The Blue Hair Incident

Maya stared at her reflection, finger hovering over her iPhone screen. The selfie timer counted down: 3, 2, 1.

The flash caught the disastrous truth—her hair, supposed to be a cool mermaid teal, had turned into something closer to pond algae green. A failed TikTok experiment gone wrong.

"Are you seriously posting that?" Chloe asked, looking up from her own phone where she was probably lurking on her ex's new girlfriend's profile. They'd been best friends since seventh grade, but lately something felt off. Like Chloe was constantly performing for an audience Maya couldn't see.

"No way," Maya groaned, deleting the photo. "I look like a wet highlighter."

"Let me fix it," Chloe said, already grabbing the hair dye remover from Maya's desk. "My cousin does this all the time. It's literally fine."

Twenty minutes and one very messy bathroom later, Maya's hair was a concerning shade of pink-orange. They sat on the edge of the bathtub, dye remover fuming around them, both laughing so hard Maya's ribs hurt.

"Okay but imagine if this happened before homecoming," Chloe wiped tears from her eyes. "You'd be serving looks, honestly."

"Serving disaster realness," Maya corrected.

Her phone buzzed. A notification from Alex—the guy she'd been lowkey talking to for weeks. *You coming to Jordan's party tonight?*

Chloe noticed. "Alex? Finally."

"I don't think I can go," Maya said, gesturing at her hair. "I literally can't."

"So?" Chloe stood up, reaching for her phone. "Watch this."

She posted the bathroom selfie on Maya's story with the caption: *mermaidcore but make it chaos*.

Within minutes, Maya's iPhone was blowing up. People she barely knew were reacting. Alex replied: *that's actually sick. you should always have pink hair*.

"See?" Chloe grinned. "You're overthinking everything. You always do."

Something about the moment—Chloe's genuine excitement, the way she'd dropped her cool-girl aesthetic to help fix a mistake—made Maya realize they'd been drifting not because Chloe had changed, but because Maya had stopped being real with her.

"Thanks," Maya said, meaning it. "For everything."

"Obviously," Chloe replied, already filming a TikTok. "Now let's go to that party. You're literally iconic."