The Cable That Connected Us

I was rotting in my bedroom all summer when Jake showed up with a tangled mess of ethernet cable. 'Your WiFi's trash,' he said, dropping onto my floor like it was his living room. Typical Jake energy—zero chill, always in motion.

'My parents cancelled the internet,' I muttered, scrolling through my phone's dwindling data plan. Jake's eyes widened. 'That's actually criminal.' He started untangling the cable like his life depended on it. 'I can hook you up to my neighbor's network. They never change the password.'

Something twisted in my chest. Jake was always doing stuff like this—bending rules, living life without a filter. Meanwhile I was overthinking everything, paralyzed by the fear of being perceived.

'Wait,' I said. 'Since when are you a tech wizard?' He shrugged, but his ears turned pink. 'I've been... kinda spying on their network usage.' He wouldn't meet my eyes. 'Just to see if they'd notice.'

My stomach did this weird flip. 'You've been WHAT?' Jake finally looked up, and I saw it—the same terrified expression I'd been wearing in the mirror for months. 'I was curious, okay? I wanted to know how they lived.' His voice cracked. 'Their family seems so... normal.'

Oh.

I sat down beside him on the floor. For months, I'd been convinced Jake had everything figured out. But here he was, spying on some random family through their cable connection, desperate to understand what normal looked like.

'My parents are getting divorced,' I said finally. The words fell out like I'd been waiting forever to say them. 'That's why they cancelled the internet. Money stuff.' Jake's jaw dropped.

'Bro. Why didn't you tell me?'

'I didn't want you to look at me like that.' Like I was broken. Like I needed fixing.

Jake sat with that for a second. Then he held up the cable. 'This connection is trash anyway.' He grinned, but it was softer this time. 'Wanna just hang out instead?'

We spent the rest of the afternoon not talking about anything important, but somehow talking about everything. The cable lay abandoned on my floor, and for the first time all summer, I didn't feel so alone.