chlorine and secrets

Marcus stood at the edge of the pool party, clutching his red solo cup like a lifeline. His hair, newly dyed midnight blue at 2 AM with his bathroom sink staining like a crime scene, kept falling into his eyes. He'd done it because Maya said blue was her favorite color, which was definitely not pathetic overthinking.

Inside, the cable TV blared a baseball game — something about the Dodgers versus someone else. The guys huddled around it, yelling at plays like their voices could change the score through the screen. Marcus should've been there. That's where guys like him belonged. But instead he was hovering by the sliding glass door, hyperventilating about Maya, who was currently in the pool, surfacing from the water like something from a Greek myth, hair slicked back, laughing at something Tyler-the-actual-baseball-captain said.

"Hey!" Maya waved from the pool. "You coming in or what?"

"I— uh—" Marcus stammered. His brain short-circuited.

"He's working on that Egypt project!" someone called out. Because somehow the entire sophomore class knew Marcus had spent three weeks building a scale model of the Great Pyramid for history, complete with tiny hieroglyphics he'd painstakingly painted with a single brush bristle. The pyramid sat on his dining table at home, a monument to his inability to just be normal and talk to girls like a regular human.

"I finished it, actually," Marcus said, to absolutely no one who was listening.

Maya swam to the pool's edge, water dripping from her elbows. "You should show me sometime. I love that old Egypt stuff. It's cool you're into it."

The baseball game roared from the TV. Someone scored. Someone else didn't. None of it mattered.

"Yeah," Marcus said, suddenly aware of his blue hair and his pyramid model and how neither of these things made him cool, but maybe — just maybe — they made him interesting enough for Maya to keep looking at him like that. "I'll show you. On Monday. At school."

"Deal." She grinned, splashed water at him, and dove back into the pool.

Marcus wiped droplets from his newly blue hair. His heart was doing something genuinely concerning in his chest. But for the first time all night, he didn't want to leave.