The Spinach Incident

I'd been cyber-stalking my best friend for three days straight. Pathetic? Maybe. But when Leo suddenly stopped replying to my texts and started posting Instagram stories from some random pool I'd never heard of, a girl's gotta investigate.

The pool wasn't even fancy — just a cracked concrete thing behind someone's backyard fence. But Leo was there every afternoon with these new friends I'd never met, laughing like I didn't exist. So I did what any rational sixteen-year-old would do: I created a fake TikTok account to infiltrate their social circle. Call it modern spying.

Friday, I decided to crash their little pool party. I showed up wearing my "casual but not trying too hard" outfit — vintage denim shorts and a cropped tee that said "EAT THE RICH" in sparkly letters. My stomach was doing cartwheels.

"Maya!" Leo looked shocked to see me. "What are you doing here?"

"Just... in the neighborhood." Total lie. I lived two miles away.

That's when I noticed it: a giant piece of spinach wedged between his front teeth. The same spinach from the smoothie place we'd gone to two days ago, before he started ghosting me. Before the mysterious pool friends. Before everything.

"You've had that in your teeth for, like, three days," I said.

Leo's face went bright red. His new pool friends went silent.

"I've been avoiding everyone because I looked like an idiot," he admitted. "These are my cousins from Jersey. They're staying with us for the month."

I died laughing. All that spying. All that overthinking. And he was just embarrassed about a green thing in his teeth.

"You're still my best friend," I said. "Even with the spinach decoration."

"Wanna get in the pool?"

"Let me grab my suit."

Sometimes you gotta crash a pool party to remember who your real friends are. And sometimes you just gotta tell someone they have spinach in their teeth. That's what best friends are for, anyway.