Summer at the Bottom of the Pyramid

The pool deck at Tyler's house was basically a social pyramid, and I was definitely at the bottom. Actually, scratch that—I wasn't even on the pyramid. I was the dirt the pyramid sat on.

"Yo Marcus, you gonna swim or just hold up the wall all day?" Tyler called out, doing a cannonball that splashed half the party. Everyone laughed. I managed a weak smile and adjusted my stupid bucket hat—Mom insisted I wear it because "the sun's no joke," but it wasn't exactly doing me any favors with the cool factor.

I grabbed an orange soda from the cooler, my third one, trying to look busy. My swimming trunks were from last season, too short in the legs, and I'd spent the last hour strategically positioning myself near the snack table to avoid the whole swimming thing.

Then Jordan showed up.

Jordan moved through the social pyramid like it wasn't even there. They were just naturally magnetic, the kind of person who could wear a cable-knit sweater in July and somehow make it work. Jordan's swim trunks had this vintage aesthetic, all retro patterns and perfect fit.

"Hey," Jordan said, sliding up next to me at the snack table. "Aren't you in Mr. Chen's English class? You wrote that essay about existentialism in Fortnite?"

My face burned. "Yeah, that was me. Pretty cringe in hindsight."

"Nah, it was actually fire," Jordan said, popping open a cream soda. "Everyone was talking about it. You got, like, a unique voice."

We talked for twenty minutes about video games and how teachers always say "this will prepare you for real life" even though nobody's ever gonna need to calculate the area of a trapezoid outside of geometry class. Jordan actually laughed at my jokes. Not the polite laugh people give when they feel bad for you, but real laughter.

"Wanna play chicken?" someone yelled.

"You down?" Jordan asked.

I looked at the pool—sparkling blue, full of people who'd been in my classes since kindergarten but never really seen me. Then I looked at Jordan, smiling like they actually wanted me to say yes.

I took off my hat and set it on the table.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I'm down."

The social pyramid was still there when I finally crawled out of the pool an hour later, dripping wet and exhausted. But somehow it didn't seem so insurmountable anymore. Sometimes you just gotta jump in the deep end.