Riddles at the Deep End
Maya stood at the edge of the pool, clutching her iPhone like a lifeline. The screen glowed with notifications she'd already read twelve times. Inside, laughter erupted. Someone cannonballed. She wasn't missing much—except she totally was.
"Hey! Maya!" Jake waved from the hot tub. "Get in here!"
She fake-smiled and held up her phone. "Gotta take this."
Her phone buzzed. Not a text. Just Instagram reminding her that everyone else was living their best life while she stood there in a towel that felt increasingly like a security blanket.
A cat—a scrawny orange tabby that had definitely seen better days—materialized from behind the bushes. It sat near her flip-flops, tail twitching, judging her.
"What?" Maya whispered. "You think I should just jump in?"
The cat blinked, unimpressed.
Then she saw it: Mr. Henderson's lawn ornament, positioned suspiciously close to the pool fence. A sphinx. Some ancient Egyptian creature with the body of a lion and the head of a human, staring eternally into the distance like it knew something she didn't.
Great. Now a lawn statue was roasting her.
The sphinx had posed riddles to travelers, right? Something about what walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, three in the evening. The answer was "humans." But what was Maya's riddle?
What holds a teenager back from the pool?
Answer: Her own brain, apparently.
The cat meowed. Once. Like, *dude, seriously.*
Maya looked at her iPhone—thirteen notifications, zero actual emergencies. She looked at the sphinx—stone face, eternal wisdom, zero chill. She looked at the pool—chlorine and freedom and Jake shouting her name again.
"Screw it."
She tossed her iPhone onto the lounge chair (carefully, she wasn't insane) and dove in.
The water swallowed her whole. For three seconds, everything was blue and muffled and perfect. Then she broke the surface, splashing Jake right in the face.
"Finally!" he laughed, wiping water from his eyes. "What took you so long?"
Maya treaded water, heart racing, and shrugged. "Riddles."