The Goldfish Window

The orange hair dye had seemed like a good idea at 2 AM, but now Maya's bathroom mirror told a different story. She looked like a traffic cone. A burnt, uneven traffic cone.

"You look... intense," said Leo, leaning against her doorframe, baseball cap pulled low. "Your mom gonna lose it?"

"Worth it," Maya shrugged, though her stomach did that flippy thing it always did when Leo looked at her too long. "Senior year starts in three weeks. Needed a change."

Her bedroom window had other plans. The screen popped loose with a dramatic crack, and suddenly something was scrambling into her room. Not the wind. Not a leaf.

A cat. A mangy, determined orange tabby with something clamped in its jaws.

"No WAY," Maya hissed, scrambling backward. The cat froze, goldfish bowl water dripping from its whiskers. The actual bowl was nowhere to be seen—probably still on her windowsill, where her pet of three years had been living its best lazy life.

"Is that—" Leo started, then dissolved into laughter. "Did your cat just steal your goldfish?"

"THAT'S NOT MY CAT." Maya was already running, grabbing a towel, chasing the tabby through her startled father's hallway, past her little brother's open door, and straight into the living room where her parents were watching TV.

The cable trailing from the wall to the television chose that exact moment to snap. Screen went black. Silence descended like judgment.

Maya stood there, orange-haired, clutching a wet towel, while an unknown cat cowered behind the sofa with a very confused goldfish presumably somewhere in the mix. Her dad's remote slipped from his hand. Her mom's mouth opened, then closed, then opened again.

"New hair?" her mom finally said.

"The cat—" Maya started, then stopped. Because somehow this was perfect. This was her life now. Orange hair, strange cats, missing fish, broken cables, Leo still laughing in the doorway.

"Yeah," Maya said, grinning despite herself. "Needed a change."

Behind the couch, a very confused goldfish flopped onto the carpet.

Leo stopped laughing. "I'll get the bowl."

Maya looked at her parents, at the cat, at Leo. Something loosened in her chest, something that had been tight since middle school ended and everyone started changing without her. Growing up wasn't supposed to look like this—not in the movies, anyway—but here it was, messy and weird and absolutely perfect.

"Actually," she said, "we're gonna need more towels."