Goldfish & The End of World

Maya's phone died at 11:47 PM on a Friday. That's when the zombie apocalypse started — at least, that's what it felt like when she couldn't scroll through Instagram for the tenth time that hour.

The cable to her charger had frayed somewhere around the time she stopped caring about being popular, which was approximately never. Being fourteen was basically a full-time job with unpaid overtime.

"My goldfish gets more likes than me," she muttered to her ceiling, where glow-in-the-dark stars still stubbornly refused to actually glow. They were like the middle school version of cool — all promise, zero delivery.

Her phone buzzed one last time, ghost battery style. The notification said: Lightning storm tonight. Stay inside.

"Great," Maya said. "Because my social life wasn't already dead enough."

Water leaked through her window frame, which had been patched with duct tape and hope. The drops hit her desk where her science fair project sat — something about plant growth that she'd abandoned weeks ago when she realized nobody actually cared about science fair winners unless they were building robots or curing diseases.

She watched the storm through rain-streaked glass. Lightning flashed purple, then white, painting her room in sudden technicolor. For a second, she felt something that wasn't boredom or worry about whether Tyler had noticed her new haircut (he hadn't).

It was like being awake.

Her little brother's voice came through the door: "Maya? The power's out. Can we play that board game?"

She almost said no. Almost kept being the too-cool-for-everything older sister who barely left her room except for school and mandatory family dinners. But then she remembered her phone was dead anyway, and there was literally nothing else to do except feel sorry for herself.

"Sure," she said, surprising herself. "But I'm totally going to crush you."

He grinned in the doorway, holding a battered box of Monopoly. "You say that every time. And then I always win."

"That's because you're like, a zombie or something. You never get tired."

"Maybe you're just bad at strategy."

"Maybe. Or maybe I'm letting you win because I'm a nice older sister."

They played at the flashlight beam's angle until their mom brought hot cocoa, and for a while Maya forgot about Tyler and her frayed charging cable and the fact that her goldfish actually did have more followers than she did. The storm raged outside, but inside, everything was weirdly okay.

Sometimes the apocalypse was exactly what you needed.