Poolside Protocol

The pool party raged around me, a blur of splashing bodies and too-loud laughter. I clutched my iPhone like a lifeline, thumb-scrolling through feeds I'd already scrolled through three times. Anything to avoid eye contact with anyone in the water.

Maya, the girl whose biology notes I'd been borrowing all semester, waved at me from the deep end. "Marcus! Get in here, the water's perfect!"

"Nah, I'm good," I mumbled, not looking up from my screen. Truth was, I couldn't swim. Not properly. Just enough to not die, which wasn't the same as actually being comfortable.

She swam over to the edge, dripping wet, hair slicked back. "You've been at every pool party since seventh grade with your phone in hand. Are you ever gonna actually get in, or do you just like pretending you're too cool?"

The burn hit my cheeks. I set my iPhone on the concrete table, screen-down, before I could think too hard about it. "Fine. But I'm not going in the deep end."

Maya's grin widened. "Baby steps. Come on."

I slid into the shallow end, the shock of cool water hitting my chest. It felt foreign and terrifying, my feet uncertain on the slippery bottom. Maya showed up beside me, treading water easily.

"You're stiff as a board," she said. "Relax. The water won't bite."

"Easy for you to say," I muttered, but I forced myself to loosen up. To let the water hold me. It was... kind of nice. The weight of everything—school, expectations, that constant pressure to perform—seemed to float away.

"See?" Maya said softly. "Sometimes you just have to let go."

I looked back at my iPhone, dark and forgotten on the table. Then I looked at her, at the way the pool lights danced across her face. For the first time all night, I wasn't thinking about who was watching, who was posting, who was doing what.

"Yeah," I said. "Sometimes you do."

Maybe I wasn't ready for the deep end yet. But this? This was okay. This was enough.