The Catfish Incident

Maya's phone buzzed at 2 AM. *You up?* — text from Alex, her best friend since seventh grade, now suddenly too cool for biology class but somehow not too cool to text her at ridiculous hours.

Maya stared at the ceiling, thumb hovering. They'd been drifting apart since Alex joined varsity and started sitting with the popular crowd at lunch. The same crowd that had spent the last three weeks making "meow" sounds whenever Maya walked past, thanks to that one — totally accidental — cat video Maya posted on TikTok that somehow went viral at school.

*Yeah. What's up?*

*Think I messed up. Can you come over?*

Maya snuck out the window because that's what you do when you're fifteen and your friend needs you, even if said friend has been kinda ghosting you for a month. Alex's house was three blocks away. The family dog — a golden retriever named Buddy who remembered Maya from better times — didn't even bark as she slipped through the back door.

Alex was sitting on their bedroom floor, laptop open, looking like they'd been crying.

"I've been talking to someone online," Alex said, voice shaking. "From North. They're supposed to meet me tomorrow at the mall."

"That's... good?"

"They sent a picture. I reverse-image searched it."

Maya looked. The photo was ripped straight from some influencer's Instagram with 50K followers. "Oh."

"I'm so stupid," Alex said, wiping their eyes. "I thought they actually liked me. Thought we had this connection —"

"Hey." Maya sat down beside them. "You're not stupid. People get catfished all the time. Literally everyone in our grade has at least one story."

Alex let out this sad laugh. "Even you?"

"Especially me," Maya said, because why lie. "Last summer? That guy from camp who turned out to be twelve? We don't talk about that."

They sat there for a minute, Buddy resting his chin on Alex's knee like the emotional support animal he was born to be.

"I've been a terrible friend," Alex said suddenly. "I'm sorry. About lunch. About the cat video thing. I just — I wanted to fit in, and I thought acting like everyone else would help, but it just made me miserable."

Maya thought about how she'd felt eating alone for weeks. Then she thought about how Alex was currently crying on their bedroom floor because someone online had broken their heart.

"Yeah, you kinda were," Maya said. "But you're here now. And I'm here. And we're going to figure this out."

Alex nodded. "So what do I do about tomorrow?"

"Block them," Maya said firmly. "Then we go to the mall anyway. We get boba. We make terrible fashion choices at Forever 21. We take the world's most awkward selfies and post them intentionally."

"Intentionally bad selfies?"

"Lean into it, Alex. Own the cringe."

Alex laughed — real this time. "You're the only person who gets it."

"That's the whole point of best friends," Maya said, punching their shoulder. "Now let me sleep over because I did NOT sneak out at 2 AM for nothing."

Buddy wagged his tail like he approved this plan.

Some things change. Some things don't. But maybe — just maybe — they'd figure out the rest together.