The Sphinx at Sunset

Maya's older cousin Jenna dragged her to the county fair, but Maya's phone buzzed with notifications from the group chat she'd been **spy**ing on all week. They were planning something without her—again.

"You're actually gonna do it?" Jenna shouted over the carnival noise, pointing at the mechanical **bull**.

Maya's stomach did that thing it always did when she was the center of attention. But then she saw them across the crowd: Chloe, Ryan, and the rest of the friend group that had been drifting away since freshman year. They were watching.

"Watch me," Maya said, climbing onto the mechanical bull before she could talk herself out of it.

The operator grinned. "Hold on tight, princess."

The bull jerked to life, and Maya's body went flying in directions it shouldn't. But for the first time in months, she wasn't thinking about grades or college apps or whether Chloe liked her Instagram stories. She was just holding on.

Then she saw it—peeking out from behind the prize booth—a hairless **sphinx** cat with wrinkled skin and giant ears, watching her like it knew something nobody else did. The absurdity of it hit her: here she was, trying to prove herself to people who didn't care, while this alien-looking cat was literally witnessing her make a complete fool of herself.

And suddenly Maya started laughing. Really laughing.

She tumbled off the bull, but instead of being embarrassed, she was **running**—toward the sphinx cat, toward Jenna, toward whatever came next.

"Dude," Chloe called across the crowd, "that was actually kind of sick."

Maya scratched the sphinx cat's ears. The weird ones were the best ones, anyway. She pulled out her phone and left the group chat. She didn't need to spy anymore.

Sometimes you had to fall off a mechanical bull to realize who was actually watching your back.