Cable Management & Other Disasters

I felt like a zombie. Actually, scratch that — zombies at least had the excuse of being undead. I was just fifteen and surviving on three hours of sleep and whatever was left in my pantry.

"You good, bro?" Marcus asked, popping another gummy vitamin like it was candy. "You look dead."

"Dude, those vitamins aren't gonna fix anything," I muttered, staring at the disaster that was my streaming setup. Cables everywhere — a rat king of HDMI, power cords, and ethernet that I'd been meaning to fix since forever.

Today was the day. My first real stream. Channel debut. No pressure or anything.

"That's bull," Marcus said, reading my mind. "You're gonna crush it. Who doesn't wanna watch some random sophomore play Minecraft badly?"

I laughed despite myself. Marcus had been my best friend since sixth grade, back when being cool meant having the newest iPhone and not knowing how to use it. Now we were freshmen, and somehow being cool meant pretending not to care about anything.

But I cared. I cared a lot.

"Alright," I said, finally untangling the main HDMI cable from the mess. "If I mess up, you're not allowed to ever speak to me again."

"Deal." Marcus grabbed his phone. "I'm totally posting your fail compilation to TikTok though. That's friendship non-negotiable."

The stream wasn't perfect. My audio was kinda messed up for the first ten minutes, and I definitely said "umm" way too much. But somewhere around the third round of getting destroyed by a zombie horde, something clicked. I forgot about being awkward. I forgot about who was watching.

I just... was.

And that felt like enough.

Later, scrolling through the chat logs, I saw my first follower count. Twelve people. Twelve actual humans who thought I was worth watching.

"See?" Marcus said, already halfway through my vitamin stash. "You were worried for nothing."

Maybe. Or maybe this was just the beginning of figuring out who I was supposed to be — cables, mess-ups, and all.