The Orange Peel Prophecy

I'd been playing spy since seventh grade, mastering the art of invisibility in a school that worshiped visibility. My specialty: watching Jordan Torres from behind the safety of my Algebra textbook while he sat three rows away, probably not noticing I existed.

Then came the baseball championship—the social event of the season that everyone pretended was just a game. My friends were going. My crush was going. I was going to stay home and re-read my favorite fantasy series until my mom literally bribed me with a grande vanilla latte from The Bean.

"You need to get out there, Maya," she'd said, doing that mom thing where she pretends not to be forcing you. "Live a little."

So I went, armed with my emotional support orange. Don't judge. It started as a joke freshman year when I forgot lunch money and survived on citrus fruit, but now it was my thing. My quirky little trademark. People actually noticed it, which was saying something.

The baseball game was everything I hated: loud, crowded, and filled with people who knew exactly who they were. I peeled my orange methodically, trying to look busy. Preoccupied. Totally not watching Jordan pitch, okay maybe a little.

He was beautiful in that way that made your chest hurt. Easy confidence, messy hair, the kind of laugh that made everyone lean in. I'd studied him from afar long enough to memorize his mannerisms. The way he tapped his cleats before each pitch. How his jersey stuck to his back in the humidity. How he looked right at me in the fourth inning.

Wait. What?

I froze with a segment of orange halfway to my mouth, suddenly hyperaware of myself. Sticky fingers. Racing heart. The overwhelming urge to dissolve into the bleachers.

He wasn't just looking. He was *looking*—that direct, unsettling gaze that felt like being caught doing something wrong. Then he did the unthinkable. He smiled. Not the polite everyone-smile he gave teachers, but something smaller. Realer.

My orange segment fell. I didn't even care.

After the game—because his team won, obviously—Jordan Torres, the boy I'd been spying on for two years, walked straight up to my section while I sat frozen beside my abandoned orange.

"Hey," he said, and his voice was exactly like I'd imagined but worse because it was real and directed at me. "You're the orange girl, right?"

The ground could swallow me now. Please.

"I mean—I've seen you around. Always with an orange." He rubbed his neck, actually nervous? "My sister swears you have a secret code. Like, the way you peel it means something different each day."

I stared at him. At his earnest, slightly concerned face. At the sudden reality of the person I'd built up in my head for years.

"Your sister thinks I'm sending coded messages through citrus arrangements?" I heard myself ask, feeling hysterical.

"Well." He shrugged, devastatingly casual. "Are you?"

And just like that, the spy became the subject. The observer became the observed. And somewhere between the ridiculous question and the way he kept standing there, waiting for an answer like it mattered, I realized something terrifying.

I didn't want to be invisible anymore.

"Maybe," I said, picking up my orange. "But you'll have to keep watching to find out."