Vitamin Pyramid Summer

Chloe's hair had always been this safe, mousy brown—the kind that blended into lockers and cafeteria walls. But the summer before junior year, she returned with cobalt blue streaks that screamed *look at me now*.

"What's up with the hair?" I asked, trying to sound casual instead of hurt that she hadn't mentioned it.

"New era, Maya." She flipped her blue-tipped waves. "I'm done being invisible."

So was our friendship, apparently.

By October, Chloe had ascended the social pyramid I hadn't even known existed. She sat at the senior table now, laughing at jokes that weren't funny, dating a guy whose personality began and ended with varsity football. I spent lunch periods in the library with Mr. Whiskers—the library cat, who judged everyone equally.

"She's just exploring," my mom said when she found me scrolling through Chloe's aesthetic Instagram feed, feeling pathetic.

"She's forgetting me exists."

"Friends grow apart. It's what teenagers do."

Whatever.

Then came the vitamin phase. Chloe started posting about wellness, gut health, and *alignment*. She tried to sell me these tiny pyramid-shaped gummies that cost forty dollars a bottle.

"It's not about the vitamins," she whispered during English, like it was a conspiracy. "It's about the *business opportunity*. You build your team, they build theirs—" she drew a pyramid in the margins of my worksheet "—and eventually you're making passive income while everyone else is wageslaving."

"You're in a pyramid scheme?"

"It's *multi-level marketing*," she corrected, but her eyes shifted.

The next week, I found her in the bathroom, crying over her blue hair faded to a sad greenish-gray, her pyramid scheme having pyramid-collapsed, her football ex having publicly ranked her a 6.5 on his Snapchat story.

"I don't know who I'm trying to be," she said.

"You could start by being someone who doesn't pyramid scheme her friends," I said, but I sat on the floor beside her anyway.

Mr. Whiskers would've been proud.

We're not back to how we were—time doesn't rewind like that. But sometimes Chloe comes over, and we make fun of her wellness phase, and she lets me dye her hair back to brown. Some pyramids are meant to fall. Some friends are meant to find their way back, slowly.