Riddle by the Pool

The humidity hit my **palm**s first—sweaty, gross, immediately noticeable. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my board shorts and wished I could disappear into the decorative **sphinx** statue that leered from the corner of Chloe's backyard like it knew exactly how much I didn't belong here.

"Yo, Marcus! You gonna stand there all day or actually get in the water?" Jordan yelled from the pool, already halfway through a cannonball that would definitely displace half the **swimming** pool onto Chloe's perfectly manicured lawn.

This was it. The moment. The one that had been keeping me up all week. Chloe's end-of-summer blowout. The whole squad was here. Even her family's golden retriever, Buster, was doing laps like he owned the place. **Dog** had more game than me.

I'd been trying to upgrade from "Chloe's **friend**'s friend" to "actually Chloe's friend" since freshman year. This party was supposed to be my in. But instead of mingling like a normal human, I was standing next to an Egyptian statue having an existential crisis.

"Marcus!" Chloe waved me over, radiant in this yellow bikini that made my brain short-circuit. "We're playing chicken fights. Jordan needs a partner."

"I—I don't really swim—" I started, but Jordan was already hauling me toward the shallow end.

"Bro, it's chicken fights, not the Olympics," Jordan laughed, practically tossing me into the water. "Just don't drown me, yeah?"

Cold water shocked my system. Chloe climbed onto her friend Sarah's shoulders across from us. "Ready to get wrecked?" she called, grinning like this was exactly where she was meant to be.

Something shifted in that moment. Maybe it was the chlorine stinging my eyes, or the way Sarah and Chloe moved together like they'd been practicing for years, or just the sheer ridiculousness of me—awkward, anxious Marcus—locked in a chicken battle against the girl I'd been crushing on forever.

But as I pushed onto Jordan's shoulders and locked hands with Chloe, laughing as we both nearly toppled over immediately, I realized something important. Nobody was watching me like I thought they would. Nobody cared that I couldn't really swim. They were just trying to have the best possible time before summer ended.

We lost. Spectacularly. But as I resurfaced, spluttering and laughing while high-fiving a very wet Buster who'd jumped in after us, I caught Chloe's smile. And for the first time all day, my palms weren't sweating anymore.