counter as she attempted to floss a stubborn piece of spinach from her braces. Her phone buzzed — third text from Jordan in ten minutes.

"u coming 2 jake's pool party??"

Maya groaned. The swimming part she could handle. She'd been on the swim team since seventh grade, slicing through water like it owed her something. But parties? Parties were a different sport entirely.

"Maybe," she typed back, then deleted it. Too noncommittal. "Yeah be there soon." Better. Possibly even true.

Mr. Wrinkles meowed, as if saying, "You're not fooling anyone with that fake confidence, Maya."

The problem wasn't the swimming. The problem was Jake specifically, who'd made varsity baseball as a sophomore and somehow gotten even more ridiculously attractive since middle school. The problem was that Maya had spent the entire school year successfully becoming invisible in the hallways, and now Jordan was trying to undo three years of careful social camouflage work in one afternoon.

She finally gave up on the spinach — it'd probably come out during swimming anyway. Changed into her favorite swimsuit (black one-piece, athletic but not trying too hard). Applied exactly the right amount of sunscreen (Maya burned just thinking about sunlight).

"You got this," she told her reflection. Mr. Wrinkles yawned.

Jake's backyard was already chaos when she arrived. Half the baseball team seemed to be there, plus various clusters of girls Maya recognized from algebra but had never actually spoken to. Jordan grabbed her arm the moment she stepped onto the patio.

"Finally! Jake's literally been asking about you."

"Yeah right," Maya said, but her stomach did something that felt suspiciously like hope.

They ended up in the pool, playing some variant of dodgeball that involved keeping a volleyball away from the baseball players. Jake was on the other team, and every time he laughed at something Maya dunked him, she felt like she'd won some tiny, invisible victory.

Later, when everyone else had moved inside for pizza, Jake found her sitting on the pool edge, feet in the water.

"Hey," he said. "You're actually really good at... whatever that was."

Maya shrugged. "Swim team."

"That explains it." He sat beside her. "I'm terrible at swimming. Baseball's more my thing, obviously."

"Obviously."

Silence, but not the bad kind. The comfortable kind.

"Hey, you've got—" Jake reached toward her face, and Maya's heart stopped. "—spinach. Right there."

He gestured to his own teeth, and Maya wanted to dissolve into the pool immediately. Of course. The spinach from earlier. She'd been talking to Jake for twenty minutes with spinach in her braces.

"Thanks," she mumbled, already reaching for her phone to text Jordan: "I'm never leaving my house again."

But Jake was still sitting there. Still smiling. "So, about that swim team practice tomorrow morning..."

Maya found herself smiling back. Maybe invisible wasn't all it was cracked up to be. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Maybe I could use some pointers. From someone who knows what they're doing."

Maya's sphinx cat would definitely approve. Eventually.