The Goldfish Graveyard Shift

The night my social life officially died, I was wearing a bear costume.

It was homecoming week, and my older sister Jade—senior, popular, perfect—had talked me into being the mascot. The polyester suit smelled like junior high gym class, and inside the giant foam head, my glasses kept fogging up.

"You need to branch out, Leo," she'd said. "Stop being such a mystery vitamin—weird, obscure, nobody knows what you actually do."

She meant well, probably. But now I was stuck at the pre-game bonfire, sweating through a mascot costume while she laughed with her friends by the fire pit. Someone had rigged up a speaker system with a sketchy extension cable that kept threatening to yank loose.

Then everything went sideways. Literally.

Some guy—maybe a sophomore, I couldn't tell through the mesh eyes—shoved me hard. The bear head spun. My glasses caught on the foam, tore off, and skittered across the ground. Before I could chase them, *crunch.*

My glasses. Dead. And I was legally blind without them.

I stumbled toward what I thought was the parking lot, but my depth perception was wrecked. I tripped over something plastic—a solo cup?—and ended up behind the concession stand, alone, humiliated, basically crying inside a bear suit.

That's when Sofia found me.

I'd had a crush on her since seventh period algebra, where she always sat in the back corner, doodling mushrooms on her assignments while somehow still getting A's. Everyone said she was weird. Everyone was right, and everyone was wrong.

"Your fish is floating," she said.

I blinked through the mesh. "What?"

She held up a plastic bag. Water sloshed inside. A tiny goldfish—dull orange, nothing special—drifted near the surface, belly-up.

"I won him at the ring toss," she said, sitting beside me in the dirt. "He lasted twenty minutes. Pretty sure he was dead before they even bagged him."

She pulled a gummy vitamin from her pocket—the kind shaped like cartoon bears, ironically enough—and offered it to me through the bear's mouth opening.

"Want this? My mom thinks they're candy. I think they taste like depression and artificial orange."

I took it. We sat there while the bonfire crackled behind us, sharing a supplement that wasn't candy while mourning a fish that had barely lived, while I wore a costume that wasn't mine.

"You know what's weird?" Sofia said. "Nobody actually sees the mascot. They just see the bear. That's kind of freeing, right?"

Maybe it was the delirium. Maybe it was the foggy-bear-head induced oxygen deprivation. But I reached through the neck opening and found her hand. Her fingers were cold. The ground was cold. Everything was perfect.

Later, we gave the goldfish a proper burial behind the tennis courts. I never did find my glasses that night.

But I did find something better.

The next day, Jade asked how it went. I told her I'd made a friend.

"Finally branching out?" she asked.

"Something like that," I said, pocketing my phone where Sofia's new contact waited.

Sometimes you have to wear a ridiculous costume to find your way out of one. Sometimes a dead goldfish is the best wingman you'll ever have. And sometimes you don't need glasses to see what's been right in front of you the whole time.