The Riddle at 2 AM

Maya's **goldfish** — won thirty minutes earlier from that guy with the sketchy carnival setup — was already doing that weird float thing where you just *know* it's about to go belly-up. Typical. Her first interaction with Tyler all night, and this was the cosmic payoff.

"Dude, that thing's deceased," said Jules, already three fingers deep into her bag of Takis. They were sprawled on Maya's bedroom floor, post-homecoming dance reality settling in like a fog.

"It's not deceased, it's... meditating."

"That's a dead fish, Maya." Jules cackled, that specific laugh that always made half the cafeteria turn heads.

Maya's **dog**, Barnaby — a商品ent pile of golden fur with zero personal boundaries — chose that moment to investigate the carnival bag with excessive enthusiasm. Glass bowl teetered. Fish water went everywhere. Jules lost it, genuinely howling, and that's when Maya's **iPhone**, positioned precariously on the edge of her comforter, decided to stage-dive.

Face down. In fish water.

"RIP to your social life," Jules said, still laughing. "Tyler slides into your DMs and you're like, sorry, my phone committed fish-cide."

Maya stared at her ceiling, at the glow-in-the-dark **sphinx** sticker she'd slapped there freshman year after that cringe Egyptian phase she begged everyone to forget. The sphinx with its stupid riddle: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? The answer was *humans*, which felt deep when she was fourteen and now just felt like... life, actually.

Crawling through middle school with braces and insecurity. Standing upright (ish) now, navigating lockers and crushes and people who somehow knew who they were. Eventually, you know, old age and canes and whatever.

But nobody mentioned the part about the fish water and the broken phone and the girl you're pretty sure is your best friend laughing so hard she snorts, and you're laughing too because somehow this is exactly what you needed.

Tyler could wait. The goldfish had already moved on to a better place (the toilet, probably). Barnaby was looking appropriately guilty. And for the first time all night, Maya wasn't overthinking anything.

"Pass a Takis," she said.

Jules tossed the bag. Life was weird and messy and sometimes involved dead carnival fish and waterlogged electronics, but she was figuring it out. One disaster at a time.