Poolside Lightning

The orange swim trunks had seemed like a good idea at Target, but now they were basically a beacon yelling LOOK AT ME. Lucas stood at the edge of Chloe's pool, clutching his towel like a security blanket. Everyone else was already swimming—splash fights, laughing, the popular crew effortlessly cool. Meanwhile, Lucas was overthinking everything, as usual.

"You coming in or what?" called Jake, who was somehow managing to tread water while simultaneously holding a red Solo cup above the surface. The guy was annoying, but annoyingly confident too.

"Yeah, just warming up," Lucas lied. He wasn't warming up. He was frozen.

He wandered toward the back of the pool area, away from the action, and found himself staring at a ridiculous garden sphinx statue that Chloe's mom had positioned between two rose bushes. The sphinx had this fake-enigmatic expression, like it knew something you didn't. Great. Even the lawn ornaments were judging him.

That's when he saw her—Mia, sitting on a bench behind the sphinx, scrolling through her phone, completely dry. Mia, who he'd been lowkey crushing on since algebra. Mia, who was apparently just as avoidant of the actual swimming part of this pool party as he was.

"Hiding behind the sphinx?" she asked, not looking up. "Same."

Lucas laughed. "These orange trunks felt like a power move when I bought them. Now I feel like a traffic cone."

Mia finally looked up and grinned. "Dude, I changed my outfit three times before I got here. Teenagers are exhausting."

"Seriously," Lucas said. "Why do we do this to ourselves?"

Then it hit him—literally lightning clarity. All that energy spent worrying what people thought, and everyone else was doing the exact same thing. The most popular kids were probably overthinking everything too, just better at hiding it.

"Wanna just not go in?" Mia suggested. "We could sit here and judge everyone from our sphinx throne."

"Honestly? That sounds way better than pretending to be excited about getting splashed by Jake."

They sat there for the rest of the party, talking about everything and nothing, while around them the pool party chaos continued. And somehow, not swimming turned out to be the best part of the whole night.