The Spy in the Bleachers

My palms were sweating. Like, actual dripping down my fingers sweating, which was exactly why I'd chosen the baseball hat as my signature disguise. Pull the brim low, look mysterious, nobody notices you're practically hyperventilating.

"You look like you're stalking someone," Maya said, dropping onto the bleacher beside me and offering me the container of spinach dip from the concession stand. "Which, let's be real, you kind of are."

"I'm not stalking Jordan," I protested, accepting the dip anyway because my stomach was doing backflips. "I'm conducting surveillance. There's a difference. Spy work requires patience. Strategy. A cool head."

"Spy work," she repeated, deadpan. "At freshman baseball tryouts. Okay, James Bond. You want me to analyze the enemy while you sit here being weirdly intense?"

Jordan was out on the field, stretching, completely unaware that his entire future—and my entire dignity—hung in the balance. I'd spent three weeks planning this moment. Three weeks of researching his interests (baseball, obviously, plus that one band he posted about on his Story that one time), three weeks of perfecting my casual-but-interested approach, three weeks of convincing myself that today would be the day I finally spoke more than three words to him without forgetting how language worked.

And now I was hiding behind a baseball hat and eating spinach dip like it was my emotional support snack.

"Your plan is flawed," Maya continued, dipping a chip. "First, you're wearing a hoodie in eighty-degree weather. Suspicious. Second, you've been staring at him for twenty minutes without blinking. Also suspicious. Third, you have spinach dip in your teeth."

I froze. "I what?"

"Since you took your first bite." She grinned. "Classic spy move. The spinach camouflage. Very tactical."

I was already scrambling for my phone mirror, horrified, when Jordan looked up from the field and caught my eye. And I mean really caught my eye—like, our eyes locked across the entire baseball diamond, and I was doing that thing where you try to look away casually but instead you just jerk your head weirdly and you look even more suspicious.

He smiled.

He actually smiled.

Then he waved.

I waved back, still clutching my spinach dip, still sweating through my hoodie, still completely failing at being a spy but suddenly, weirdly, okay with that.

"He's coming over here," Maya hissed. "Fix your teeth. Abort mission. I repeat, abort mission."

But Jordan was already jogging toward the bleachers, and for the first time in three weeks of planning, I didn't have a plan at all. Just spinach in my teeth, a stupid hat, palms sweating, and the sudden terrifying understanding that sometimes the moments that matter aren't the ones you spy from the distance.

They're the ones you let yourself be seen for.

"Hey," he said, breathless and smiling. "Nice hat."