Poolside Static

The Friday everything went wrong started with a good idea: invite Maya over to swim. My parents were gone, the weather was perfect, and I'd been crushing on Maya since seventh grade health class. What could go wrong?

Everything, apparently.

First, the pool cleaner—that long, snake-like **cable** snaking across the bottom—decided to die mid-cycle. So instead of a crystal-blue oasis inviting Maya to jump in, my pool looked like a swamp creature's habitat. I spent twenty minutes with a pool net, trying to make it look less like we were about to film a horror movie.

Then came Buster, my golden retriever who has zero chill. No sooner had Maya arrived than Buster spotted a squirrel and went full beast mode, knocking over the drink table and sending soda cans rolling across the deck like some disastrous bowling experiment. I wanted to die.

Maya just laughed though, which somehow made it worse and better at the same time.

"Your **dog** is wild," she said, scratching Buster behind the ears like he hadn't just destroyed my social life.

We ended up at the **padel** court in my backyard instead of the pool. I'd been playing since last summer, when my dad went through his midlife crisis phase of buying sports equipment. Maya had never played, so I got to teach her—which meant standing awkwardly close while trying to explain the rules without sounding like a total dork.

She was terrible. Like, impressively bad. But every time she missed the ball, she'd crack up, and I found myself grinning like an idiot. At one point she tried to serve and hit the fence instead, and we both collapsed laughing in the middle of the court.

"I think I'm retiring from professional sports," she said, wiping sweat from her forehead.

"Yeah, probably for the best."

Later we ended up back at the **pool** with our feet in the water, talking until the sun went down. Buster passed out on the deck, exhausted from his squirrel-chasing adventures. The dead cable still coiled at the bottom of the pool, and the padel racquets lay abandoned on the grass.

I didn't even get to kiss her. But when she texted me later that night—"today was actually fun"—I figured that was basically the same thing.