The Sphinx on Zoom

Maya's iPhone died at 2% right as the math study session was getting interesting. Of course. She scrambled to find her charging cable, which had somehow migrated to the depths of her backpack's abyss—along with three gum wrappers, a half-eaten granola bar, and what appeared to be the remains of seventh grade.

"Guys, I'm back," she said, plugging in and rejoining the Zoom call. "Technical difficulties."

Her best friend Priya was doubled over laughing. "Maya, you were gone for like, thirty seconds."

"Thirty crucial seconds. I could've missed Alex's entire personality development."

Alex, who Maya had been lowkey crushing on since September, just rolled his eyes. "Anyway, I was saying that my aunt got a sphynx cat and it's literally the most unhinged creature on earth."

Maya's actual cat, Mochi, chose that exact moment to launch herself onto Maya's keyboard, triggering a catastrophic chain of events that somehow resulted in Maya's screen sharing her incredibly embarrassing Instagram drafts folder.

"Wait, is that—" Priya started, before Maya practically tackled her laptop to close the window.

"NOPE. Nothing to see here. Just a glitch. You know how it is."

"Maya," Alex said, his voice weirdly gentle. "Did you write poetry about me?"

The silence that followed was the most excruciating moment of Maya's sixteen years of existence. She wanted to dissolve into the ether. She wanted her cat to actually have nine lives so she could waste one on fixing this.

"It's not—like, it's not weird," Maya stammered. "It's for creative writing. We had to write about someone who—"

"Someone who what?" Alex asked, and she could hear the smile in his voice.

"Someone who gets it," she finished quietly. "Someone who doesn't make you feel like you have to perform all the time."

Priya made a sound like a dying kettle.

"That's actually... really nice," Alex said. "I write stuff too. Maybe sometime we could—"

"Bro," Priya interrupted. "If you're about to ask her to write poetry together, I'm ending this call. My romance tolerance is maxed out."

They all laughed, and Maya felt something shift inside her chest—like the moment before a sunrise, when everything is possible and nothing has gone wrong yet. Her cat purred loudly, completely unaware that she'd just accidentally become the best wingman in history.

"Tomorrow?" Alex asked.

"Tomorrow," Maya said, and watched her battery percentage finally start climbing up again.