Riddle in the Battery Low

Maya's iPhone was at 4%. The party thumped bass through the floorboards, but she'd been hiding on the rooftop for twenty minutes, nursing a flat orange soda and watching her screen flicker between apps.

Then she saw it—a cat crouched on the neighboring roof, staring at her like it knew something she didn't. Its eyes reflected the distant streetlights, glowing like tiny amber moons.

"What?" Maya whispered. "You got answers?"

The cat didn't move. Just kept watching, sphinx-like, with that ancient judging gaze that felt weirdly similar to how her mom looked at her when Maya said she was "fine."

Her phone buzzed one last time—group chat exploding without her. Someone posted a pic of her crush, Jordan, talking to Brianna. Maya's stomach did that thing it always did lately, like someone had tied it into complicated knots.

She needed her charging cable. It was downstairs in her bag, next to the speakers where everyone was dancing and existing confidently in their own skin while Maya was up here having an existential crisis with a neighborhood cat.

"You're just a cat," she told it. "You don't have to worry about who to sit with at lunch or why your crush likes Brianna's Instagram stories but never yours or—"

The cat stood, stretched, and padded to the edge of its roof, then leaped gracefully to hers. It approached slowly, like it was deciding whether she was worth its time, and finally settled beside her, close enough that its warmth pressed against her thigh.

Maya's phone died. The screen went black, and for the first time all night, she could actually breathe.

"Riddle me this," she whispered to the cat, scratching behind its ears the way her younger sister taught her. "What walks on four legs at the beginning of the night, two legs in the middle, and three legs when it's time to leave a party early because social battery is also a thing?"

The cat purred. It wasn't an answer, exactly, but it felt like one anyway.

Downstairs, someone shouted her name. Maya stood up, cat watching her go, and realized something: the riddle wasn't about becoming who everyone wanted. The riddle was figuring out who she actually was when nobody was watching.

She grabbed her cable on the way out. Jordan was still talking to Brianna, and that was okay. Some nights, the best company is a sphinx cat and a dead phone and the realization that you can leave whenever you want.