Riddles at the Pool Edge

Maya's legs dangled over the deep end, chlorine stinging her nose, toes skimming water that looked way too inviting for someone wearing a full-face of makeup she'd spent forty minutes perfecting. The pool party crowd, loud with forced laughter and Instagram poses, felt miles away from where she sat.

"You gonna swim or just pretend you're a sphinx guarding the deep end?"

Maya jumped. Leo. He'd materialized beside her, dripping wet, dark hair plastered to his forehead. The Leo who'd been her childhood best friend until eighth grade when everything got weird. Now he was a varsity swimmer with an annoying tendency to show up whenever she felt most fake.

"Ha ha," Maya deadpanned. "Some of us value our contour."

"Contour this." Leo splashed her.

Maya shrieked as cold water hit her legs. "You absolute—" She lunged, and he dodged, grinning that lopsided grin that made her stomach do things she refused to acknowledge. They ended up in the water anyway, Maya's makeup surrendering to chlorine, both of them laughing like they were ten again.

Later, tucked into a lounge chair with the sphinx cat his neighbor owned—yes, a literal hairless sphinx cat named Riddles—Maya realized something. The cat, with its alien wrinkled skin and enormous ears, was completely unbothered by its own weirdness. It just *was*.

"Hey, Riddles," Maya whispered, scratching behind its ears. "You ever feel like you're performing? Or are you just out here living your best life?"

The cat blinked slowly, utterly unimpressed.

Her phone buzzed. The group chat, tagging everyone for plans. Being included, but barely. The kind of friend who keeps you around for numbers.

"You okay?" Leo sat beside her, towel-drying his hair. "You went quiet."

Maya looked at the sphinx cat. At Leo, who'd somehow always known when she wasn't fine, even when they weren't speaking. At the party continuing behind them, everyone performing for cameras.

She wiped her smudged mascara. "Yeah. Just... thinking maybe swimming with raccoon eyes wasn't the worst thing that could happen."

Leo grinned, and Maya decided that maybe—just maybe—figuring out who you actually were, makeup or no makeup, fake friends or real ones, was just another kind of riddle. And the answer wasn't about solving it. It was about finding the people who'd sit with you while you tried.