The Spinach Incident

Maya's hair was supposed to be perfect. That was the plan. Instead, she stood in front of her mirror at 7:43 PM on homecoming night, staring at a disaster that had somehow transpired in the forty minutes since she'd last checked.

"This is fine," she told herself. "Everything is fine."

Everything was not fine.

Her dog, Barnaby—a golden retriever with zero concept of personal space or the importance of formal occasions—had chosen that exact moment to shake himself vigorously directly after rolling in something questionable in the backyard. Now Maya's previously pristine white dress had a suspicious streak across the front, and her carefully styled hair had gone from "effortless waves" to "I just stuck my finger in an electrical socket."

"Barnaby, you traitor," she whispered, trying to smooth her hair back into something resembling civilization.

Her phone buzzed. Jordan: *You ready? I'm outside.*

Panic. Pure, unadulterated panic.

Maya grabbed a handful of spinach from her dinner plate—don't ask why she was eating spinach before homecoming, she wasn't thinking clearly—and stuffed it into her mouth because stress-eating was apparently her personality now. She managed to fix her dress with some strategic accessorizing and was attempting to salvage her hair situation when Jordan knocked on the door.

She opened it, and there he was. Looking like a fox somehow—sleek and composed and unfairly good-looking in his navy suit, while she was standing there with spinach probably stuck in her teeth and her hair doing something concerning.

"Hey," Jordan said, smiling. And then his expression shifted. "You have—" He gestured to his own teeth.

Maya's face burned. "Spinach?"

"Yeah. But also..." He reached out and gently tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear. "Your hair's kind of perfect like this."

Maya blinked. "It looks like a bird's nest."

"Exactly," Jordan said. "It looks like you didn't try too hard. Which is cool."

Her dog chose that moment to burst into the hallway, tracking something questionable across the clean floor, and Maya started to laugh. Because of course. Of course this was her life.

"Barnaby," she said. "You're banned from my life."

Jordan laughed too, and suddenly the spinach incident, the hair disaster, the dress situation—it all seemed kind of perfect. Messy, yeah. Real, definitely. But perfect.

"So," Jordan said, offering his arm. "Ready to go?"

Maya grabbed a mirror, checked her teeth one more time, and nodded. "Yeah. Let's do this."