Palm Reader at the Pool Party

Maya's palms were sweating. Again. She wiped them on her jean shorts —ugh, why did she even come to Tyler's pool party? The bass from the speakers thumped against her chest, and everywhere she looked, people were being annoyingly effortless. Jake doing cannonballs. Skylar snapchatting her smoothie. Even Tyler's weird cousin was in the deep end, swimming backward like it was totally normal to be that comfortable with existence.

Then Chloe flopped onto the lounge chair next to her.

"Okay but can you actually read palms though? Like for real?" Chloe's eyes were wide, maybe from the sun, maybe from whatever was in that red solo cup.

Maya's heart did that thing where it forgot how to rhythm. "I mean, my grandma taught me some stuff? It's mostly just... vibes?"

"Do mine!" Chloe shoved her hand forward, and okay, Maya had seen enough TikToks to fake this.

She took Chloe's hand and tried to look mysterious instead of panicking. "Your life line is... surprisingly long. That's good, probably."

Chloe gasped. "No way. What else?"

"You're gonna... meet someone?" Maya was literally making this up as she went. "His name starts with... a T?"

Chloe's jaw dropped. "TYLER?"

Maya's brain short-circuited. "Sure? Yes? Tyler. Definitely Tyler."

Suddenly Tyler himself was standing there, dripping wet, grinning that devastating grin that made everyone forget he was kind of a tool. He reached down and plopped a snapback onto Maya's head — backward, because of course.

"You're holding up the psychic business, I see," he said, and she could feel herself turning approximately the color of a tomato. "Chloe, you know she's just reading your hand lines and making stuff up, right?"

"She said I'd meet someone whose name starts with T!" Chloe practically shouted.

Tyler laughed, and it was annoyingly genuine. "I mean, statistically..." He looked at Maya, really looked at her. "You're good. Have you considered doing this for real? Palm reading, I mean. Not the whole fortune teller aesthetic, but the —"

"The vibes?" Maya offered.

"Exactly. The vibes."

For once, her palms weren't sweating. She adjusted the hat — his hat, actually, she was literally wearing his hat — and something in her chest loosened. Maybe fake palm readings weren't the worst way to learn how to swim after all.