Electric Fish & Pyramid Schemes

The red Solo cup pyramid towered over Maya's kitchen counter—four levels of wobbly plastic architecture that represented everything wrong with junior year social climbing. Someone had probably spent twenty minutes constructing it while the rest of us pretended to care about Jackson's new pickup line.

Maya herself was nowhere to be found. That's how it worked when your best friend decided she was too cool for her old crew. One day you're sharing secrets and stolen gummy worms, the next she's floating in the stratosphere with the kids who parked their luxury cars diagonally across three spaces.

I should've left. The bass thrumming through the floorboards was giving me a headache, and somewhere a goldfish—some poor carnival prize—circled its bowl on the bookshelf, looking as miserable as I felt. Its fins were translucent amber in the party lights, mouth opening and closing like it had something important to say.

"You gonna finish that?" Some sophomore I'd never seen before pointed at my untouched soda.

I abandoned it near the fish. "All yours."

Then the front door opened, and every conversation in the room dropped like someone had pulled the plug on a stereo. Maya walked in with Lucas Chen—the Lucas Chen, whose older brother had bought actual gold chains for the homecoming football game—and her eyes met mine across the crowded room.

In that moment, something ancient and hurt in me crystallized. I wasn't mad. I wasn't even surprised. I was just done.

Outside, the sky cracked open—actual lightning, brilliant and instantaneous, illuminating the whole block through the bay windows. Someone shrieked. The power died, plunging us into darkness lit only by phone flashlights and distant thunder.

"Dude," someone laughed. "A sign from above."

I shouldered through the murmuring crowd, past the Solo cup pyramid that would probably never get knocked down, toward the door. Let Maya have her new orbit. I'd find my own gravity.

The goldfish watched me go, its secret still safe in its glass world.