Chlorine Summer

The summer I turned sixteen, I spent every waking hour at the community pool. Not because I loved the smell of chlorine or the way my skin pruned up like a raisin after hours in the water, but because it was the only place where I didn't have to think about how everything with my best friend Stella had gone completely off the rails.

Stella and I had been inseparable since seventh grade, but something shifted between us when high school started. She started hanging with the popular crowd, leaving me behind like an old backpack she'd outgrown. The worst part? I was working as a lifeguard that summer, watching her from my high chair while she flirt with the older guys who worked at the snack bar.

"You're too much in your head," my mom kept saying, handing me these huge vitamin D supplements she'd read about online. "Teenagers need sunshine vitamins. Go outside."

But I was already outside, sweating under the brutal sun while Stella and her new friends monopolized the shallow end, their laughter floating up to me like chlorine-scented knives.

Then came the day everything exploded. Stella was flirting with Tyler, the senior who worked the snack counter, when she slipped near the diving board. I blew my whistle so hard I nearly passed out. Everyone was watching. I had to jump in, rescue the girl who used to be my best friend, while she sputtered and looked everywhere but at me.

After, she found me in the locker room, dripping wet and feeling like the world's biggest loser.

"Thanks," she muttered, not meeting my eyes.

"No problem."

"I'm sorry about... everything. About this summer. About me being a jerk."

"Yeah, you were kind of the worst."

She laughed, this tiny sound that was almost like the old Stella. "Wanna come over later? We could make those smoothies with the ridiculous vitamin powders your mom always buys."

"Only if you promise never to flirt with Tyler again."

"Deal."

That night, running home under streetlights with chlorinescent still in my hair, I thought about how some friendships don't end—they just need to be rescued, pulled from the deep end where you thought they'd drowned forever.