The Bear At The Window

Maya practically sleepwalked through first period, feeling like a total zombie after staying up till 3AM doomscrolling through Luca's Instagram stories for the third time that night. Her phone battery was at 8%, her social battery was at negative 20%, and she was pretty sure her eyeliner was smudging into full raccoon mode. Typical Wednesday energy.

"You're literally deceased," Kayla whispered, sliding her a stolen iced coffee across the desk. Maya's designated person since kindergarten, ride-or-die, and currently the only person who knew about the whole Luca Situation™ — which was that Maya had been desperately lowkey spying on Luca's Spotify public playlists for weeks trying to figure out if they were flirting with her in chemistry or just being, like, a normal decent human being.

The Spotify surveillance had reached critical levels when Luca added "Your Song" to their public playlist, which Maya had immediately overanalyzed for three days straight until Kayla was like, "bestie, that's literally the most basic romantic gesture ever, it means nothing." Harsh but fair.

"My parents are making me go camping this weekend," Maya groaned, accepting the coffee like it was her lifeline. "It's gonna be me, my dad's terrible campfire cooking, and literally nothing else for 48 hours. I'll have to bear witness to his signature 'well-done' hot dogs that are basically charcoal."

The camping trip was exactly as mid as expected — mosquitoes, awkward silence, and Maya's dad asking if she'd met any "nice young people" at school while she stared into the fire and thought about how Luca had definitely looked at her during yesterday's lab partner rotation, right? Or was she just delulu?

Then came the bear incident.

Maya was sitting outside their camper at midnight, doomscrolling again because reception was somehow miraculously decent, when she heard the garbage bag rustle. She looked up, expecting a raccoon or something, and instead locked eyes with an actual literal bear.

The bear stared at her. She stared at the bear. Her phone was clutched in her hand like a weapon.

"This isn't real," she whispered.

The bear, who was literally living his best life and clearly unbothered, reached into their trash and pulled out a half-eaten bag of marshmallows.

"Those were for s'mores," Maya said, because her brain was currently buffering hard.

And in that ridiculous moment, standing in her pajamas while a bear ate their marshmallows, she realized something: she'd been so caught up in her head, so busy trying to decode every micro-interaction with Luca, so convinced she was doing everything wrong, that she'd forgotten how to just live in moments like this.

She snapped a picture. The bear looked at her phone, judgment evident in those beady eyes.

"Respect," she told him.

Monday morning, Luca approached her desk before the bell.

"I heard you saw a bear," they said, casual-like, but their eyes were doing that thing where they were maybe interested?

"He ate our marshmallalls," Maya said. "Total disrespect."

Luca laughed, and it was this real, actual laugh, not polite laughter.

"That's iconic," they said. "I'm Luca, by the way. Like, properly?"

"Maya," she said. "And yeah, it was pretty iconic."

She didn't know if this was anything yet. But for the first time in months, she wasn't spying through Spotify or overanalyzing Instagram stories. She was just here, in this moment, fresh from an encounter with a marshmallow-stealing bear, finally awake from her zombie state of perpetual overthinking.

Sometimes you literally need a bear to remind you how to be a person again.