Deep End, Shallow Breath

Maya's phone buzzed against her thigh, but she didn't check. Not at Tyler's pool party. Not when she was wearing a swimsuit that felt basically illegal and trying to look like she wasn't mentally calculating every angle of her existence.

"You coming in?" Tyler called, doing that thing where he flicked water from his hair like some kind of shampoo commercial. Maya hated that she noticed.

"Yeah, just—"

Her **iPhone** lit up with a notification. Jada had posted a story. Of course she had. Jada, who was probably somewhere looking effortless and golden and not currently hyperventilating about ***swimming*** in front of the entire sophomore class.

Maya's mom had made her take this weird ***vitamin*** D supplement because "you're inside too much, honey, it's not natural." Natural. What even was that? Everything felt curated and filtered and terrifyingly permanent.

She slipped into the pool, letting the water swallow her legs first. The cool shock was almost good. Almost. Down here, sound didn't work the same way. It was muffled and distant, like being inside a thought instead of inside a moment.

She remembered the ***goldfish*** she'd won at the fair last summer. It had lived for three days in that tiny plastic bag before she'd finally transferred it to a proper bowl. The freedom had killed it. She'd felt guilty in a way she couldn't explain to anyone.

"Maya? You good?"

She surfaced, water streaming from her hair. Tyler was there, holding an ***orange*** slice that someone had probably brought as a ~healthy~ snack option alongside three pizzas.

"Just thinking," she said.

"About what?"

"About how we're all just swimming around pretending we know what we're doing."

Tyler blinked. Then he grinned, all lopsided and surprisingly genuine. "That's deep, Maya."

"It's not deep. It's literally just—"

"No, it's good." He tossed her the orange slice. She caught it, wet hands and all. "Wanna hang out on the edge? We don't have to swim. We can just... exist."

Her phone buzzed again somewhere on the patio. She ignored it.

"Yeah," Maya said, something in her chest loosening. "Yeah, I'd like that."