The Goldfish Summer

The moment I dyed my hair midnight blue, my mom practically had a stroke. "You look like a smurf on steroids," she said, but honestly? That was kind of the point. Junior year was about reinvention, about proving I wasn't the same girl who'd spent freshman year getting called library rat.

Then my goldfish died. I know, tragic, right? But Cornelius had been with me since sixth grade, through braces and bad haircuts and that time I tried to learn TikTok dances and accidentally face-planted in front of everyone. So when I found him floating belly-up, I did what any emotionally stable teenager would do — I called Maya.

Maya, who'd been my best friend since we bonded over stolen cafeteria pudding in third grade. Maya, who now spent her weekends with the cool crowd, the ones who went to parties with actual alcohol and everything.

"Cornelius is dead," I sobbed into the phone.

"Your fish?" She paused. "I can't come over, Izzy. I'm at Jordan's."

Jordan, whose parents had a pool and didn't care if their house became weekend central.

"It's fine," I said, even though it wasn't.

My brother found me later, conducting a funeral仪式 in the backyard. Cornelius was getting a proper sendoff — complete with a eulogy I'd written on the back of my math homework. Leo watched me dig, then handed me a plastic sandwich bag.

"For the fish," he said, deadpan. "So bears don't dig him up."

"Bears don't eat buried goldfish, Leo."

"How do you know? Are you a bear expert now?"

I stared at him. And then I started laughing, this ugly snort-laugh that made my blue hair shake. Because somehow, in the absolute most terrible year ever, my brother was being nice to me. Leo, who usually acted like my existence personally inconvenienced him.

"Want to get ice cream?" he asked. "Mom's at book club, we can take her car."

"What about Jordan's party?"

"Screw Jordan's party." Leo shrugged. "Cornelius deserves a wake."

So we went. And maybe blue hair and dead fish and bear jokes weren't what I expected from my reinvention year. But sometimes the best transformations aren't the ones you plan — they're the ones that happen when you stop trying so hard and just let yourself be exactly who you are, smurf hair and all.