Riddles by the Pool

Jordan's hands were sweating—like, actual droplets in his palms. Gross. He wiped them on his swim trunks again, but it didn't help. The Taylor's end-of-summer pool party loomed ahead like a social minefield.

"You good?" Marcus asked, already halfway to the water.

"Yeah. Just... gotta do this." Jordan's voice cracked. Classic.

The pool sparkled with that too-perfect blue that only happened when someone's parents paid for weekly maintenance. Groups clustered around inflatable flamingos, doing that thing where everyone pretended to be casual while actually performing careful social calculus. Where was safe to sit? Who could you approach without being weird?

Then he saw her. Lena. The sphinx of sophomore year. She perched on the diving board like it was a throne, surrounded by three girls Jordan didn't have the confidence to talk to. Lena with her perfectly messy hair and that expression that said she knew everyone's secrets and wasn't impressed.

"Dude, just go talk to her," Marcus whispered, shoving Jordan's shoulder. "She's just a person. She puts her cat sweatpants on one leg at a time like everyone else."

"Cat sweatpants?"

"You know what I mean. Her cat probably has better sweatpants than me, honestly."

Jordan snorted despite himself. Maybe this wasn't impossible.

He approached the pool edge, rehearsing casual greetings in his head. Hey. What's up. Nice party. All lame.

"You're Jordan, right?" Lena's voice cut through his mental spiral. She was looking at him, actually looking, with those sharp eyes that noticed everything.

"Yeah. Hi."

"Riddle me this," she said, and her friends giggled. "What's the thing everyone wants but nobody actually likes getting?"

"Uh..."

"Attention." She smirked. "Anyway, Marcus told me you're into the new fantasy series."

Jordan's brain short-circuited. Marcus had prepared an opening? That bro actually came through?

"Yeah! I just finished book three. The sphinx riddles in chapter seven were—"

"So good!" Lena lit up. "I stayed up till 2am solving them before I kept reading."

The rest blurred into easy conversation about plot holes and character arcs and how they'd both cried at the ending. The party noise faded to background. His palms stopped sweating.

Later, cannonballing into the cool water with Lena and Marcus, Jordan realized something: the scariest social situations were just riddles you hadn't solved yet. Once you figured out the pattern, the answers made sense.

"Same time next week?" Lena called as he headed home.

"For sure."

Jordan walked home grinning like an idiot. Sometimes sphinxes weren't mythical monsters. Sometimes they were just people waiting for someone to understand their language.