When Lightning Struck My Stream

Leo was fifteen minutes into his first-ever gaming stream when disaster struck. His cat Cosmos, apparently jealous of the attention Leo was giving his screen, launched herself from the floor and landed directly on his keyboard – and the HDMI cable dangling precariously from his PC.

"NO!" Leo yelled as his monitor went black. The chat, which had been a steady trickle of lol's and hype messages, froze mid-comment. His face was still visible in the corner of the screen, mouth half-full of the spinach salad his mom had made him promise to eat before going live. "Gross," someone had typed thirty seconds earlier. Thanks, random viewer.

Outside his window, summer lightning cracked the sky purple. Then came the rain – sudden, relentless, like the universe had decided his stream needed more drama.

Cosmos purred innocently, batting at the disconnected cable like it was a toy snake. Leo's phone buzzed. Maya: u coming?? leo??

Right. The group call. He'd forgotten. They were all supposed to watch each other's first streams together – a dumb idea he'd agreed to because Maya had suggested it, and Maya had been his crush since seventh grade, and apparently he was still making decisions based on middle school feelings like an absolute idiot.

The cable wouldn't reconnect. His router was blinking like it was having a medical emergency. His spinach-adorned teeth were probably the least of his problems, honestly.

Outside, thunder rattled his window. More lightning. The kind that made everything feel electric and wrong and possible.

Leo grabbed his phone, wallet, keys. Cosmos meowed reproachfully as he abandoned her mid-cable-battle. He was running down the stairs, out the door, into the rain, running three blocks to Maya's house because his internet was dead and his dignity was dying and maybe if he just showed up in person, wet and pathetic and probably smelling like wet teenager, she'd laugh and it would be fine and they'd watch TikToks instead and he wouldn't have to worry about whether his stream was good enough or whether the spinach in his teeth had ruined everything.

Her porch light was on. His heart was running faster than his legs had.

He knocked. Maya opened the door, took one look at his drowned-rat appearance, and said, "Did you run here in a storm? For a stream?" Then she was laughing, bright and surprised, pulling him inside by his wet hoodie sleeve. "You're so dramatic. We can just hang out. Come eat actual food."

Leo grinned, spinach-free and humiliated and weirdly happy. "Yeah. Okay."

Somewhere, Cosmos was probably sleeping on his cable. Whatever. He'd deal with it later.