Electric Blue

The chlorine stung my eyes, but I wouldn't get out of the pool. Not when Lucas was finally looking my way.

"Yo, Maya, your iPhone's blowing up," my best friend Priya called from the pool deck, holding up my phone like evidence at a crime scene. "Half the squad's posting stories from Tyler's party. The FOMO is real."

I paddled to the edge, water dripping everywhere. "Let them. This is better."

"Better than being at the party of the summer?" Priya raised an eyebrow. "You're literally swimming laps while everyone else is living their best lives."

"It's peaceful," I lied.

It wasn't. I'd been ghosted by Lucas for three weeks after I sent that risky text at 2 AM. The same text I'd obsessed over, typed and deleted seventeen times, before finally—stupidly—hitting send. Now here I was, fourth of July weekend, hiding in a neighborhood pool while the rest of our friend group partied without me.

"Hey, earth to Maya." Priya waved my phone in my face. "Someone's tagged you in like, ten things."

I ignored it. Dived back underwater, letting the silence swallow me. Everything looked different through the water-distorted light—gentler, softer. My problems felt smaller.

Then the sky cracked open.

Not rain. Something way more dramatic.

Lightning fractured the sky in electric spiderwebs, turning everything violet-white for seconds at a time. The pool's surface reflected each strike like a broken mirror.

"Everyone out NOW!" The lifeguard's whistle shrieked through the sudden wind.

We scrambled toward the pool house, soaked and shivering as the heavens unleashed everything. My iPhone sat on a bench, screen lighting up with notifications I couldn't care less about anymore.

"Check this," Lucas said, appearing out of nowhere with that grin that had destroyed my sleep schedule for weeks. He held out his own phone—water-damaged, glitching, completely fried. "I was live-streaming from the diving board when the lightning hit nearby. My phone's literally dead."

Priya snorted. "Karma's real, huh?"

But Lucas was already looking at me. "Hey. You weren't at the party."

"I was... busy."

"Swimming?" He gestured at my drenched state.

"Something like that."

"Can I join you next time? Like, when it's not literally storming?"

I thought about my phone, sitting there with its fifteen unread messages, its stories and posts and carefully curated everything. Then I looked at Lucas—really looked at him—and realized something wild.

The electric moment wasn't happening on any screen.

"Yeah," I said, as lightning painted everything blue again. "You can join."