Vitamin F

My mom started leaving those gummy vitamins on the counter after the divorce, like citrus-flavored band-aids for a shattered family. 'Take your vitamin, Maya,' she'd say, not looking up from her phone. I started taking them, just to make her feel like she was fixing something.

But the real medicine came at 5:47 AM every morning, when I slipped out the back door in my too-old running shoes. The subdivision was still asleep, lawns dotted with dew that soaked through my socks by the third block. I wasn't running from anything specific — just the way my dad's empty chair looked at dinner, the group chats that blew up without me, the feeling that everyone else had gotten the manual to being sixteen and I'd been absent that day.

That's when I saw him the first time: a red fox, sleek as a dropped stitch, sitting on the Andersons' porch like he paid rent there.

We locked eyes. His were golden and unbothered, like he knew something I didn't about moving through the world like you belonged in it. Then he was gone — a rust-colored blur between houses, gone before I could even reach for my phone to prove he existed.

'You're seeing things,' my friend Chloe said when I told her at lunch. 'Stress hallucinations. Classic.' She tapped her phone. 'Speaking of, did you see what Brianna posted?'

I hadn't. I'd stopped looking.

The fox showed up again the next morning, and the next. Sometimes he'd watch me from a distance, tail curled like a question mark. Once, he trotted beside me for half a block before veering into someone's backyard. It became our thing — this wordless understanding between two creatures out before the world demanded they be something.

'Maya?' My mom found me in the kitchen weeks later, counting gummies instead of eating them. 'You okay?'

I looked at the bottle, then at the window where dawn was painting itself across the sky. 'Yeah,' I said, grabbing my shoes. 'Just need my vitamin.'

She nodded, thinking she understood.

Outside, the fox was waiting. I didn't run today. Just walked up to where he sat, calm as anything, and lowered myself onto the grass beside him. We watched the neighborhood wake up together — the paper delivery truck, the neighbor's restless dog, the sky shifting from gray to gold.

'Morning, friend,' I whispered.

He didn't run. Just stretched like he had nowhere better to be.

I realized then that belonging wasn't about fitting into someone else's picture. It was about finding the spaces where you didn't have to shrink.

The fox dipped his head once, then was gone — a flash of red against the waking world.

I stood up and started running, but not away anymore. Just forward, toward whatever came next, with the wild thing's secret tucked in my chest: you don't have to be tame to be real.