Going Live Eventually

Alex stared at their reflection, fingers tangled in what used to be a perfectly fine mop of brown hair. Now it was a patchy disaster—half bleach-blonde, half still brown, with a suspicious orange tint in the middle.

"You were supposed to leave the dye in for THIRTY minutes, not forty-five," Alex muttered. The bathroom mirror showed the undeniable evidence of a 3 AM decision gone wrong.

In twelve hours, Alex would be going live for the first time on StreamVerse. The gaming channel they'd been quietly building for months was finally hitting milestone numbers, and the celebratory stream was supposed to be professional. Put-together. Not... this.

Outside the bathroom, Luna the family's husky-mix let out a dramatic whine, then something crashed.

Alex rushed out to find their streaming setup in chaos. The expensive HDMI cable dangled from the desk, while Luna sat on the floor, innocently chewing on their gaming headset.

"You've got to be kidding me."

Alex gently extracted the foam-covered ear cup from Luna's jaw. The dog flopped onto her back, tail thumping, entirely unbothered. This was fine. Everything was fine. They just needed to figure out how to fix both their hair and their career before 3 PM.

The cable, now disconnected, lay coiled like a defeated snake. Alex reconnected everything. The monitor flickered, then died.

Great.

Two hours of YouTube tutorials later, Alex sat back at the desk, hair under a beanie, cables finally behaving, headset miraculously functional. Luna slept in a patch of sunlight.

The stream started in an hour.

Alex's phone buzzed.

brooklyn: u ready??

jaz: SO hyped!!

tyrell: gonna be fire 🔥

Alex stared at the messages, then at the mirror, then at Luna, who'd wandered over and rested her chin on Alex's knee.

"Fine," Alex said. "Fine."

They pulled off the beanie.

The hair was still a disaster. Uneven, patchy, ridiculous.

Alex grabbed their phone, snapped a mirror selfie with the mess visible, captioned it "me dying inside before the big stream lmao," and sent it to the group chat.

Three seconds later:

jaz: DUDE your hair?? 😂

brooklyn: LMAOOO that's ICONIC

tyrell: no way you're actually going on stream like that?? legendary behavior

Alex looked at the photo again. The panic had dissolved into something else. Not confidence, exactly, but... acceptance? The hair would grow out. The cables were working. The dog was being weirdly supportive.

Maybe being a mess on stream wasn't the worst thing. Maybe it was just real.

"Alright Luna," Alex said. "Time to be internet famous."

The dog sneezed.

Alex hit "GO LIVE."

Perfect.