Pool Protocol

I never meant to become the resident spy of the Riverside Community Pool, but that's kind of what happens when you're the only employee who actually shows up on time.

My summer job was supposed to be simple: sit in the lifeguard chair, blow the whistle when someone did something stupid, and occasionally demonstrate proper swimming technique to kids whose parents treated swim lessons like survival training. Instead, I'd accidentally become the keeper of everyone's secrets.

It started when I found Maya's phone behind the old filter system. She was the junior I'd been crushing on since she'd dissed my playlist during free swim—my taste in music was apparently "basic beyond repair." The phone was connected to this ancient coaxial cable someone had rigged near the ceiling, probably trying to steal the pool's barely-existent WiFi. I didn't snoop. Okay, maybe I glanced at a notification or two. But that's when I saw it: Maya's texts to someone named "Alex 💜" about how she was terrified of tryouts for the swim team because she'd "never swum competitively before" and didn't want to embarrass herself.

Maya? The girl who'd told me my backstroke looked like a "drowning squirrel"? The same Maya who'd spent all summer acting like she owned the pool?

I should've put the phone back and forgotten everything. That's what a normal person would do. But the next day at swim practice, I caught her watching the team with this expression I knew all too well—wanting to belong but being terrified of not being good enough. So I did something possibly stupid but definitely out of character.

"Hey," I said, dropping my towel next to hers. "If you want to practice without an audience, the pool's empty on Tuesdays at six. I may have accidentally borrowed a key."

Maya stared at me like I'd grown a second head. "Why would you help me? You said my freestyle was tragic."

"I said your *technique* was tragic," I corrected, which was technically true. "But your endurance is actually solid. And unlike some people, I don't think embarrassing myself in public is a personality trait."

She laughed, and it was this real, unguarded sound that made my stomach do something annoying and fluttery.

We started practicing together Tuesdays and Thursdays. No audience, no pressure, just me trying not to be obvious about how her being exhausted and pool-haired somehow made her more attractive, and her slowly admitting that being popular was exhausting when you felt like a fraud the whole time.

By the time tryouts rolled around, Maya made the team. I didn't—I wasn't trying out, obviously—but watching her dive in on day one, confident and ready, made me realize something about this whole spying thing.

Sometimes knowing people's secrets isn't about having power over them. Sometimes it's about seeing them real, even when they're busy pretending to be someone else.

"Thanks," she told me later, passing me a soda. "For not being weird about the cable incident."

"What cable incident?" I deadpanned, and she grinned.

We never talked about the phone again, but I kept accidentally-on-purpose forgetting to lock the pool on Tuesdays. Some secrets are worth keeping, especially when they're not really secrets at all—just people waiting for someone to notice they're not as perfect as they pretend to be.