Three Feet of Separation

The internet cable lay across my bedroom floor like a dead snake, and somewhere along its three feet of length, my entire social life had ceased to exist.

"Dude, you there?" Marcus's voice crackled through my phone speakers. "I've been counting to sixty for like five minutes."

"Cable's fried," I grooled, staring at the flashing router lights that mocked me with their cheerful persistence. Everything was connected except the one thing that mattered. My streaming setup. My Discord server. My carefully curated online persona who definitely did not have a zit the size of Mount Everest on her chin.

"Just use hotspot, weirdo."

"Hotspot kills my battery and I'm at 8%. Can we just... I don't know, exist without internet for five seconds?"

Silence. Then, the sound that strikes fear into every sixteen-year-old's heart: the front door opening.

"Honey? I bought you a friend!" Mom's voice drifted up the stairs, cheerful and terrifying in equal measure.

I scrambled up, nearly tripping over the cursed cable. "Mom, I'm literally on Discord—"

"She's lonely like you," Mom continued, appearing in my doorway with a plastic bag sloshing water. "Her owner moved to college and couldn't take her. I thought you'd appreciate having someone around who doesn't require bandwidth."

She placed a fishbowl on my desk. Inside, a single goldfish floated with the existential despair of someone who has realized their entire existence is decorative.

"Her name was Bubbles," Mom added, "but you can rename her. I put her food right—"

"Next to my AP Bio textbook," I finished flatly. Because obviously.

"You're welcome!" She closed the door behind her, leaving me alone with my new roommate and the cable still refusing to cooperate.

Marcus was still on speaker. "Did your mom just buy you a fish?"

"Yes."

"Like, an actual living creature?"

"Yes."

"Aren't you literally not allowed to keep pets in your apartment?"

"That's what I said! But apparently fish are 'decorative water features' according to the lease, which Mom definitely read while I was at school getting assigned a group project with Sydney Reynolds."

I flopped onto my bed, staring at the fishbowl. The goldfish—I refused to call it Bubbles—swam in tight, anxious circles, mouthing the glass like it was trying to articulate the same frustration building in my chest.

"You know what's messed up?" I said to Marcus. "This fish has a better social life than I do. At least it gets noticed."

"That's dark, even for you."

"No, I'm serious. My 'friend' group is literally you and the algorithm that recommends Minecraft tutorials. Sydney Reynolds probably thinks I'm mute. I haven't had a real conversation with anyone my age since... since I can't even remember."

The fish did a little flip,尾巴spinning water onto my textbook.

"Great," I muttered. "Now my AP Bio homework is literally fish-flavored."

Marcus laughed. "Okay, first of all, rude. Second, you literally have plans with Sydney tomorrow. You're gonna work on the project at her house. Which is a thing that's happening. In person. Outside this apartment."

"Which is exactly why I needed to fix my cable tonight so I could ask ChatGPT what normal people talk about."

"Bro, you don't need the internet to talk to Sydney. You need to just... talk. Be weird. She's weird too. Everyone's weird. That's the whole point of being sixteen."

I looked at the goldfish. It had stopped swimming in circles and was now hovering near the front of the bowl, staring at me with its bulging, judgmental eyes.

"You know what?" I said. "You're right. I'll do the project. I'll talk to Sydney. But first—I'm naming this fish."

"Please don't name it after Sydney. That's serial killer behavior."

"No. I'm naming it Chaos. Because that's literally my life."

Chaos swam a victory lap.

The cable could wait. Tomorrow, I'd figure out how to talk to Sydney Reynolds without pre-downloading conversation topics from Reddit. Tonight, Chaos and I had a chemistry worksheet to ignore, and honestly? That felt like progress.