The Feed

Maya's vitamin stash sat next to her iPhone like a ritual offering. Biotin for hair growth, Vitamin D for mood (or so TikTok claimed), Vitamin C for... actually she'd forgotten why she started taking that one. At 15, she'd already mastered the art of performing wellness.

"Your hair looks sick, bestie!" someone commented on her latest post. Maya had spent forty minutes perfecting those waves, but online it just looked effortless. The irony wasn't lost on her.

Her sister Emma was away at college, leaving Maya with unexpected responsibility: her pet goldfish, Fin.

"He's basically immortal," Emma had said. "Just don't overfeed him."

Fin lived in a corner of Maya's room, swimming endless circles in his five-gallon tank. At first, Maya barely noticed him—just another thing to maintain between volleyball practice and curating her feed.

But one night, Maya caught Fin staring at her through the glass. Not moving. Just hovering. She found herself talking to him about things she couldn't post about. The pressure to be effortlessly perfect. The fear that everyone else had figured out something she hadn't.

"You know what's wild?" she told Fin. "I have 2,000 followers, but you're the only one who actually listens."

The next morning, Maya posted something different. A photo of Fin looking vaguely judgmental, captioned: "POV: your goldfish is your only real friend." No filters. No perfect lighting. Just a fish with serious side-eye.

Her phone blew up. Not with compliments, but with DMs: "Omg same," "My fish gets me too," "Finally, something real."

Two weeks later, Emma came home to find Maya and Fin having what looked like a genuine moment. Maya was showing him her phone, not posting—just watching.

"You know," Emma said, "goldfish only have three-second memories. But I think he likes you anyway."

"Actually," Maya said, "that's a myth. They remember way longer than that."

She'd looked it up. The internet had been wrong about something. Imagine that.

That night, Maya deleted half her vitamin supplements. She kept taking the ones that actually mattered, posted another unfiltered fish photo, and realized something: maybe growing up wasn't about becoming perfect. It was about becoming real—even if, like Fin, you sometimes had to swim in circles to figure out which way was forward.