The Papaya Incident

I stood by the snack table like a **bull** in a china shop, which was exactly how I felt at Tyler's end-of-summer bash. Everyone else was chilling on the patio, being their naturally cool selves, while I was busy having an existential crisis over a fruit platter that no one was touching.

"You gonna eat that whole **papaya**?" Maya appeared beside me, and my brain immediately short-circuited. This was it. The moment I'd been waiting for all summer. And I was about to blow it by talking about tropical fruit.

"I—uh—maybe? It's just sitting there being... aggressively orange."

Maya laughed, and I simultaneously wanted to disappear and also freeze time forever. She was wearing this **orange** sundress that made her look like actual sunlight, and I was wearing my insecurity like it was a designer brand.

"I love how you're always so random," she said, which was hilarious because I was the opposite of random. I calculated every move, rehearsed every conversation, and overthought every text message until my thumbs hurt.

"I've got this **goldfish** at home," I blurted out. My brain had officially abandoned ship. "His name is Captain Fin. He's been alive for three years, which I feel is kind of an achievement, considering I killed three succulents last year."

She smiled, and something in my chest did that annoying fluttery thing. "That's actually really cute."

Cute. She called me cute. My inner celebration lasted exactly three seconds before Tyler's **baseball** came flying out of nowhere and shattered the punch bowl behind me.

Glass exploded everywhere. Bright red punch splattered across the patio. And there I stood, covered in sticky fruit juice, holding a papaya like it was a newborn baby.

"I am SO dead," Tyler announced from the other side of the yard.

The next twenty minutes were chaos. We spent them cleaning up punch and glass shards together, me and Maya and a bunch of random people, all united by Tyler's impending doom. My anxiety was replaced by something else—something like belonging, maybe. Or at least not being the only one who didn't know what they were doing.

"You know," Maya said, wiping orange punch from her arm and somehow making it look graceful, "this is way more fun than standing around pretending to be cool all night."

"Yeah," I said, and it was the first time all night I wasn't lying.

Later, she helped me clean punch out of my hair. I got her number. I also learned that sometimes you have to break something—a punch bowl, your expectations, your carefully constructed walls—to find out what's real. And that some memories are worth making a complete fool of yourself for.