The Lightning in Her Spinach Teeth

Maya felt like a total zombie as she stood against the wall at Jake's party. She'd spent three hours flat-ironing her hair, and now it was already frizzing up in the humidity. Classic.

"You look like you're plotting murder," said Leo, leaning against the wall beside her. Leo, who'd dyed his hair electric blue last week and somehow still looked effortless. Maya had been lowkey obsessed with him since seventh period English, when he'd compared her to a sphinx because she never spoke but always had the answers.

"Just observing," Maya said, trying to play it cool. "Like, socially speaking, what even is happening?"

Leo laughed, and Maya felt it in her chest. Then disaster struck.

"You got a little—" Leo gestured to his own teeth, and Maya's stomach dropped.

She'd eaten spinach wraps earlier. SPINACH. The green vegetable of her enemies. She rushed to the bathroom, feeling like she might actually die.

Thunder shook the house as rain started hammering against the windows. Maya stared at herself in the mirror, spinach still stuck in her teeth, hair now a complete disaster zone. She was about to text her best friend to stage an emergency exit when lightning flashed, illuminating the bathroom in brilliant white.

The door opened. Leo stood there, looking weirdly nervous.

"I didn't come to make fun of you," he said. "I came because—"

Another flash of lightning. The power went out.

"Because what?" Maya asked, her heart doing that thing it always did around him.

"Because I've been waiting all night for you to look at me like you look at your phone," Leo said, and then he was kissing her in the dark, and Maya's spinach-flecked smile didn't matter anymore, and her frizzy hair was perfect, actually, and she wasn't a zombie anymore but something else entirely—someone who got kissed by Leo during a lightning storm.

"Your hair looks great," he whispered.

"I have spinach in my teeth," she whispered back.

"I know," he said. "It's kinda why I like you."