Lightning in the Deep End

I wasn't supposed to be at Taylor's pool party. I wasn't supposed to be ANYWHERE that required me to take off my hoodie and expose the arms I'd been hiding since seventh grade. But here I was, standing at the edge of the water in my one-piece, while girls who looked like they walked straight out of Instagram floated effortlessly on giant inflatable slices of pizza.

"Yo Maya, you coming in or what?" Bear—that was Taylor's boyfriend, massive and lumbering and somehow everyone called him Bear without irony—splashed water at me.

My phone buzzed in my bag. I checked it compulsively, even though I knew what it would say. My charging cable was frayed at home, and my battery was at 8%. No safety net. No excuse to text my way out of this.

"I'm good!" I called back, voice doing that stupid crackle thing. "Just, you know. Warming up."

The sky, which had been doing that ominous gray thing all afternoon, finally snapped. Lightning tore across the horizon like the sky had been paper and someone had ripped it open.

"Everyone out!" Taylor's mom shouted from the patio. "Storm's coming in fast."

That was when I saw it—Avery, the girl I'd been lowkey obsessed with since September, was struggling with her giant inflatable flamingo. The wind had caught it, and she was being dragged toward the deep end. She couldn't swim. I'd heard her say it in bio last week, voice barely above a whisper.

My body moved before my brain could sabotage me. I hit the water, and something shifted inside me. The water—the enemy, the thing I'd avoided since I was twelve and someone made fun of how I looked in a swimsuit—suddenly felt like somewhere I belonged. I reached Avery, grabbed the flamingo, towed her back to the shallow end where she could stand.

"You saved me," she said, hair plastered to her face, makeup streaming everywhere. And she was still the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

"Yeah," I said, treading water, heart hammering. "I guess I did."

Everyone was rushing inside, but we stayed there for a second longer. Lightning flashed again, turning everything stark and brilliant and real.

"You're really brave," Avery said. "I thought you were just, like, shy."

"I thought so too," I admitted. "Maybe I was wrong."

We ran inside through the downpour, laughing like maniacs. Later, I'd find someone's spare cable and charge my phone, discover like forty texts from my mom and zero from anyone else. But that night, wrapped in a towel that smelled like chlorine and thunder, watching Avery laugh at something stupid Bear said, I realized something:

I wasn't who I thought I was. And that was actually okay.