Goldfish in the Deep End

The backyard pool glowed an unnatural blue in the twilight, the kind of suburban magic that only exists right before you're supposed to be somewhere else. I stood at the edge, nursing a lukewarm soda while Tyler's older brother and his friends dominated the deep end with their impressive cannonballs and louder laughter.

"You gonna swim or just stand there looking like a lost goldfish?" Tyler's brother called out. The group laughed. I felt my face heat up.

"Whatever," I mumbled. But then Kina grabbed my hand.

"Don't listen to them. They're being such bulls." She dragged me toward the shallow end. "C'mon. Race you to the other side."

I hesitated. The truth was, I could barely swim. While everyone else had spent summers at the community pool or their own backyard pools, I'd been helping my dad with his weird projects. Last summer, we'd spent three months trying to fix the cable TV in the basement because he refused to pay for service when "free waves are literally everywhere."

Kina was already splashing into the water, her dark hair slicking back as she surfaced. "You coming?"

Something in her voice — maybe the fact that she actually wanted me there, in the pool, with her — made me forget everything. I jumped in.

The water swallowed me. For a second, I panicked. Then I kicked upward, breaking the surface with a gasp. Kina was laughing, but not in a mean way. Her eyes caught the pool lights, shimmering like that goldfish we'd won at the fair last year — the one that died three days later because we overfed it, but still.

"Finally!" she said, splashing water at me. "Took you long enough."

I swam over to her, treading water in the glowing blue. Tyler and his friends were still doing their thing in the deep end, being loud and taking up space like they owned everything. But here in the shallow end, it was just me and Kina, and the weird thing was, I didn't feel like the lost goldfish anymore.

Maybe growing up meant realizing some pools had deep ends you weren't ready for, and shallow ends where you could actually breathe. Either way, you had to jump in eventually.

"Race you to the other side," I said. "But warning: I'm slow."

Kina grinned. "Good. Then I actually have a chance."