The Spinach Incident and Other Disasters

Maya's first month of freshman year had been a masterclass in invisibility. Until the cafeteria incident.

She'd been sitting with her tray—mystery meat Monday and a side of spinach that looked suspiciously like it had been cooked during the Bush administration—when Chloe, the undisputed queen of the sophomore pyramid, had marched over. The school's social hierarchy operated like a pyramid scheme, and Chloe sat comfortably at its apex, surrounded by her minions who laughed at jokes that weren't funny and agreed with opinions that weren't opinions.

"Spinach? Really?" Chloe had said, loud enough for three tables to hear. "That's... bold."

Maya had frozen, her fork hovering midway between tray and mouth. Her cat, Mr. Whiskers, would've had the dignity to simply pretend he hadn't heard. Maya, unfortunately, was not a cat.

"It's—good?" Maya had tried, which was exactly the wrong thing to say. Half the cafeteria erupted. Not with laughter—worse. With that specific kind of teenage secondhand embarrassment that makes you want to dissolve into the floor tiles.

But then, from behind her: "Actually, spinach contains more iron per calorie than beef, and the absorption increases significantly when paired with vitamin C."

Maya turned. A guy she'd never seen before—dark hair, faintly bear-like in stature, wearing a hoodie that had definitely seen better decades—was standing there, holding a container of orange juice.

"Like, if you drink this with it," he continued, placing the juice on her table. "Bear with me here, I'm not trying to be weird. I just really hate food misinformation."

Chloe raised an eyebrow. "Okay, bear guy. Whatever."

The table burst into actual laughter this time, but somehow it was different. Not at her—well, not ONLY at her.

"I'm Leo," the guy said, after Chloe had moved on to terrorizing someone else. "And I promise I'm not always this intense about nutritional biochemistry. Usually I save it for physics."

"Maya," she said. "And I promise I don't always eat questionable cafeteria vegetables."

They'd been sitting together for three weeks when Leo finally admitted: "I actually transferred here because I got into a fight with my last school's mascot."

"You fought a mascot?"

"It was a bear costume. The guy inside kept making these inappropriate comments about my sister, and..." He shrugged. "My dad said I needed a fresh start."

Maya looked at him—this bear of a boy who defended people's sisters and corrected nutritional misinformation and somehow made sitting in the corner of the cafeteria feel like the best seat in the house.

"Fresh starts are overrated," she said. "Sometimes you just need someone who doesn't care that you eat weird spinach."

Leo grinned. "Exactly."

Outside the cafeteria window, a stray cat—Mr. Whiskers's distant cousin, probably—sauntered across the courtyard, completely unbothered by the social pyramids and spinach incidents of human high schoolers.

Maya took a bite of her spinach. It was still gross. But everything else was starting to feel a little less like a disaster.