Pool Party Panic

I was absolutely not ready for Jordan's pool party. Like, physically spiraling in the bathroom while my mom yelled at me to take my **vitamin** gummy because I'd 'skip every meal if she didn't monitor me.' She wasn't wrong.

The problem wasn't the party itself. It was that Jordan's cousin Marcus would be there, and I'd been lowkey obsessed with him since he'd moved here from California wearing that backwards **hat** like he owned every room he walked into. My friends said I was being dramatic, but they didn't see the way he smiled at me in the hallway yesterday like he actually noticed I existed.

So there I was, standing at the edge of the pool in my one-piece that felt simultaneously too childish and too revealing, clutching my towel like a security blanket. The backyard was already chaos—someone had brought a Bluetooth speaker, people were doing cannonballs off the diving board, and Tyler was being his usual **bull** in a china shop self, splashing everyone within a ten-foot radius while practically screaming about how he'd 'barely even drank anything.' The energy was giving 'try way too hard' and I was suddenly exhausted.

Marcus waved at me from the deep end, droplets of **water** streaming down his chest, and my brain short-circuited. I forgot I wasn't actually good at swimming. I forgot I didn't have my contacts in. I definitely forgot that the pool floor wasn't where I thought it was.

The moment I hit the water wrong, everything went sideways. I came up sputtering, my dignity completely gone, while Marcus laughed—not mean, but genuine, like he was actually amused. 'You good?' he called, swimming over.

'Never been better,' I lied, wiping my face and trying to pretend my heart wasn't doing something embarrassing.

'You look like a wet **bear** trying to figure out how it got in a swimming pool,' he said, grinning. 'It's kinda working for you though.'

My friends were losing it behind me. I wanted to evaporate. But as Marcus treaded water beside me, making some terrible joke about how his brother once tried to teach their dog to swim and it did not go well, I realized maybe humiliating myself wasn't the worst thing that could happen. Sometimes you just have to let go of looking cool and let yourself be the person who cannonballs into the deep end without checking if there's water below.

Later, drying off under the string lights while everyone else got loud about nothing, Marcus sat next to me and passed me a soda. 'So,' he said, all casual like his heart wasn't probably also doing something stupid. 'You doing this again next weekend?'

I looked at my wet hair in my phone camera reflection, the ridiculous evidence of my incredible coordination failure, and smiled. 'Honestly? Yeah.'