Goldfish in the Orange Bowl

Maya's been a spy since October.

Not the cool kind - the desperate kind with a guilty Spotify habit and memorized cafeteria routes. She knows Jamie takes coffee with two sugars, walks past the mural third period Tuesdays, has a laugh like sunlight breaking through clouds.

Pathetic? Maybe. But Maya's fifteen, and apparently that's the prime age for spectacularly bad decisions.

Today she's wearing orange Doc Martens - a clearance-rack impulse buy that felt bold at 2 AM and ridiculous at 7 AM. Her mom said they looked like traffic cones. But they caught Jamie's eye in the hallway once, for three seconds, and Maya's been replaying it on loop since.

So here she is, in the AV club room after school, pretending she didn't deliberately show up twenty minutes early. She's aggressively untangling a cable that was already fine, anything to look busy and casual. Not like someone who has seventeen screenshots of Jamie's cryptic Instagram stories saved in a hidden album.

"Nice boots," Jamie says.

Maya nearly drops the cable. "Thanks! They're orange. Obviously. I mean - you can see that. I don't know why I said that."

Smooth. Truly an espionage mastermind.

Jamie's grinning now, leaning against the doorframe. "I've been meaning to ask you something."

Maya's heart does something genuinely concerning. "Yeah?"

"The spinach wrap at lunch -" Jamie starts, and Maya's stomach drops because she KNOWS, she had spinach in her teeth ALL of fourth period, this is it, her social death -

"You looked like you were enjoying it," Jamie finishes. "Never seen someone commit to spinach that hard."

Maya blinks. "I'm vegetarian. And the cafeteria options are bleak."

Jamie laughs - that sunlight laugh, up close - and something shifts in the room. "Hey, remember that goldfish we had in bio last year? The one that mysteriously disappeared?"

The goldfish. Maya's stomach does a different kind of drop.

"RIP Goldie," she says carefully.

"Yeah, RIP." Jamie's studying her now, intent. "Because I was wondering - did you really take him home over break? Or was that just what you told Mr. Henderson so he wouldn't think you killed him by overfeeding him again?"

Maya freezes. She hasn't told anyone what actually happened. How she brought it home in a leaky baggie, how it died two days later anyway because she loved it too much, how she buried it under the rosebush because she was too old to believe in fish heaven but too young to handle the truth.

"You knew?" she whispers.

"I didn't," Jamie says softly. "I guessed. You looked guilty every time someone mentioned him."

They look at each other.

"I was going to say I did the same thing in seventh grade," Jamie continues. "To a hamster. Named him Hamlet."

Maya starts laughing. "Hamlet. Of course."

"Shut up, I was twelve." Jamie's smiling too. "So, are you going to untangle that cable, or..."

"Or?"

"Or you want to get coffee? Two sugars?"

Maya's heart does that thing again. She's been spying for months, watching from the sidelines. But Jamie's been watching too.

The orange boots were the right choice.

"Coffee sounds good," she says.

And somewhere, under a rosebush, Goldie would be proud.