Spinach Secrets & Fox-Eared Lies

The fox ears looked ridiculous, and I knew it. But Brianna wore them to school yesterday and suddenly half the sophomore class was doing it. So there I was, standing in front of my mirror, adjusting these cheap orange faux-fur things on my head, practicing my casual lean.

My cat, Mochi, watched from my bed like she was personally disappointed in my life choices.

"Shut up, you don't get it," I told her. "It's about the VIBE."

Mochi blinked slowly.

The thing was, I wasn't even friends with Brianna's squad. I'd been hanging with Maya and Sam since seventh grade, doing our own weird thing, staying far away from the whole aesthetic-of-the-week cycle. But something shifted this year. Maya joined cheer. Sam got deep into gaming and basically lived on Discord. And me? I was just floating, untethered, desperate for something to grab onto.

So I grabbed onto fox ears.

"You're actually wearing those," Maya said when I met her at lunch, her voice flat. "Like, unironically."

"It's just a thing," I said, defensive immediately. "Everyone's doing it."

"Not everyone." She pushed her tray away. "Since when do you care what everyone's doing?"

Since my friends stopped needing me, apparently.

Later, trying to make conversation with Sam, I mentioned I'd started cooking new recipes. "Made this spinach lasagna last night. Actually kind of proud of it."

"Wait since when do you cook?" He laughed, but not meanly. "Last I checked, your culinary expertise was microwaving pizza rolls."

"People change, Sam."

"Yeah but like—you?" His eyes went back to his phone. "Since when?"

The question hit harder than he meant it to.

That night, I sat on my kitchen floor, crying into a container of spinach because I'd tried to make that lasagna again to prove something and burned it. Mochi curled up next to me, purring like she understood everything wrong with my life.

"I'm being stupid," I told her. "I'm literally crying over spinach and fox ears."

My phone buzzed. Maya.

*Can you come over? Sam too. I think we need to talk.*

I showed up still wearing the stupid ears, expecting an intervention about how weird I was acting. Instead, Maya handed me a controller.

"We were gonna invite you to game night earlier," she said, not looking at me. "But we thought you were too busy being, like, aesthetic now."

"I wasn't—I'm not—"

"We miss you," Sam said quietly. "The actual you. Not whoever you're trying to be."

Maya laughed suddenly. "Also those ears are tragic and you need to take them off immediately."

I pulled them off, and my hair was flat from being pinned up all day, and I probably looked terrible. But when we started playing Mario Kart and I absolutely crushed them at Rainbow Road, I felt like myself again.

"So," Maya said later, when we were sitting on her roof eating surprise spinach pizza from that place downtown because I'd insisted. "Are we good?"

"Yeah," I said, and Mochi would've been proud of how much my eyes weren't disappointed in me anymore. "We're good."