The Cat Who Fixed Everything

Maya's phone buzzed for the third time in sixty seconds. Brandon was wondering where she was. The party started in twenty minutes, and she was supposed to be there NOW.

Her hair was supposed to be perfect—she'd spent forty minutes with the curling iron, trying to achieve that effortless-looking-but-actually-totally-effortful wave that all the popular girls at Northwood High seemed to nail without trying. Maya had been trying since seventh grade.

Then Mittens, her obese orange tabby cat, decided NOW was the time to stage a dramatic protest against being ignored. He leaped from the dresser directly onto her head, knocking her backward into her vanity chair. The curling iron crashed to the tile. Her hair? Nowhere near perfect anymore. It was somewhere between "just woke up" and "survived a natural disaster."

Her iPhone, which had been livestreaming her breakdown to the group chat, was now lying screen-down on the floor, probably cracked.

"You have got to be KIDDING me," Maya yelled, but Mittens was already gone, sprinting down the hallway like he'd just committed the crime of the century—which, in Maya's world, he basically had.

She was supposed to be running out the door. Instead, she was running a brush through her catastrophe of hair, watching in the mirror as her eyes welled up. Why was she even going? Brandon would be there with his perfect smile and his perfect friends, and she'd spend the whole time feeling like she was failing some test she didn't even know she was taking.

Her phone lit up with a new notification: Brandon: "no pressure if u can't make it lol but hope u can come :)"

Maya stared at herself in the mirror. Her hair was wild. Her eyeliner was smudged from the cat incident. She looked like she'd been through something.

And she realized—that was exactly it. She HAD been through something. She was always going through something. Who was she trying to fool with this whole effortless vibe anyway?

She grabbed her phone, threw on her beat-up Converse, and didn't bother with the hair anymore.

When she walked into Tyler's basement twenty minutes late, Brandon looked up from the couch and grinned. "Hey! You made it."

"Yeah," Maya said, touching her messy hair self-consciously. "Sorry I'm late. My cat attacked me with my own curling iron."

Brandon laughed—an actual laugh, not the polite one. "That's honestly the most epic excuse I've ever heard. Your hair looks sick though."

"Really?"

"Yeah. It's way better than when everyone tries to look all perfect and stuff."

Maya felt something shift in her chest. Maybe disaster was just authenticity waiting to happen.