Chlorine & Courage

Maya adjusted the straps of her bright orange bikini for the hundredth time, feeling like a traffic cone at a pool party where everyone else apparently got the memo to wear black. She'd spent forty-five minutes psyching herself up to come to Tyler's end-of-school blowout, and now she was hovering awkwardly by the snack table, clutching her iPhone like a lifeline.

"Hey, you coming in?" Tyler appeared beside her, dripping wet and unfairly gorgeous. His hair was darker from the water and he had this crooked smile that made her stomach do literal backflips.

"Uh, maybe later," Maya said, then internally facepalmed. Maybe later? What was she, eighty?

Tyler laughed, but not in a mean way. "The water's perfect. And your orange is sick, by the way. Like, actually." He nodded at her bikini and something in her chest loosened.

Her phone buzzed with a text from her best friend: 'WYA??POOL???

"My phone's gonna die though," Maya said, then felt like an actual loser for saying it out loud.

"I've got a charging cable inside," Tyler said. "Leave it on the kitchen counter. Live a little."

Something about the way he said it—like he actually wanted her to live a little, not like he was roasting her for being antisocial—made her slip her flip-flops off and paddle toward the pool. The water hit her waist, then her chest, then she was fully submerged in that perfect suspended blue where sound goes muffled and everything slows down.

When she surfaced, pushing her hair back, Tyler was waiting.

"See? Not so bad."

"Yeah," Maya said, and for the first time all night, she wasn't lying.

Her iPhone was sitting on some random counter inside, probably at 3% battery, her group chat going wild without her. But in the water, with Tyler grinning like he'd been waiting for her to join them all along, Maya finally stopped feeling like a traffic cone.

She felt like a girl who was exactly where she was supposed to be.