The Sphinx's Smile

Maya stared at her reflection in the museum bathroom mirror, frantically picking spinach out of her braces with her thumbnail. Of course. The ONE day she finally sat next to Liam at lunch, and she'd spent three hours walking around with green stuff stuck in her teeth like some kind of vegetable-loving christmas ornament.

Her hair was doing that weird frizzy thing it always did when she stressed, and she'd accidentally worn basically the same orange shirt as her ex-best friend Chloe, who was currently somewhere in the Egyptian exhibit laughing with her new friends. Maya washed her hands and took a breath.

She'd wanted this field trip to be different. This was going to be her year—she was going to break out of her shell, talk to people, maybe even actually live instead of just watching from the sidelines like she was observing her own life through a glass bowl, a sad goldfish swimming in endless circles.

The Great Hall of Ancient Egypt was dimly lit when she slipped in. There it was—the Sphinx, carved from limestone, somehow simultaneously powerful and trapped. Maya had learned about it in World History, but seeing it in person hit different. The statue's human face stared back at her through thousands of years, its missing nose giving it this weirdly defiant look.

"Riddle me this," she whispered to the empty room, feeling ridiculous but doing it anyway. "Who's the girl who finally speaks up, who finally makes real friends, who stops being everyone's background character?"

"Maya?"

She spun around. Liam stood there holding a sketchbook, orange pencil tucked behind his ear. "I saw you come in here. You okay? You looked—"

"Like I had spinach in my braces for three hours?" Maya groaned, wishing the museum floor would just open up and swallow her whole like some ancient curse.

Liam laughed, and it wasn't mean. "I was gonna say 'like you were thinking about something deep.' But... yeah, I noticed that earlier. I didn't want to make it weird."

"You noticed and didn't say anything?"

"I'm not gonna embarrass someone I've been trying to work up the courage to talk to all semester." Liam's face went almost as orange as his pencil. "I was gonna wait until the perfect moment, but there is no perfect moment, so..."

He held out his sketchbook. A drawing of Maya from lunch—laughing, spinach and all. It was beautiful.

"You're way cooler than you give yourself credit for," he said. "Wanna check out the mummies together?"

Maya smiled, and this time she didn't worry about whether there was anything in her teeth. The Sphinx seemed to wink at her from across the hall.