The Sphinx Hair Catastrophe

My best friend Kai spilled an entire grape Gatorade on my gaming setup three minutes before my first stream. Honestly, typical Kai behavior.

"Bro, I got this," he insisted, grabbing a paper towel and somehow managing to spread the purple chaos further into my tangled mess of HDMI and power cables behind the desk. I watched in horror as my monitor flickered and died.

Three years of building my confidence to finally go live on Twitch, and Kai had single-handedly destroyed everything in thirty seconds.

"My hair looks ridiculous anyway," I muttered, reaching for my beanie to hide the disaster I'd spent forty-five minutes trying to tame. Fresh from the barber, and I looked like a frightened poodle.

Kai froze. "Wait, hair gel." His face lit up. "My cousin has this modeling gig downtown. She said her makeup artist uses this stuff that literally fixes everything. We can bike there and back in twenty minutes."

"You want me to bike across town with hair that looks like I stuck my finger in an electrical socket?"

"Trust me."

Ten minutes later, we're locked out of Kai's cousin's apartment building, waiting for some delivery guy to let us in. The guy finally shows up, and we sprint up four flights of stairs to apartment 4B.

Kai's cousin isn't home. But her roommate is. And she has the weirdest creature I've ever seen sitting on her shoulder.

"That's a sphinx cat," the roommate said, scratching the wrinkly, hairless creature under its chin. The cat blinked at me with these enormous eyes, looking remarkably unimpressed with my existence. "His name is Potato."

Potato the sphinx cat crawled onto my knee and started purring like a chainsaw. The roommate handed me some fancy pomade that apparently costs more than my entire wardrobe.

"No offence," she said, nodding at my reflection in the hallway mirror, "but Potato has better grooming habits than you right now."

I fixed my hair in their bathroom while Potato watched from the counter. Kai filmed it on his phone, naturally.

Back home, with fresh hair and my monitor miraculously recovered from its Gatorade bath, I went live. Kai watched from the beanbag chair, eating my snacks, being exactly the kind of friend who wrecks your stuff but somehow makes everything better anyway.

Potato the sphinx cat ended up in my stream's Discord server. Kai made him a moderator. My first stream got exactly three viewers: Kai, Kai's alternate account, and Potato's owner.

Somehow, that felt perfect.