Poolside Existential Crisis

The first time I saw Jordan, I was literally a zombie. Two hours of sleep, courtesy of 3 AM doom-scrolling, will do that to you. I dragged myself to Tyler's pool party feeling like the undead, hair doing whatever it wanted, dark circles that could've been their own aesthetic.

"Bro, you alive?" Tyler asked, tossing me a soda.

"Barely," I muttered, which was hilarious given what happened next.

Everyone was swimming—or at least pretending to. The popular crew splashed around in the deep end while the rest of us clung to pool edges like our lives depended on it. I stayed poolside because (a) social anxiety, and (b) I'd forgotten to shave and looked like a prepubescent werewolf.

Then Jordan emerged from the house with this giant spinach and feta stuffed pizza slice, and my stomach did that embarrassing fluttery thing. She was laughing at something Mia said, head thrown back, completely unbothered. I'd been crushing on her since biology, when she'd caught me staring at a frog diagram instead of the actual lab work.

"Hey Marcus," she said, suddenly right there. "You coming in?"

My brain short-circuited. "Uh, yeah, just... you know."

Cool, Marcus. Real smooth.

She smiled, and I noticed she had this tiny silver bear charm on her necklace. A polar bear, actually, which I only knew because my little sister was obsessed with Arctic animals for like six months.

"I love your necklace," I heard myself say. "Polar bear?"

Jordan's face lit up. "Yeah! My aunt got it for me from Alaska. They're actually the most terrifying creatures—"

"—but also cute?" I finished, then immediately wanted to dissolve.

She laughed, and it was this genuine sound that made something in my chest expand. "Exactly. Like, they're basically giant murder fluffballs."

We talked for twenty minutes about nothing and everything—her weird obsession with zombie apocalypse preparedness, my irrational fear of clowns, why school pizza tastes like sadness but we eat it anyway. The spinach in her teeth became this whole thing where I debated telling her (she eventually noticed and we both cracked up).

When her mom called to pick her up, she actually seemed bummed to leave.

"Text me?" she said, like it was nothing.

Like it was NORMAL.

I stood there, chlorine-smelling and slightly sunburned, watching her walk away, feeling weirdly alive for someone who'd been dead on his feet four hours ago. The zombie mode had lifted. Sometimes the best moments happen when you're too tired to overthink everything.

My phone buzzed: an unknown number. hey it's jordan 🐻

I grinned, possibly for the first time that day.

Maybe swimming upstream wasn't so bad after all.