Goldfish in the Deep End

The pool party raged around me, chlorine-heavy air thick with laughter and the bass of someone's phone blasting through a waterproof speaker. I stayed plastered to the side, nursing my solo cup of punch like it was a lifeline.

"Yo, Marcus!" Jayden yelled, cannonballing into the deep end and sending a wave of water over everyone. "Get in here or are you scared?"

I wasn't scared. I was just me. The new kid. The one whose parents moved him across the country three weeks before junior year, expecting him to just slide into someone else's friend group like it was nothing.

"I'm good," I mumbled, but Jayden—the resident bull of Harrison High's social hierarchy—was already wading over, dripping wet and radiating that effortless confidence I'd been trying to fake since day one.

"Bro, you've been standing there for twenty minutes holding that same cup." He splashed me. "Living a little?"

Behind him, I noticed a girl on the pool deck crouched over something. She was crying, actually crying, and everyone was ignoring her because she was Maya—the quiet one who brought a homemade lunch every day and sat alone at lunch.

I drifted over, trying to look casual. "Everything okay?"

She looked up, mascara streaking down her face. "My goldfish. I—my mom said I couldn't leave him alone, so I brought him, but—" She gestured to a plastic bowl overturned on the concrete, a tiny orange shape flopping desperately in the sun.

"Oh crap."

I didn't think. I just scooped up the goldfish in my hands and made a run for the kitchen, bursting through the sliding door with Maya right behind me. We dumped him in a mixing bowl filled with water, both of us breathing like we'd just run a marathon.

"Thank you," she whispered, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. "He's stupid, but he's mine."

"Yeah." I looked at her, really looked at her, and noticed the spinach stuck in her teeth from earlier. "You've got a little—" I pointed.

She turned bright red. "Oh my god. I tried this vegan spinach wrap thing from the food table and—"

"It's fine." I smiled. "It's actually kind of perfect."

We stood there for a moment, the goldfish swimming fratically in its mixing bowl sanctuary, and I realized something: I didn't need to be Jayden. I just needed to be the person who stopped to help a drowning goldfish.

"Wanna go back out there together?" I asked.

Maya grinned. "Only if you protect me from Jayden."

"Deal."

We walked out side by side, and for the first time since moving here, the pool didn't feel so deep anymore.