The Social Pyramid Scheme

The goldfish floated at the top of the bowl again, and Maya refused to accept defeat. "He's just resting, Leo. Fish nap."

"Maya, he's been 'napping' for three days. I think we need to call it."

My twelve-year-old sister glared at me with the intensity of someone who'd never had her heart properly broken yet. That was the problem with being seventeen—you accumulated enough dead things to recognize them when they stared you in the face.

I felt like a zombie anyway. Three hours of sleep after finishing college apps that I'd proofread until my eyes burned. Honors classes. Debate team captain. Volunteering at the shelter every Saturday. My therapist called it "overachievement." I called it surviving the pyramid scheme that was high school social hierarchy.

Freshman year, I'd bought into it completely. Work your way up, make the right friends, say the right things. By junior year, I'd made it to the tier just below the actual popular kids—the ones who threw parties their parents definitely knew about, whose lives looked like curated Instagram feeds.

But I was exhausted. Bone-tired. Maya had more energy in her grief than I had in my entire carefully constructed existence.

"Fine," she said, tears finally spilling over. "But we're doing a funeral. Proper one."

So that's how I found myself at midnight in the backyard, digging a hole next to the rosebushes, holding a Taco Bell sauce packet because we didn't have a proper coffin. Maya had made a tiny pyramid out of index cards—she'd just learned about them in history—and placed it over the grave like a tombstone.

"He was a good fish," she whispered. "He never judged me."

Something cracked in my chest. "None of the good ones do, Maya."

"Do you feel like that too?" She looked up at me, and I realized she wasn't talking about the fish anymore. "Like everything's fake and you're just... going through the motions?"

I sat back on my heels, startled. "Yeah. Actually, yeah."

"Mom says you're bearing all this pressure." She dug in her pocket and pulled out a crumpled drawing—a bear she'd made in art class, labeled "STRONG" in rainbow letters. "You need to be a bear instead. Just... bear your own self."

"Bear your own self?"

"You know what I mean. Stop trying to climb everyone else's pyramid."

I stared at her, then at the tiny goldfish pyramid, then at the bear drawing that wasn't actually that good but was somehow perfect.

"Maya," I said slowly, "you're kind of a genius."

She shrugged. "I know. Can we get taco tomorrow? For the wake?"

"Absolutely."

We went inside, and for the first time in months, the zombie feeling faded. I didn't know how to fix everything—the college apps, the expectations, the version of myself I'd built like a house of cards. But Maya was right. The dead goldfish hadn't faked anything. And neither did bears.

Sometimes you had to bury the things that weren't real to make room for the things that were.