Goldfish Mourning

I was running on three hours of sleep and a venti cold brew, basically functioning at 50 percent zombie capacity. My hair looked like a bird's nest—split ends fraying in every direction because I'd forgotten to brush it for three days straight.

Principal Chen's voice droned on about midterms, but my brain was stuck on something way more important.

Fin. My goldfish. The one constant in my chaotic sophomore year.

He'd been floating sideways since yesterday, and I couldn't deal. Not when I was already failing geometry, my crush hadn't texted back in 47 hours, and my mom kept asking if I'd "thought about colleges yet" like I wasn't barely keeping it together.

"You okay?" whispered Jasmine from the seat next to me. She had those perfect beach waves that somehow looked effortless even though I knew she spent twenty minutes on them every morning.

"Fine," I lied. "Just tired."

Her face softened. "Same. I stayed up until 2 AM finishing that English essay."

The bell finally rang, and we shuffled into the hallway—that middle school bull ride of shoving bodies and awkward collisions. Someone slammed into my shoulder, and I nearly face-planted into the lockers.

"Watch it," snapped Kyle, the same guy who'd made my life miserable in seventh grade because he'd decided my name sounded like a hamburger order. Some people never grew up.

"Whatever," I muttered, but my hands were shaking.

Because here's the thing about grief: it doesn't care if it's "just a fish." Fin had been there through everything. My parents' divorce. The time I cut my own bangs and looked like a disaster for three weeks. When I got braces and couldn't eat popcorn at movies.

He was my witness.

That afternoon, I buried him in the backyard next to the rosebushes. My little brother watched, wide-eyed.

"Are you crying?" he asked. "It's a fish, Maya."

"I know," I said, but the tears kept coming anyway.

Sometimes growing up means letting yourself feel the small things, because they're never really small at all. They're just practice for the bigger stuff waiting around the corner.