The Papaya Promise

My legs burned like they were on fire, but I kept running.

Three miles into my morning jog, I spotted him—Marcus—sitting on the park bench with that ridiculous orange hoodie that made him look like a human traffic cone. He was eating something yellow-orange and exotic-looking, and I swear my heart started racing faster than my feet.

"Nice form," he called out as I slowed down, pretending I wasn't dying inside.

"Nice," I wheezed, "hoodie."

He laughed, and the sound did something weird to my stomach. "Want some? My mom's obsessed with exotic fruits now. It's a papaya."

I'd never had papaya. I'd never even SEEN a papaya in real life, only in that one health class presentation where Ms. Rodriguez tried to convince us that vitamin C from actual fruit was somehow superior to the fluorescent orange soda we all chugged after lacrosse practice.

"Sure," I said, trying to look casual instead of absolutely terrified that I was about to eat something I couldn't even pronounce.

Marcus handed me a slice. It was soft and melting and honestly kind of looked like someone had eaten an alien and this was what remained. But his eyes were watching me—like, actually watching me—and my palms got sweaty.

I took a bite.

And...

It wasn't bad. It wasn't amazing, but it wasn't bad. Sort of like cantaloupe's cooler cousin who spent a semester abroad and came back with stories.

"Well?" Marcus asked, and there was this crinkle around his eyes that made everything feel too bright and too much.

"It's definitely a thing," I said. "A food thing. That exists."

He laughed again, and I decided right then that I would eat papaya every day for the rest of my life if it meant he'd keep looking at me like that.

"My cross-country coach thinks I need more vitamin D," I said, because I'm an idiot and my brain had stopped functioning properly around minute three of this conversation.

"Pretty sure you get that from the sun," Marcus said. "Which you're getting, like, a lot of, considering how much I see you running past my house every morning."

Wait.

He'd NOTICED?

"I," I started, then stopped. My face felt approximately one thousand degrees.

"Same time tomorrow?" he asked, standing up and shoving his hands in his hoodie pockets. "I can bring mango. It's way better than papaya."

"Yeah," I said, and my voice came out weird and soft. "Yeah, okay."

I ran the rest of the way home with papaya still on my tongue and something like hope blooming in my chest, bright and terrifying and absolutely worth the inevitable awkward conversation I'd have to have with my mom about why I suddenly wanted exotic fruits in the house.