The Night I Woke Up

I felt like a **zombie** walking into Tyler's house party—three hours of sleep will do that to you. The entire week I'd been stressing about whether to show up, doom-scrolling through Instagram stories of everyone else's seemingly perfect lives while I sat alone in my room.

My older sister Kai had basically force-marched me out of the house. "You're not spending Friday night overthinking again," they'd said, shoving my lucky beanie onto my head. That **hat** had seen me through every breakdown, breakthrough, and buffer zone since seventh grade—basically my emotional support accessory.

Inside, the bass thumped against my ribs. I grabbed a soda and immediately felt like I was doing it wrong—should I be holding this differently? Standing differently? BEING differently? That's when I noticed the **cat** sitting on the kitchen counter like it owned the place, judgmentally watching a bunch of sixteen-year-olds attempt to be cool.

Then I saw her: Lana, dressed as some kind of futuristic **sphinx**, complete with gold wings and riddle-energy radiating off her like she knew secrets about the universe. She'd transferred here three months ago and already had everyone wrapped around her finger without even trying.

She caught me staring. I almost panicked, but she smiled and walked over.

"Nice hat," she said. "You look like you're hiding something good under there."

And just like that, we were talking about everything—our shared obsession with horror movies, how exhausting it is keeping up with everyone's curated feeds, how we both secretly hated the taste of **spinach** but pretended to love it because it was "the healthy thing to do." She confessed she'd come as a sphinx because she felt like she was always expected to have answers, always supposed to be mysterious and perfect.

"Honestly?" I said, pulling off my hat. "I'm just trying to figure out who I am when nobody's watching."

"Same," she said, and something in her face shifted—like she'd dropped the sphinx act for the first time all night. "Maybe we can figure it out together?"

I didn't feel like a zombie anymore. I felt like a real person, finally awake and talking to someone who got it. Sometimes the best nights aren't the ones you plan—they're the ones where you accidentally show up as yourself and someone decides that's enough.