Cable Box Confessions

Working at my dad's cable shop after school wasn't exactly how I pictured spending my sophomore year. But there I was, surrounded by tangled wires and the faint smell of electronics, while my friends were probably at Maya's house doing literally anything else.

The bell chimed. I looked up from the coaxial cable I'd been stripping — and there she was. Maya. The same Maya who'd sat behind me in bio since September, whose laugh sounded like summer and whose perfume I could smell three desks away. She held up a router like it was a radioactive alien artifact.

"My internet's dead again," she said, and I swear my heart did that thing where it forgets how to beat for a second.

I felt like such a spy. Like I was gathering intel on her life through tech support calls. Her Wi-Fi password (maya+lucas<3, RIP). Her streaming habits (eight hours of Netflix on school nights). The fact that she was apparently dating some Lucas guy who definitely wasn't me.

"You okay?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said. "Just thinking."

Later that night, Jordan hit me up on Discord. "Bro, you're being weird about Maya again."

"No I'm not."

"That is such bull. I SAW you looking at her story five times today. FIVE times. That's not even normal creeping behavior."

"Shut up."

"Just talk to her, bro. She literally came to your house. That's not accidental."

"Maybe she just needed her cable fixed."

"Or maybe she's been crushing on you since homecoming and you're too dense to notice because you're too busy having a whole identity crisis about being 'the cable guy's son.'"

The next day, I found an old cable box in the back room. Dad was throwing it out — those ancient ones from like 2005. Something about the chunky gray plastic and the ridiculous buttons made me think about how things change but somehow stay the same. Maya's password had Lucas in it, sure, but Jordan had been in my ear about how he'd seen Maya looking at me during lunch for weeks.

I called her. "Hey, I think I found something you might like."

"What?" She sounded genuinely excited.

"Trust me."

I showed up at her house with the retro cable box. "My dad was gonna toss it. Thought it was cool."

Maya laughed. That actual, genuine laugh. "You're literally the weirdest person I know."

"Is that good or bad?"

"Good," she said, and then softer, "really good."

I'm still not sure what happened with Lucas. Maybe he was ancient history like that cable box. Maybe Jordan was right for once in his life. Maybe I'd been a spy in my own crush story way too long, watching from the sidelines while the actual plot happened without me.

But Maya showed up at the shop again on Friday. "My Wi-Fi's acting up again," she said, grinning like she knew exactly what she was doing.

Some bull, huh?