The Green Between My Teeth

I'd been walking around like a zombie all week—three hours of sleep total, thanks to AP History crunch time and my mom's new obsession with kale smoothies at 6 AM. Friday at lunch, I finally sat down with Mia and Marcus, ready to zone out.

"You got something in your teeth," Marcus said, around a mouthful of cafeteria pizza.

I froze. "What?"

"Spinach," Mia whispered, like she was delivering classified intel. "And you're about to talk to Tyler."

Tyler. The guy who sat behind me in Calc, who'd somehow managed to make derivatives look attractive. He was walking toward our table with that effortless confidence I'd been faking since middle school.

I grabbed a napkin. "Is it gone?"

"No, you made it worse," Mia hissed. "Now it looks like you're trying to floss with paper."

Tyler reached our table. "Hey, Maya." He held up a tangled mess of wires. "You're good with computers, right? The ethernet cable in the library got ripped out of the wall, and the librarian's about to lose it."

I stared at him. He was asking me for help? Now? With spinach between my front teeth?

"Sure," I heard myself say. "Let me just..." I gestured vaguely toward my mouth.

Tyler's eyes widened. "Oh, you got—" He mimed his own teeth. "My little sister does that all the time with salad. It's fine."

"It's NOT fine," I whispered.

"Actually," he said, dropping his voice, "I once gave a presentation with a whole piece of parsley stuck to my tongue. Didn't notice until someone recorded it and put it on the class Snapchat." He grinned. "We've all been there."

Something in my chest unlocked. The zombie feeling evaporated.

"Cable," I said, standing up. "Let's go fix it."

We walked to the library together, and I didn't even check my reflection in my phone screen. The spinach could wait. This was better.