The Sphinx by the Pool

The spinach in my teeth felt like a neon billboard broadcasting my awkwardness to everyone at Tyler's party. I'd been nursing the same red cup of fruit punch for twenty minutes, too terrified to actually speak to anyone and reveal the green disaster in my smile.

Then I saw her.

Maya sat poolside like some kind of sphinx—inscrutable, magnificent, completely out of my league. She was reading a paperback with her feet in the water, while everyone else splashed around like overexcited puppies. She didn't look up. She didn't check her phone. She just existed in this bubble of cool that I couldn't figure out how to enter.

"Yo, Marcus!" My best friend Jayden slapped my back, nearly making me spill my punch. "You gonna stand here all night or actually talk to her?"

"I can't," I hissed. "There's literally spinach in my teeth."

Jayden squinted at me. "Bro, that's not spinach. That's a piece of your braces bracket."

I froze. "What."

"Yeah, you lost a bracket like two days ago. It's been metal this whole time."

I ran to the bathroom, flipped up my lip, and sure enough—metal. Not spinach. Not a green leafy vegetable announcing my social demise. Just a tiny piece of orthodontia.

When I came back out, Maya had looked up from her book. Our eyes met across the pool, and for some reason, I didn't overthink it. I didn't let the panic spiral or my brain manufacture seventeen reasons why talking to her would end in catastrophe.

I just walked over.

"Hey," I said, my voice doing this weird crackle thing. "Your book—is that the one about the girl who can see ghosts?"

Maya's face transformed from sphinx-mode to something genuinely interested. "You've read it?"

"Yeah, I finished it last week. The ending wrecked me."

We talked for forty minutes straight. About books, about how both of us hated pool parties actually, about how she moved here from Chicago and hadn't made real friends yet because everyone thought she was stuck-up when really she was just shy.

"I'm not a sphinx," she said, smiling. "I'm just awkward."

"Me too," I said. "Like, really awkward. I thought I had spinach in my teeth for an hour earlier."

She laughed, and it was the best sound I'd heard all summer.

Later, as the sun started going down and people started leaving, she wrote her number on my arm in purple sharpie.

"Text me," she said. "Maybe we can hang out somewhere that's not a pool party."

"Yeah," I said, feeling like I was floating. "I'd like that."

Jayden found me grinning at my arm like an idiot. "Well?" he asked.

"I got her number," I said.

" AND you didn't even have to use the spinach excuse?"

"It wasn't spinach!" I protested, but I was still smiling.

Some nights, everything just works out. Even when you're convinced there's spinach in your teeth and the girl you like is an unsolvable riddle. Sometimes riddles solve themselves, and sometimes you're just running on nothing but hope—and sometimes, somehow, that's enough.