The Vitamin K Incident

Maya's bedroom was her sanctuary, or at least it was until her older brother Jayden decided their house needed to become the unofficial streaming HQ for his entire friend group.

"Just need to run one cable, Maya, chill," Jayden had said three hours ago, drilling holes through her ceiling like he was mining for diamonds instead of setting up an Ethernet connection for his gaming tournament livestream.

Now her room smelled like drywall dust and betrayal. And somewhere in the chaos, her cat Luna had disappeared.

"Luna?" Maya whispered, checking under her bed. Nothing. Not even the usual calico tail twitch she'd get bribed with treats to reveal.

Her phone buzzed. Squad chat blowing up about Tyler's party tonight. The one she'd been overthinking for days. Tyler, who'd sat next to her in bio lab every day this semester and somehow never noticed her existence. Or maybe he had? That was the problem. The overthinking. The infinite scroll through his Instagram archive at 2 AM trying to decode whether that story from last July meant anything.

She needed to look flawless tonight. Hence the vitamin D supplements she'd been taking all week because someone on TikTok said it helped your skin glow. Hence the existential crisis when she realized she'd grabbed her grandma's vitamin K instead.

"Maya!" Jayden yelled from downstairs. "Why's the internet down?"

"Because you're incompetent!" she shouted back, scrolling through selfies she'd hate tomorrow.

Something brushed against her ankle. Luna, looking smug, emerging from behind her dresser with something orange and plastic in her mouth. The vitamin bottle. Chewed through. Pills scattered everywhere like bizarre confetti.

Maya stared at her cat. Luna stared back, then coughed up something terrifyingly blue.

"Did you eat one of Jayden's ethernet cable tips?" Maya realized. "Luna, what is wrong with you?"

Her phone lit up. Unknown number.

hey this is tyler from bio lol saw jayden's stream setup & noticed the band poster in your background anyway i was gonna ask if you wanted to come over before the party? we can pre-game with the squad

Maya looked at her cat, who was now batting a vitamin pill across the floor like a tiny orange hockey puck. She looked at the drilled holes in her ceiling, the dust settling on everything she owned, the absolute disaster of her carefully curated aesthetic.

She typed back: sureeee give me 30 mins

Some stories started with a meet-cute. Hers started with a cat who ate plastic, a brother who destroyed her bedroom, and a vitamin mix-up that was definitely going to give her weird dreams. But as she caught her reflection in her phone screen—hair messy, rooms destroyed, cat dramatically yowling in the background—she realized something.

She didn't look flawless. She looked like herself. And maybe that was enough.