Lightning in a Bottle

Maya stood at the edge of the pool, clutching her phone like a lifeline. The water glittered with that impossibly blue chemically-enhanced glow, and somewhere inside, Jordan was laughing at something stupid Brian said. Probably another one of his dad jokes.

"You coming in or what?" Jordan called out, splashing water her way. His wet hair was plastered to his forehead, and Maya's stomach did that annoying flutter thing it always did when he looked at her.

"Uh, yeah! Just... gotta take my vitamins first!" she yelled back, mentally facepalming. Who brings a bottle of gummy vitamins to a pool party? Her mom, apparently, who'd slipped them into her bag with a note about immune systems and summer colds.

She downed two orange-flavored bears and checked her phone. Still no signal. The cable internet at her house had been out since morning, and now her data was barely holding on. Perfect timing to be cut off from the group chat where everyone was making plans for tonight.

A crack of thunder split the air. The sky, which had been suspiciously gray all afternoon, finally opened up. People screamed and scrambled out of the pool as the first fat drops hit.

Maya grabbed her stuff and made a run for the covered patio, but something made her stop. Jordan was still in the water, treading slowly, looking up at the sky.

"What are you doing?" she called over the growing thunder.

He turned, water dripping from his eyelashes. "Waiting for lightning. My cousin says if you see it hit something, you can make a wish and it actually comes true."

"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."

"Probably." He swam to the edge and pulled himself out, water streaming down his shoulders. "But everything's dumb lately, right? School's over, everyone's pretending to be someone they're not, and we're all just... waiting."

Maya's chest tightened. He felt it too.

"So," he said, standing way too close. "if lightning doesn't strike, what do we wish on instead?"

She looked at him—really looked at him—and the joke about vitamins, the cable outage, the ruined pool party, none of it mattered anymore.

"Maybe we don't need to wait for lightning," she said. "Maybe we just... make it happen ourselves."

Jordan's smile was slow, real, and everything Maya had been waiting for.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I like that."