The Pyramid of Likes

Maya's thumb hovered over the 'post' button, her iPhone screen glowing in her darkened bedroom. Another pyramid scheme. Not the money kind—the social kind. At the base were the kids like her, scrolling endlessly, liking, commenting, feeding content upward to the influencers at the peak who didn't even know they existed.

'You're overthinking it again,' her best friend Jamal had said earlier that day, watching her delete and retype a caption for the third time. 'Just post it. Who cares what some random bull thinks anyway?'

Maya had laughed—Jamal always called the internet trolls 'bulls' because they'd charge at anything that moved, horns locked and ready to gore. But tonight, the bulls felt especially loud.

She was running track now, literally and figuratively. After practice, her legs burned, her lungs screamed, but for those forty-five minutes around the oval, she wasn't worrying about follower counts or who'd commented what on whose post. She was just moving. Forward.

Her phone buzzed. A notification: someone had posted something about her. Maya's stomach dropped. The bulls were at it again, tearing down another random target in the comments.

But then she saw it—a picture someone had snapped of her at practice, mid-stride, face fierce, hair flying. Not posed. Not filtered. Not part of the pyramid. Just her, running.

The caption read: 'POV: watching Maya absolutely crush her lap time today 💪'

Below that, comments from people she barely knew. *She's so fast.* *I wish I could run like that.* *Goals.*

Maya stared at her screen, something shifting inside her. The real pyramid wasn't likes or followers or whatever the bulls wanted her to believe. It was the stuff she was actually building, lap by lap, day by day—herself.

She opened a new post, typed three words, and hit share without overthinking it: *Watch this space.*

Then she turned off her phone, laced up her shoes, and went for a night run. The bulls could keep their pyramid. Maya was building something real.