Lightning in the Deep End

The pool party was supposed to be Maya's comeback moment. After two months of being ghosted by her entire friend group following "the incident" (she'd accidentally posted her private diary to her Instagram story for exactly thirty-seven seconds before realizing), this was her chance to prove she was still normal. Still worth hanging out with.

She gripped her iPhone like a lifeline, standing at the edge of Tyler's above-ground pool in her new swimsuit that had cost three weeks of babysitting money. Everyone was already in the water, laughing, splashing, existing in that effortless way Maya couldn't seem to manage anymore. The fake confidence she'd been performing all day was starting to crack.

"Maya! You coming in or what?" Tyler called from the water, and everyone turned to look at her. Of course they'd all notice. Of course they'd all wait.

"Yeah, just—" Whatever she was about to say was cut off by the first crack of lightning, so close it made the air taste like ozone. Thunder followed immediately, rattling the backyard fence.

"Everyone out!" Tyler's mom shouted from the back door. "Now!"

The pool cleared in seconds. But Maya's iPhone—her iPhone, which contained her entire social life, her tickets to next month's concert, three months of saved texts from her grandma before she passed—that iPhone was gone. She'd been holding it. She'd been HOLDING it.

It was at the bottom of the pool.

"My phone," she whispered, and then she was diving in, chlorine stinging her eyes, hands grasping at nothing while rain started hammering the water's surface. Another lightning strike turned the whole world white-blue for a split second. She could see it there, glowing faintly against the pool liner, and she grabbed it, surfacing gasping.

She scrambled out, water streaming from her hair, everyone watching, and her phone was dead. Gone. Three months of texts from Grandma. Gone.

And then she was sobbing, ugly crying, the kind where you can't breathe and your face gets splotchy and there's no hiding it. She'd worked so hard to seem okay, to seem like she could bear anything, but the truth was she couldn't. She couldn't bear losing her grandma's voice again.

Someone touched her shoulder. Tyler, of all people. He wasn't laughing.

"My uncle works at Apple," he said. "Water damage isn't always—" But he stopped, really looking at her. "Wait. Is it the texts?"

Maya nodded, unable to speak.

"I backed them up," said a voice from behind them. Chloe, who'd barely said two words to Maya since the diary incident. "When you showed me that screenshot last month? I noticed you hadn't enabled iCloud backup, so I—" She shrugged. "I did it for you. They're safe."

Maya stared. "You what?"

"I mean, you were basically my best friend before everything," Chloe said, like it was obvious. "I figured you'd want them saved."

Another lightning flash illuminated Chloe's face, and for the first time in months, Maya didn't feel like she was swimming alone in the deep end.