Market Crash at Midnight

The night sky above the community pool glowed that weird orange from the streetlights—like someone had spilled a Creamsicle all over the atmosphere. Marco sat on the edge, legs dangling in the water, wondering how his life had become such a clown show.

"Yo, you gonna jump or just marinate?" Ty called from the deep end, splashing water everywhere like a chaotic fountain.

"Hold up, I'm mentally preparing," Marco shot back, though really he was stalling.

The pool was closed, obviously. They'd snuck in through a hole in the fence Ty had made with some bolt cutters he'd "borrowed" from his uncle's garage. Classic Ty behavior—impulsive, chaotic, somehow always convincing.

Across the water, Maya was already floating on her back, phone somehow dry despite everything. "Y'all are so dramatic about this. It's literally just water."

"Easy for you to say, you didn't face the wrath of Coach Miller today," Marco groaned. "That man absolutely went full BULL on my ass in third period."

"Wait, what?" Ty paddled over. "Coach Miller? The guy who's literally always talking about his glory days?"

"Caught me checking my stocks instead of watching game film, and then proceeded to lecture me about how crypto is for suckers while literally owning a boat he named 'Stock Option' like it's clever. The irony was pAINFUL."

Maya laughed so hard she almost sank. "You were checking stocks in gym class? You're such a bear, dude. Always predicting doom while everyone else is trying to live their lives."

"I prefer 'financially cautious,' thank you very much."

"You're afraid of everything," Ty said, but his voice was gentler this time. "Including this pool. Which is four feet deep in the shallow end, Marco. It's not gonna kill you."

Marco looked at his phone—one last notification from his trading app. Something about market volatility. Something about how the world was always on the edge of collapsing.

But then he looked at Ty, who'd failed algebra twice but could talk his way out of literally anything. Maya, who'd dyed her hair seven times this year and wasn't apologizing for any of them. And here Marco was, seventeen years old, still treating every decision like it needed a risk assessment.

"You know what?" Marco stood up. "Coach Miller can kick rocks."

"There he is!" Ty cheered.

Marco cannonballed into the pool, and for a second, the water swallowed everything—the anxiety about college applications, the constant algorithm pulling at his attention, the pressure to have everything figured out.

He surfaced, gasping, as Maya and Ty cracked up at his spectacularly ungraceful entrance.

"Bro, that was the most awful thing I've ever witnessed," Ty wheezed. "Zero style points."

"I don't care," Marco said, and he actually didn't. "This is better than stocks."

"Finally," Maya said, tapping Marco's shoulder with a wet hand. "You're learning. The market can wait. Being seventeen only happens once."

They stayed until the orange faded to gray, until Marco's fingers looked like raisins, until the security guard's flashlight beam swept across the parking lot and they had to scramble over the fence, wet clothes and laughter and absolutely zero regrets.