The Ethernet Protocol

Maya thought she knew everything about Jamie—her best friend since seventh grade, the person she'd shared passwords with, watched Netflix with until 3 AM, the one who'd held her hair back that time behind the gym. But people have layers, like those confusing onions everyone talked about in Shrek, and Maya was about to discover one she never expected.

It started with the cable. The ethernet cable, specifically—the one Maya kept tripping over in her bedroom because her WiFi was trash again. Her dad, in his infinite wisdom, had strung it from the router in the hallway directly into her room, creating a death trap across the carpet. But when Jamie came over for their usual Friday hang, something shifted. Jamie kept glancing at the cable like it was judging her. Then Maya noticed it: Jamie's phone, angled weirdly, screen barely visible, but unmistakably recording.

"Are you... spying on me?" Maya asked, half-joking, but her stomach did that thing it did when she forgot to study for a bio test.

Jamie's face flushed the color of those smoothies they pretended were healthy. "What? No. I was just—"

"You were totally recording me."

"Okay, FINE," Jamie burst out. "But it's not what you think."

Turns out, Jamie had been Maya's unofficial brand manager for six months, running a TikTok account called @maya_daily where she posted all of Maya's little moments—the way she sang off-key to Taylor Swift, her disastrous attempts at cooking, that time she got spinach stuck in her teeth at lunch and didn't realize until fifth period. The account had 40K followers. People loved Maya's authenticity, whatever that meant. "Authenticity" apparently included having spinach in your teeth and not knowing until someone finally told you.

"You turned me into a meme," Maya said, and she didn't know whether to laugh or cry or both.

"You're HAPPY content, Maya! People love you because you're just... you. Unfiltered. It's not like those fake Instagram girls everything."

Maya stared at her friend—this person who'd been documenting her most unflattering moments for strangers on the internet. But weirdly, she wasn't mad. Because Jamie was right: Maya was messy and awkward and sometimes had food in her teeth, and that was exactly what made her real.

"Fine," Maya said, grabbing Jamie's phone. "But I'm in charge of the captions from now on. And you're deleting that spinach video."

"Deal," Jamie grinned. "But you have to admit—it went viral."

"Get out of my house."

"Love you too."

And just like that, they were back to normal—except now Maya was in on the joke, which somehow made it funnier. Some friends were worth keeping, even if they occasionally exposed your entire existence to the internet without permission. Especially then.