Cable Connection

Maya hated track practice, especially when Coach Williams made them do sprints in the humidity. Her lungs burned as she rounded the curve, hair plastered to her forehead, every muscle screaming. But she kept running, because her dad said sports looked good on college applications and because at least it gave her an excuse to avoid the group chat blowing up her phone.

"Pick it up, Rivera! Coach yelled. "You've got lightning in those legs somewhere!"

She didn't feel lightning. She felt like a potato.

Later, stuck in her room while the cable guy worked in the living room, Maya's phone buzzed. Her friend Bri had posted a TikTok about someone "spying" on their crush through a mutual friend's Snapchat story, and now everyone was debating if it was cute or creepy. Maya watched the comments flood in—so fake deep, so performative—and felt that familiar twist in her chest. Like she was watching everyone else live actual lives from behind glass.

"Hey, can you check if the Wi-Fi works?" the cable guy called from downstairs.

Maya sighed and opened her laptop. The connection bars filled in instantly, and suddenly everything hit her at once: the crushing weight of expectations, the way she performed normalcy for her parents, the careful curation of her own personality, the constant surveillance and judgment of high school social life. She'd been spying on herself for years, monitoring every move like she needed approval from some invisible audience.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, then started typing. A message to Bri: "this is stupid. let's just hang out tomorrow. no phones."

Send.

She waited for the panic to set in, for the overthinking, the what-ifs. But instead, something else rose in her chest—lightning fast, electric, real. For the first time in forever, she didn't want to run away from herself.