Surface Tension

The iPhone 14 Pro Max lay at the bottom of the pool like a drowned artifact, its sleek black case mocking me from three feet under. I'd only had it for two months. Only two months of curating the perfect feed, only two months of becoming someone else online, and now—splash.

"You just had to text him, didn't you?" Sophia said from the pool's edge, not even trying to hide her smirk. She'd been waiting for this moment, I could tell. Waiting for the flawless facade to crack.

I dove under, chlorinated water stinging my eyes, reaching for the phone that held my entire social existence. My fingers grazed the case—

A hand grabbed my ankle. I surfaced, sputtering, to find Sophia grinning. "It's dead, Maya. Let it rot with the lost Atlantis of deleted DMs."

"My mom will actually kill me." I tread water, heart pounding harder than it should. "Literally murder me in my sleep."

"Worth it." She swam over, treading water beside me. "You were spiraling anyway. Tyrone's not worth drowning over."

I snorted. "Tyrone's not the problem. It's the—" I waved vaguely at the underwater phone "—the constant curation. The sphinx posing riddles I can't solve. Am I cool enough? Funny enough? Pretty enough?"

"You know what the sphinx asked Oedipus?" Sophia said suddenly.

"What walks on four legs in the morning—"

"No, the OTHER question. The one nobody remembers." She flipped onto her back, floating. "'What runs smoother than a rasp, whispers softer than wind, and makes teenagers bear the unbearable?'"

I laughed. "That's not a real riddle."

"The answer's 'nothing,'" she said. "We just bear it anyway. That's the whole point."

"Since when are you the philosopher queen?"

"Since my best friend started hyperventilating over a boy who didn't even text back for three hours." Sophia reached for my hand underwater. "Maya, you're bear-ing the weight of an entire social pyramid on shoulders that are, statistically, not designed for that kind of pressure."

"Bear-ing? That's not even a word."

"It is now." She squeezed my hand. "So the phone's gone. So what? You're still here. I'm still here. The real friends—the ones who dive into pools to rescue dead technology—those are the ones worth keeping."

I looked at her, really looked, past the sophomore popular girl exterior she'd been curating since seventh grade. She'd done the math on my dad's therapist bills. She'd noticed I wasn't sleeping.

"You're my best friend, you know that?" I said.

"Obviously." Sophia grinned. "Now help me fish that thing out before my dad sees we were swimming in his filtration pond again."

We dove together, two girls in the deep end, bearing the riddles of sphinxes and surviving them side by side.