Riddles at the Deep End

Maya's stomach did backflips as she stood at the edge of the **pool**, clutching her phone like a lifeline. The end-of-summer party raged around her — music thumping, laughter exploding, bodies everywhere. She'd barely spoken to anyone since freshman year, and now here she was, somehow invited to Jake's house.

"Hey!" Jake materialized beside her, dripping wet. "You coming in or what?"

"I, uh..." Maya fumbled with her **cable** — her phone charger, tangled around her fingers like a snake. "Forgot to charge my phone. Classic me, right?"

Jake laughed, and she swear her heart synced with the beat. "Nobody cares about phones today. We're playing **padel** later if you want. My parents got a court installed last month."

Maya nodded, pretending she knew what padel was. Tennis, but different? She'd Google it later. If she survived the next hour.

The real reason she'd come was sitting on the patio, looking like some kind of Egyptian **sphinx** — mysterious, untouchable, impossibly cool. Zoe, the girl who'd sat behind Maya in bio last year, who'd once asked to borrow a pencil and somehow made it feel like Maya was doing HER a favor. Zoe, who'd graduated early and was already taking college classes.

Now Zoe was watching her, and Maya forgot how to breathe.

"You gonna stand there all day?" someone called, and suddenly she was being splashed — **water** everywhere, cold and shocking and real.

Maya yelped as Jake grabbed her hand. "Come on!"

She let herself be pulled in, phone and all, because sometimes you just have to jump. The water swallowed her, and when she surfaced, gasping, Zoe was smiling at her from the edge.

"Finally," Zoe said. "We've been waiting for you to join us."

Maybe high school wasn't so scary after all. Maybe she'd been building it up in her head, like some impossible riddle. The answer had been simple all along.

Just jump.