The Spy in Aisle Seven

Maya's life officially peaked when she caught Ethan—actual Ethan, varsity soccer captain, owner of the smile that made girls forget their own names—standing in the organic produce section at Food-4-Less examining a bag of **spinach** like it contained the secrets of the universe.

She'd been pretending to arrange apples perfectly for twenty minutes, engaged in what she called "strategic reconnaissance" and what her best friend Riya called "being a total **spy** instead of just talking to him like a normal human."

"You're being creepy," Riya had texted. "Just say hi."

Maya, sixteen and deeply convinced that her entire social standing hung in the balance, had other plans. She needed information. What did Ethan like? What did he do in his free time? Was the spinach for himself or some girl whose life was already better than Maya's?

The universe answered in the worst way possible.

Ethan dropped the spinach. He bent down. His backpack—worn, faded, covered in doodles—unzipped slightly. And out tumbled a crumpled piece of notebook paper with familiar handwriting. Maya's handwriting.

Her stomach dropped like she'd just gone over the first hill of a roller coaster. The poem. The one she'd written during English last week, when Mr. Harrison was going on about metaphors and emotions and she'd poured everything into the page and then somehow, impossibly, LOST it.

The one that started: "Sometimes I feel like I'm underwater holding my breath..."

Her **water** metaphor. Her soul, literally lying on the grocery store floor next to organic baby spinach.

Ethan picked it up. He smoothed it out. He started reading.

Maya didn't think. She didn't plan. She just moved, like **lightning** striking without warning, diving behind a display of canned tomatoes while her dignity burned away like paper in a fire.

"Maya?" Ethan's voice came closer. "I think this is—"

She considered faking her own death. She considered never leaving Aisle Seven again. She considered moving to Antarctica where the only social pressure would be penguin dynamics.

"You wrote this?" He stood there, spinach in one hand, her poem in the other, looking at her with something that wasn't laughing. Wasn't mocking. Wasn't anything she'd prepared for.

"It's not finished," she heard herself say, mortified. "It's dumb. I—"

"'Underwater holding my breath, waiting for someone to notice I never learned to swim.'" He read the line back to her. "That's... actually really good."

The school mascot—a dude named Marcus in a sweaty **bear** costume—walked by, high-fiving absolutely no one because it was Tuesday afternoon and the grocery store was not, in fact, a pep rally.

Maya started laughing. She couldn't stop. Ethan joined in. They stood there in Aisle Seven between spinach and canned tomatoes, laughing while the bear mascot shuffled away to find someone who actually cared, and for the first time in forever, Maya felt like maybe she could finally breathe.