Fox Fire Friday

The bonfire crackled, sending sparks toward a sky full of stars. Everyone from school was there — the first real party of freshman year — and I was hiding behind a tree, hyperventilating.

"You okay?" asked Tyler, whose last name literally is Butler but everyone calls him "the Bull" because he's stubborn as hell and built like a refrigerator.

I nodded, but my hand went to my hair anyway. Just two days ago, I'd finally chopped it all off. No more waist-length brown curtains. Now it was a pixie cut, dyed this electric blue that made my heart race every time I caught my reflection.

"You look badass," Tyler said, like he could read my mind. "Like, actually intimidating. In a good way."

Something moved in the woods behind him. A flash of russet fur, pointed ears, a long snout. A fox — an actual fox — stepped into the firelight, regarded us with amber eyes, then vanished.

My iPhone was in my hand before I could think about it. I'd been documenting everything lately, building this online persona who was confident and bold and everything I wasn't. But this? This felt too rare, too perfect, to filter and caption and perform for an audience.

"Did you get it?" Tyler asked.

"No." I pocketed my phone. "Some things aren't for the internet."

We walked back to the fire together. Someone started playing music. People were dancing. And for the first time in my life, I didn't scan the perimeter for an escape route. I didn't worry about who was staring at my hair or whispering about the girl who'd finally stopped being invisible.

The fox had been there and gone in seconds, but it left something behind. This feeling in my chest — sharp and bright and wild.

"You coming?" Tyler called back.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm coming."

And I did. Straight into the firelight, into the noise, into whatever happened next. The blue hair, the secret fox, the Bull who wasn't really bullheaded at all — they were all pieces of something bigger. A story I was just starting to write. A person I was finally becoming.