Orange Goldfish Summer

The goldfish was supposed to be easy. That's what Jessica said when she dumped the bowl on my bed like it was a pair of borrowed sneakers. Just feed it. How hard could it be? But here I was, three days later, watching this orange speck float at the top of the water like it was questioning all its life choices.

"You're overthinking it," Maya said from where she was sprawled across my floor, painting her toenails the exact shade of black she'd been obsessed with since freshman year. "It's a fish. Not a deep philosophical inquiry."

Easy for her to say. Her biggest responsibility was keeping her vegan streak alive for moral superiority points. Meanwhile, my mom had me on this new vitamin regimen because apparently my aura was looking "a bit faded" lately. I'd been choking down these horse pills that smelled like pine cones and existential dread.

The fish—I'd named it Bear because everything tiny and helpless needed a tough name, okay?—was supposed to be temporary. Jessica had gone to camp for the summer like some kind of optimistic forest creature, leaving me with her aquatic legacy and a strange sense of abandonment. We'd been friends since seventh grade, when we both got detention for accidentally starting a small fire in the chem lab. That was the kind of friendship that felt permanent, unbreakable. But lately she'd been texting less, her messages growing shorter like someone was gradually turning down the volume on our friendship.

"She's just busy," Maya said, like she could read the panic in my silence. "Camp is like, literally designed for making you forget about everyone back home. It's not personal."

But it felt personal. It felt like she was moving on, upgrading her social circle to people who said things like "no cap" unironically and owned camping equipment. Meanwhile I was here, guardianship of a goldfish that might be dying, trying to decide if I should tell Jessica or just replace it with a lookalike from the pet store. That's what a good friend would do, right? Or would that be weirdly deceptive?

Bear did a weird little flip and suddenly sank to the bottom, looking oddly energetic.

"Whoa," Maya sat up. "Was that a resurrection or what?"

Maybe it wasn't dying. Maybe it was just dramatic, like the rest of us.

My phone buzzed. A photo from Jessica: sunset orange sky over a lake, her face squished between two people I didn't know. Caption: "Wish you were here!"

The words hit different than I expected. Not like she was forgetting me, but like she was actually waiting for me to be part of it too. The fish did another spin, remarkably alive for something I'd mentally eulogized three times this morning.

"She wants me to visit," I realized out loud. Like maybe the camp counselor thing wasn't so ridiculous. Like maybe friendship wasn't about staying perfectly preserved in amber, but about growing into people who kept choosing each other even when things changed.

"So go," Maya said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. "Bring the fish. I'm sure they have a lake or whatever."

I looked at Bear, doing surprisingly enthusiastic laps around his tiny kingdom. Maybe this whole summer—the vitamins, the fish-sitting, the growing anxiety that everything was permanently shifting—wasn't about losing anything. Maybe it was just about learning how to bear the changes without letting them break you.

"Okay," I said. "I'm going."

And for the first time all week, the orange glow of sunset didn't feel like an ending. It felt like something beginning.