Pool Party Lightning

The gummy vitamin in my pocket was melting against my thigh. Great. Just perfect.

I was fifteen and somehow still taking cartoon-shaped vitamins because my mom insisted they'd help me "grow big and strong." Meanwhile, Kyle was already six feet tall and definitely didn't need chewable supplements.

"You coming in or what?" Maya called from the pool edge, dripping wet. The pool lights turned her skin blue and gold.

"Yeah, just—"

"He's probably overthinking his cannonball," Kyle laughed. "Classic Leo."

Everyone laughed. That tight, Performative laugh that meant they were waiting for someone to do something actually funny.

I'd been friends with these people since elementary school. That was the problem. They knew me as the quiet kid who once brought a stuffed dog to sleepaway camp and cried when its ear fell off. Now they knew me as the quiet kid who still hadn't kissed anyone and probably still had that stupid dog somewhere.

(For the record, Sergeant Paws was lovingly retired to my closet, thank you very much.)

Something shifted. The air went heavy, charged. Water lapped against the pool sides. Then—CRACK.

Lightning split the sky, close enough that the hair on my arms stood up. A collective gasp, then scrambling.

"Inside, NOW!" Kyle's dad shouted from the patio.

We all grabbed our towels and ran. I was last, of course. And in the chaos, my vitamin pocket failed. The melted gummy blob fell onto the concrete, a bright orange smush.

I froze. Everyone would see. They'd know.

But Maya was already there, wiping her hands on her swimsuit. She looked at the orange puddle, then up at me. Something in her face shifted—recognition, not judgment.

"My dad makes me take those too," she said, almost whispering. "The dinosaur ones."

The storm rumbled overhead. We stood there in our wet swimsuits while everyone else dried off inside, two people with embarrassing secrets, connected by a melted vitamin and a lightning strike that had somehow made everything more real.

"Yeah?" I said. "Yours taste like fake cherry?"

"So fake." She grinned. "Like, aggressively fake."

"Same." I smiled back.

The rain started, huge warm drops. We didn't move. Inside, someone was blasting music. Out here, it was just water and light and this strange, electric moment where I felt—finally, weirdly, wonderfully—seen.