The Orange Cable Heist

Friday night and I'm about to do something incredibly stupid.

"You got the goods?" Maya asks, leaning against my bedroom door frame like she's in a movie instead of just hanging out in my gross room.

I hold up the coaxial cable I'd raided from the box in the garage. My dad's been "gonna fix the living room TV" since like, forever. "Obtained and operational."

"Nice." Maya's wearing this oversized orange hoodie that makes her look like a traffic cone, but somehow she pulls it off. She always does. That's the problem.

We're sneaking onto my roof to piggyback on the Hendersons' WiFi because my parents found out I'd been staying up till 3 AM gaming and literally murdered my internet connection. Grounded for two weeks. Two. Weeks. In 2024. It's basically medieval torture.

The ladder groans as we climb up. The summer air sticks to my skin, thick and humid. Below us, my neighborhood sleeps while we're about to commit low-level theft.

"This is actually so dumb," Maya whispers, but she's grinning.

"So dumb." I stretch the cable toward the vent where I know the signal's strongest. "But we need to finish that chemistry project and I cannot do it on my phone."

That's when Mac starts barking.

The Hendersons' golden retriever loses his absolute mind every time anyone comes near their property. We freeze, pressed against the shingles, hearts pounding.

"He's gonna wake everyone," Maya hisses. But then the dog's front paws appear on top of their fence, and he's wagging so hard his whole body shakes. "Wait. Is he... smiling at us?"

"I think he likes us," I whisper back.

We both start laughing, trying to keep it quiet but failing. Maya accidentally kicks an empty soda bottle I left up here yesterday. It clatters across the roof, loud enough to wake the dead.

We freeze again.

Nothing. No lights, no yells, no angry dad coming outside with a baseball bat. Just Mac, doing his happy bark from next door like he's in on the joke.

The cable catches a signal. My laptop screen glows to life.

"We're in," I say, but I'm looking at Maya instead of the screen. The orange light from my computer reflects in her eyes, and something in my chest does this weird flip thing that I'm definitely not going to think about right now.

"We are totally criminals," she says, sitting beside me. Her shoulder presses against mine. "Criminal masterminds."

"The worst." I pull up our project. "You know, we could've just gone to the library tomorrow."

"Yeah." She's quiet for a second. "But this is better."

The dog keeps barking softly in the distance, happy about nothing at all. The cable connects us to a world of information we don't actually care about. And I'm sitting on a roof with a girl in an orange hoodie, thinking maybe getting grounded was the best thing that ever happened to me.