Chlorine and Orange Peels

The pool party was already in full swing when Maya arrived, the bass from someone's portable speaker vibrating through the concrete. She'd spent forty minutes on her eyeliner alone, trying to look like she hadn't tried at all. A universal teenage struggle.

"Mayyyyaa!" Jenna's voice cut through the noise, followed by the sound of someone doing a cannonball. "Get in here! The water's practically bathwater!"

Maya clutched her crossbody bag tighter. Inside, next to her phone and lip gloss, was the orange plastic bottle. The vitamins her mom had insisted she take—"for your immune system, baby, COVID's still out there"—huge, chalky circles that tasted like artificial fruit and regret.

"I'm good!" Maya called back, perching on one of the loungers. She pulled out her phone, scrolling through nothing while kids from school splashed and laughed. Tyler was there, shirt off, doing that thing where he stood in the shallow end with water dripping from his hair, being annoyingly attractive without trying.

Then someone's elbow knocked into her bag, and the vitamins spilled everywhere. Those unmistakable bright orange pills rolled across the pool deck like deranged M&Ms.

"Whoa," said Tyler, materializing suddenly beside her. He was dripping wet, towel around his neck. "What's this? You dealing vitamins now?"

Maya felt her face burn. "My mom makes me take them. They're supposed to be—I don't know, immune support or something. They taste like chalky despair."

Tyler laughed, and then—surprisingly—sat down beside her. "My mom's got me on these ones that are supposed to be for 'focus.' Pretty sure they're just expensive urine." He picked up one of the escaped pills. "These the bad boys?"

"Yeah." Maya watched him, confused. "Aren't you going back in? You were, like, swimming laps earlier."

"Eh." Tyler tossed the vitamin back to her. "Water's cold anyway."

It wasn't. They both knew it wasn't.

They sat there for twenty minutes while the party continued around them, talking about nothing—school, their ridiculous mothers, how pool parties were secretly just awkward social experiments in swimwear. When Tyler asked for her number, Maya pretended to be cool about it, handing over her phone with fingers that were definitely not shaking.

Later, as she swallowed that day's vitamin with pool water from a plastic cup, she realized something: sometimes the most real moments happened when you stopped performing. Even if it took a spilled bottle of supplements to get there.

Also, Tyler definitely still had chlorine in his hair. She kind of loved that.