The Sphinx of Study Hall

Maya's first mistake was letting Elijah walk her home. Her second mistake was accepting when he asked to hang out. Now here she was, frantically shoving empty pizza boxes under her sofa while her mom's cat, a rotund tabby named Pickles, judged her from the windowsill.

"You're missing your daily vitamin!" her mom called from the kitchen, because clearly the most important thing right now was Maya's immune system, not the fact that the Sphinx of Northwood High—the mysterious, unreadable Elijah who sat in the back of AP History—was currently three minutes away.

"Just take it later!" Maya yelled back, kicking a stray sock under the coffee table. Pickles yawned, unimpressed.

The doorbell rang.

Elijah stood there holding a tangled mess of HDMI cables and a PlayStation. "My mom's boyfriend's doing a movie night with his kids," he said with that half-smile that made everyone forget he never spoke in class. "Thought you might want to play something."

Maya's brain short-circuited. This was not in her seventeen carefully planned scenarios. "Oh. Cool. Come in."

Her mom chose that exact moment to march in, vitamin bottle in hand. "Maya, you need this or you'll get—" She froze, spotting Elijah. "Oh! I'm so sorry, I didn't know we had company."

"That's okay," Elijah said, somehow charming while holding a mess of cables. "I actually take those too. School's stressful."

Maya wanted to die.

Twenty minutes later, they were sitting on her floor playing FIFA while Pickles repeatedly attacked the controller cables. Elijah laughed every time, leaning closer, and Maya's heart did this stupid fluttery thing that definitely had nothing to do with the vitamin deficiency her mom kept going on about.

"You're different than I thought," he said during a pause in the game. Not a question. A statement.

"What did you think?" Maya asked, voice barely above a whisper.

He shrugged. "That you were perfect. Everyone says you've got it all together. GPA, college apps, whatever." He grinned. "I like this better. The pizza box hiding, cat-attacking version."

Maya realized something then: everyone was the sphinx to someone else. Even the people who seemed to have everything figured out were just shoving pizza boxes under sofas and hoping nobody noticed.

"I like this better too," she said.

Pickles chose that moment to pounce on the main power cable, killing the TV. They sat in the sudden darkness, laughing like idiots, and Maya thought maybe, just maybe, high school wouldn't be so terrible after all.