Goldfish in the Dark

The rain drummed against Maya's basement windows, rhythmic and insistent. Down here, with the concrete walls covered in band posters and the air smelling like vanilla candles and slight mildew, everything felt possible.

"Your shot, Derek," she said, leaning against the **pool** table. The green felt was worn at the edges, patched with duct tape in one corner where her brother had spilled soda. It was perfect.

Derek lined up his shot, tongue poking out slightly. He missed. The cue ball clacked against the side, spinning uselessly.

"Bro, you're down bad," Taquan laughed from the couch, where he'd been aggressively eating **goldfish** crackers for the past twenty minutes. Orange dust coated his fingers. "That's seven-0. Maya's actually destroying you."

"Shut up," Derek grumbled, but he was grinning.

They'd been friends since middle school, back when Maya had still worn braces and Taquan had that unfortunate haircut phase. Now they were seventeen, somehow, and graduation loomed like this terrifying thing on the horizon. Everyone kept asking what they were doing next year, as if seventeen-year-olds were supposed to have their lives figured out.

Maya's phone buzzed with another text from her mom: *Did you finish your college essay???*

She ignored it.

The TV flickered—some reality show Taquan had put on, the **cable** connection cutting in and out because of the storm. Perfect timing, honestly.

"Whatever, let's play something else," Derek said, abandoning the game entirely. He grabbed the remote and started flipping through channels, but everything was either infomercials or weather reports about the storm.

"My cousin's having people over Friday," Taquan said suddenly. "There's gonna be a pool and everything. His parents are out of town."

Maya raised an eyebrow. "A party?"

"Yeah, but like, chill. Not rager status." Taquan paused. "You should come."

"Maybe," she said noncommittally. Parties weren't really her scene. Too many people, too much noise, too many expectations to perform happiness.

But then she caught Derek's eye, and he gave her this tiny nod, and suddenly it wasn't about the party at all. It was about the fact that they were all **swimming** toward something different, toward the end of everything they'd known, and nobody knew how to be brave about it.

"We'll all go together," Maya found herself saying. "Like, as a group."

"Yeah," Derek said, relieved. "Together."

Taquan held up his goldfish-cracker-covered hand for a high five. "To surviving the apocalypse of senior year."

Outside, the rain kept falling, and somehow, in this basement with its imperfect pool table and fuzzy cable signal, everything felt exactly as it should be.