Operation Chlorine

I'd been basically cyber-spying on Maya Chen for months before I accidentally followed her on Instagram. Big mistake. Suddenly my carefully curated fake account—a place to watch from afar—felt exposed, like when your therapist mentions that thing you thought you'd buried deep.

Three days later, I sat in the school bathroom with a box of neon blue hair dye, breathing in fumes that definitely weren't OSHA-approved. The first streak hit my temple like electric paint. By third period, half the sophomore class had seen it. Maya commented "bold choice" on my post and I almost threw up.

This was supposed to be the year I became someone else. Someone who didn't spend Friday nights watching Netflix with her cat while doom-scrolling through people living their best lives. Midnight, my emotionally support animal, would literally head-bonk me until I put the phone away.

"You're spiraling again," she'd say during our weekly therapy sessions. My therapist, not the cat. Though honestly, Midnight's judgement hit harder sometimes.

Monday brought the announcement: swimming unit in PE. For someone who'd strategically avoided pool parties since seventh grade, this was basically my personal apocalypse. I showed up in my mother's old one-piece—it hit me like a dress from the 90s.

The locker room smelled like coconut everything and teen insecurity. I kept my towel wrapped until the last possible second, then made a tactical dive into the pool before anyone could look.

Water does this thing where it equalizes everything. Under the surface, nobody's checking your body or judging your strokes. It's just you, propulsion, and the muffled sounds of the world above. I actually stopped sucking at swimming for like five whole minutes.

Then I surfaced to Maya standing at the edge, neon waves in her own dark hair.

"Your blue washed out," she said, grinning. "Need help fixing it?"

Later, sitting on her bathroom floor with foils in my hair and Midnight watching judgmentally from the windowsill, I realized something: I'd spent so long spying on everyone else's lives that I'd forgotten to live my own.

"So," Maya said, catching me looking at my phone. "You gonna put that away, or what?"

I set it down. Finally.