The Green Between My Teeth

The problem with having a pool party when you're the only one who actually swims is that eventually you have to get out. And when you get out, everyone sees you. Everyone sees the way your shorts cling to your legs. Everyone sees you reaching for your towel.

I'd been in the pool for forty-five minutes straight trying to avoid Tyler, who'd spent the entire week telling everyone about how I'd choked at the baseball game last Friday. Bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded — and I'd swung at nothing but air. My bat had literally fallen out of my hands. The video was already circulating, naturally.

"Hey, spinach breath!"

I flinched. Tyler. I grabbed my towel and turned around, and that's when I saw the fraying coaxial cable dangling from the garage roof above us. Someone had rigged a TV out here, pulling cable from who-knows-where, and the wire was swaying dangerously.

"That's not even —" I started, then stopped. Because Maya was laughing. Maya, who I'd had a crush on since sixth grade, who I'd been trying to talk to all summer, was laughing at Tyler's joke.

My face burned hotter than the pavement under my bare feet. I turned back toward the pool, ready to dive back into the safety of chlorinated water, when Tyler grabbed my shoulder.

"Bro, I'm kidding. You actually got spinach or something in your teeth though."

I froze. The spinach from lunch. The spinach my mom had packed because "you're growing, you need iron." It had been stuck in my braces this whole time.

The entire time I'd been talking to Maya earlier. The entire time I'd been trying to play it cool.

"That cable," someone said, and I looked up to see it snap. The wire whipped down like an angry snake, and Maya stepped back, tripping over my bag of pool snacks — including the Tupperware of spinach salad I'd been too embarrassed to eat.

Green went everywhere. Across the deck. Into the pool. All over Tyler's pristine white Jordans.

For a second, nobody moved. Then Maya started laughing. Not mean laughing — the other kind. The kind where you can't help it because sometimes the universe just commits to a joke that hard.

"Well," she said, grinning at me. "At least you won't have to worry about the spinach in your teeth anymore. There's plenty more where that came from."

I laughed. I actually laughed. And for the first time all day, I didn't think about baseball. I didn't think about being cool. I just jumped back into the pool, spinach-flecked water and all, and finally felt like I could breathe.