Storm Season

The summer before sophomore year, Maya's mom got her the gig: pet-sitting for the Hendersons' zoo while they were in Cabo. Two hundred bucks for five days. Easy money, she'd thought.

She should've known better.

On night three, the weather app turned an angry shade of purple. Severe thunderstorm warning. Maya was already regretting everything — especially her decision to binge-watch Stranger Things instead of doing a proper check on the animals.

The Hendersons' dog, Buster, was basically a golden retriever crossed with a sentient rug. He spent 23 hours a day horizontal. But when the first crack of lightning split the sky, Buster went full feral. He scrambled up from his coma, nails clicking against the hardwood in a panic spiral.

Then came the problem: their cat, Luna, who hated everyone and everything, particularly Buster, and especially Maya, the intruder in her kingdom.

"Dude, chill," Maya whispered, trying to herd Buster toward the laundry room where he usually slept. But the dog was having none of it. Another lightning flash turned the kitchen strobe-light bright, and Buster bolted — straight toward the stairs where Luna perched like a gargoyle on the railing.

What happened next was exactly the kind of chaotic energy Maya had been trying to avoid all summer. Buster launched himself at Luna. Luna, surprisingly, didn't bail. Instead, she ducked under the railing and pressed herself flat against the wall, and Buster tumbled past her down the stairs like a clumsy potato.

Maya raced down after him, heart hammering, fully prepared to find a broken dog and a vet bill that would bankrupt her before she even got her license.

Instead, she found something stranger: Buster at the bottom of the stairs, unhurt but trembling, and Luna curled up beside him, purring like a broken engine. The storm raged outside, lightning flashing through the windows every few seconds, but down there in the dim hallway, these two mortal enemies were just two scared creatures finding comfort in each other.

Maya sat down on the bottom step, breathing hard, and it hit her like actual lightning: she'd spent the whole summer worrying about starting high school, about losing her middle school friend group, about whether her hair looked right, about being "cringe" — all the stuff that felt like life-or-death but wasn't.

Maybe, like Luna and Buster, the people she thought were her enemies weren't actually. Maybe sophomore year wouldn't be the disaster she'd built up in her head. Maybe she could just figure it out, one scary moment at a time.

"You guys are weird," she said, smiling as Luna blinked slowly at her.

Buster rested his head on her foot. Outside, the storm kept raging, but for the first time all summer, Maya didn't feel like she was waiting for something bad to happen.

She texted her mom: "Everything's fine. Actually, it's kind of good."