Dead Pool

The running joke between us had always been that Marcus was the only person I knew who'd managed to drown in debt while staying completely dry. Standing at the edge of his infinity pool at three in the morning, watching the black water catch reflections from the city lights below, I understood exactly what he'd meant three weeks ago when he'd said the water was calling him.

"You're my oldest friend," he'd told me then, his hand shaking around a tumbler of scotch. "If anything happens to me, there's a safety deposit box. Key's in the pool house."

I hadn't taken him seriously. Marcus had been dramatic since college, always performing his own life as if it were cinema. But now, staring down at the dark water, I noticed something I'd missed earlier—a pale shape suspended beneath the surface, almost invisible in the shadows.

My body moved before my mind could catch up. Years of running from my own problems had made me good at instinctive motion. I dove in.

The water was colder than it should have been in mid-July. My hands grasped fabric, then flesh. Marcus. Heavy. Dead weight. I hauled him upward, breaking the surface with a gasp that wasn't mine. His chest didn't move. His lips were blue.

I dragged him to the edge, my hands slipping on wet tile, and performed CPR I'd learned in a mandatory workplace training session I'd half-slept through. Compressions. Breaths. Compressions. Breaths. Each press against his chest reminded me of all the times I should have checked on him instead of assuming his silence meant he was busy.

"Come on, you dramatic bastard," I muttered between breaths. "Not like this. Not the cliché ending."

Marcus coughed. Then vomited water all over my thousand-dollar suit.

As I sat beside him, both of us dripping and shivering in the expensive silence of his backyard, I realized what I'd actually been running from all these years—not failure, not responsibility, but the terrifying possibility that I might actually be needed. The water that had called him had been calling me too, just in a different way.

"The pool house," Marcus croaked, staring up at the starless sky. "The box."