The Hair Betrayal

Maya pressed her phone against her chest like a guilty secret, feeling like a total spy in her own life. Behind the bathroom door, she'd been watching Instagram Stories for forty-five minutes—specifically, Jordan's stories. The guy she'd been crushing on since seventh grade had posted five consecutive videos of himself at some party she wasn't invited to.

"Maya! Dinner!" her mom called from downstairs.

She swiped everything closed and stared at herself in the mirror. Her hair was the problem. Definitely. Jordan liked girls with that effortlessly messy-but-perfect wave thing, while Maya's hair refused to be anything but aggressively frizzy. She'd spent two hours this morning trying to curl it, and now it hung halfway between disaster and desperation.

Her phone buzzed. Jordan had posted again.

She shouldn't look. Really. But her fingers had other plans.

"Riddle me this," the caption said under a photo of Jordan holding a massive statue of a sphinx from what looked like an Egyptian exhibit. "First person to guess where I am gets to hang out with me tomorrow."

Maya's heart did this embarrassing flutter thing. A sphinx. Riddles. Jordan. This was somehow perfect and terrible simultaneously.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their Egyptology wing was legendary. But before she could type the answer, her phone started blowing up. Every other girl in their grade was commenting with wrong guesses. LA. London. Some random girl's house party.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. This was it—the moment to make her move, to stop being the background character in her own life. But then she caught sight of her hair again, still somehow wrong, and hesitated.

"You're overthinking it," she whispered to herself, remembering what her best friend always said. "Literally no one cares about your hair except you."

Maya typed: "Met Museum, Egyptian wing. That sphinx has been there since like, forever."

She hit send before her brain could talk her out of it.

Three minutes later—though it felt like three years—Jordan replied: "Finally someone who knows their ancient history. You down for tomorrow?"

Maya stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her hair was still frizzy. She was still the girl who hid in bathrooms at parties. But she'd just won a riddle from the guy she'd been spy-ing on for months.

She grinned at herself. "So down," she typed back.

Sometimes sphinxes weren't mysterious at all. Sometimes they were just awkward boys who needed someone to pay attention in class.