Dead Girls Don't Float

6 AM swim practice turned me into a actual zombie. I'd drag myself to the pool, eyes half-closed, chlorine already ghosting in my nose before I even touched the water. Mom's solution: a handful of vitamin gummies that tasted like artificial strawberry despair. They didn't help. Nothing really did when you were a sophomore whose entire social life had imploded three weeks before summer break. The incident at Paige's party—me, seven shots of cheap vodka, and an unfortunate confession about her boyfriend—still haunted my mentions. People I'd known since middle school soft-blocked me. My feed was a graveyard of inside jokes I was no longer part of.

The only thing that kept me sane was this kid Marco from the neighboring school who practiced at the same time. He had this kind of ethereal, half-awake energy that matched mine perfectly. We'd share earbuds during breaks, passing my iphone back and forth to show each other songs that understood us better than anyone else could. No talking about what happened at school. No dissecting the fallout. Just music and the way the water looked when the morning light hit it wrong—gold and fractured and beautiful.

Then came morning I found him sitting poolside, legs dangling in the water, just... sitting. I dropped my bag next to him. 'You okay?' He looked at me with these bloodshot eyes and said, 'My mom died yesterday.' And I didn't say I was sorry or any of the useless stuff adults say. I just sat next to him and put my feet in the cold water and thought about how sometimes you're already drowning before you even start swimming.

We stayed there for twenty minutes as the pool slowly filled with other swimmers. Nobody said anything, but something shifted. Like maybe we weren't zombies anymore. Maybe we were just beginning.