The Pyramid Scheme
Maya stared at the soda cans stacked in a perfect pyramid on her kitchen counter. Three on the bottom, two in the middle, one lonely orange Fanta crowning the top. It had taken her forty minutes to get the lighting right—soft afternoon sun filtering through the blinds, that golden-hour glow everyone pretended happened naturally.
"You good?" Kenny leaned against the doorframe, spinning his iphone between his fingers. "You've been obsessing over this for like an hour."
"It needs to look effortless," Maya muttered, adjusting the cans by millimeters. "Like I'm just chilling with my cousins, living our best lives. Not like I staged a whole moment for the feed."
Kenny snorted. "You literally just staged it. That's the point. It's all a pyramid scheme and we're both buying in."
The words hit harder than they should have. Maya looked at her phone—Kenny's phone, technically, since hers was at her mom's house this weekend. The screen showed her last post: 237 likes, 18 comments. Nice. But not viral nice. Not the kind of numbers that made people at school actually notice you existed outside of AP Chem.
Her thumb hovered over the camera button. The orange Fanta gleamed in the sunlight, impossibly bright against the muted tones of the kitchen. She'd stolen it from Tío Carlos's stash because it matched her planned aesthetic. Sometimes her entire life felt like that—borrowed pieces arranged to look like something real.
"You know what?" Maya shoved the cans. They cascaded down, the orange Fanta rolling across the counter. "Forget it."
"Whoa, chill—"
"No, you're right." She grabbed a soda from the scattered pile, popped it open. "I'm tired of performing for people who don't actually care. Let's just hang out."
Kenny grinned, finally putting his phone down. "Now that's authentic."
They sat on the kitchen floor, drinking warm soda and talking about nothing important until the sun went down. Maya didn't post anything that day. But for the first time in months, she actually felt like she was living something real.