The Ethernet Lifeline

My life felt like it was buffering at 99% — stuck, loading, never quite finishing.

I'd spent three years running from who I actually was. sophomore year had barely started, and I was already exhausted from the performance. The curated outfits, the practiced laugh, the way I twisted my straightened hair into perfect Instagram-worthy waves that took forty-five minutes every morning. All of it — a carefully constructed lie.

"You should try curling it differently," Maya had said at lunch, inspecting my hair like it was a science project. "It would look so much better with your face shape."

I'd nodded. I'd always nodded.

The thing was, my hair wasn't naturally wavy. It wasn't naturally straight either. It was somewhere in between — thick, unruly, capable of frizzing at the slightest hint of humidity. I'd been chemically treating it since seventh grade, when someone had called it "poodle-like" in the locker room.

That night, I sat on my bedroom floor staring at the mess of cables behind my desk. Our WiFi had been acting up all week, and I'd finally decided to run an ethernet cable directly from the router in the hallway. Dad had fished this ancient yellow cable out of the garage — thick, clumsy, ugly as sin.

"You sure about this?" he'd asked. "It's gonna look tacky running across the floor."

"I don't care how it looks," I'd said, and realized I meant it.

I plugged it in, and my internet instantly stabilized. A notification popped up: ELISE_WANTS_TO_FACE — someone I hadn't spoken to since middle school, before I started performing. Before I started running.

We talked until 3 AM. About nothing and everything. And when I sent her a photo from sixth grade — me, gap-toothed, hair in an accidental halo of frizz, holding a science fair ribbon — she replied: "I forgot how awesome your hair actually was."

Something in my chest unlocked.

The next day at school, I walked past Maya and her posse without stopping. I let my hair do whatever it wanted. When someone asked if I was having a "bad hair day," I shrugged.

"Nah," I said. "Just a regular one."

And for the first time in years, I wasn't running anymore.