Chlorine Dreams and Baseball Schemes

The invitation sat on my phone screen like a dare: pool party at Jessica's house. Saturday. Bring a swimsuit.

I hadn't been to a pool party since seventh grade, when I'd forgotten to shave my legs and spent three hours pretending the water was too cold to actually get in. Now a junior in high school, I was still mastering the art of blending in, which mostly meant avoiding situations where blending in required actual swimming.

"You going?" asked Maya, tapping at my phone in AP Bio.

"Probably not," I mumbled, staring at the amino acid sequence on my worksheet. "I promised my brother I'd help with his baseball practice."

Maya snorted. "You hate baseball. You've never even watched a full inning."

"Exactly. That's why he needs me. I'm his lucky charm."

The truth was simpler: I didn't want to be the girl in the corner with her arms crossed, pretending she wasn't hungry while everyone else cannonballed into the deep end. The girls who made it look effortless, hair slicked back like mermaids, skin glowing even under harsh fluorescent pool lights. They were the ones who laughed at each other's jokes, who shared secrets underwater, who existed in that effortless orbit of popularity I'd been trying to break into since freshman year.

But Maya, because she was Maya, showed up at my house Saturday morning with a grocery bag.

"What are you doing?" I asked, still in my oversized sweatpants.

"Operation Make You Actually Go To This Party." She dumped the bag onto my bed. Two bottles of water, sunglasses, and a bright orange bottle of gummy vitamins. "My mom says these help with anxiety. Or they're just vitamins. Either way, take them."

"You think vitamins are going to fix my social awkwardness?"

"No," she said, tossing me the sunglasses. "But pretending they will might."

Jessica's backyard was exactly as I'd imagined – blue water shimmering, music thumping from portable speakers, at least thirty people from school already there. I froze by the patio doors, suddenly hyper-aware of my bare arms, my slightly-too-tight bikini top that I'd bought online and never worn.

Then I saw them: the baseball guys from school, including Tyler Evans, who'd sat behind me in English last year and never learned my name. They were in the shallow end, throwing around those little foam footballs like they owned the place. Laughing. Splashing. Existing.

Maya grabbed my hand. "Water first. Then we assess."

We stood by the snack table, clutching our plastic cups like shields. The cool water felt good against my suddenly-parched throat. I watched Tyler Evans do a backflip off the diving board, landing with a massive splash that drenched everyone within a ten-foot radius. Everyone screamed and laughed, and something in my chest twisted.

I wanted that – the confidence, the friends, the ability to exist in my body without constantly critiquing every angle, every movement, every breath.

"You're overthinking," Maya whispered. "Just jump in. Literally. No one's looking."

So I did. I cannonballed into the deep end, fully expecting to feel self-conscious the second I surfaced. But when I broke the surface, sputtering and wiping chlorine from my eyes, no one was watching. They were too busy being sixteen, too busy worrying about who was watching them.

I floated on my back, staring up at the sky through the canopy of trees, feeling the weird buoyancy that only pool water gives you – that sense of being weightless, suspended between two worlds. And for the first time in years, I wasn't thinking about how I looked or who was watching or whether my arms were too flabby to go sleeveless.

I was just floating.

Later, when Tyler Evans actually remembered my name and asked if I wanted to play chicken fights, I said sure. And when Maya and I won, spectacularly and accidentally, I laughed until my sides hurt.

Those gummy vitamins? Probably didn't do anything. But sometimes the placebo effect is all you need.