The 3 AM Goldfish Protocol

Maya's hair had achieved maximum chaos—way past "artfully messy" and straight into "electrocuted raccoon" territory. Not that she cared, because it was 3 AM and she was deep in the rabbit hole.

She was currently executing what she and her bestie Priya called The Goldfish Protocol: stalk someone's social media until you found something from three years ago, because goldfish supposedly have no memory and neither should you, theoretically, after seeing your crush's eighth-grade posts.

"You are literally a zombie," Priya had texted an hour ago before passing out. "Go to sleeeepp."

But no. Maya was a spy now. A highly trained operative whose mission was determining whether Jake from chem class was actually boyfriend material or just had good hair. (Answer: both. His hair was objectively perfect, which was either extremely hot or extremely suspicious.)

Her parents' ancient cable package was playing some weird infomercial in the background because apparently sleep was for people who didn't need to know whether Jake had liked exactly forty-three of her posts since October. (He had. She'd made a spreadsheet. She was fine. Everything was fine.)

Then she found it. Jake's 2019 Instagram bio: "Professional zombie slayer. FPS god. Dm to join the squad."

Maya literally laughed out loud. A zombie slayer. This dorky, beautiful-haired boy had once written "professional zombie slayer" where everyone could see it and thought he was cool.

And the weirdest part? She didn't think it was cringe. She thought it was kind of... endearing. Like, maybe everyone had an awkward phase where they didn't know who they were yet. Maybe you were supposed to be a little embarrassing before you figured it out.

Her actual goldfish, Bubbles, stared at her from his tank with maximum judgment.

"Don't look at me like that," she told him. "At least I'm not the one swimming in my own toilet."

Maya closed her laptop. The Goldfish Protocol was complete. Jake had been a weird gaming kid in middle school. Jake had once posted a video of himself doing a dramatic reading of a zombie movie script while wearing a cape. Jake was human.

And maybe, just maybe, Maya could be human too. Even with her chaotic raccoon hair and her elaborate social espionage and her tendency to overthink everything into spreadsheets.

She fell asleep with a smile on her face. Tomorrow she'd talk to Jake. Like, actually talk. Not spy. Not overanalyze. Just talk.

(Maya would definitely overanalyze it later. But that was tomorrow Maya's problem.)