Sweaty Palms by the Pool

The invitation sat on my phone screen for three days before Maya finally DM'd me: "Pool party Saturday. You coming? Don't make me drag you there."

I wasn't a pool party person. I was a stay-in-my-room-with-headphones person. But Maya had been my best friend since kindergarten, and she'd been giving me that look lately—the one that said she worried I was fading away like an old Instagram post.

So there I was, standing by the **pool** in board shorts that felt approximately two sizes too small, clutching a red plastic cup like it contained the antidote to a poison I'd already been infected with. Everyone else seemed to know exactly what to do with their limbs. They floated. They laughed. They existed without overthinking it.

"Hey! You made it!" Maya materialized at my elbow, her hair already wet and somehow perfect. "Try this fruit salad. My uncle went to a farmer's market and bought, like, his body weight in tropical stuff."

She shoved a piece of bright orange fruit at me. I took it, because refusing would require more words than I currently possessed.

"What is it?"

"**Papaya**," she said. "It's literally life-changing. Also apparently full of enzymes that are great for your skin, not that you need it, but—"

I bit down. And immediately wished I hadn't. It tasted like someone had mixed perfume with old bananas.

My face did something uncontrollable.

Maya burst out laughing. "Oh my god, your expression! That's exactly why I wanted you to try it. I needed someone else to suffer with me."

I started laughing too, mostly from relief that I hadn't just insulted her family's fruit offerings.

"You could've warned me," I said, still grimacing.

"Where's the fun in that?" She grinned, then her expression softened. "You okay? You look like you're about to throw up."

I looked at my hands. My **palm**s were sweating. Classic.

"I just—I don't know how to do this," I admitted quietly. "The talking to people thing. The existing in public thing. It's like everyone got a manual I missed."

Maya snorted. "Bro, literally no one got a manual. Jake over there?" She pointed to a guy doing a cannonball that displaced approximately fifty gallons of water. "He asked me if papayas grew on trees last week. We're all just pretending we know what we're doing."

Something about that made the knot in my chest loosen a little.

"Now," Maya said, grabbing my arm, "we're going to jump into that pool together, and you're going to stop standing there like you're guarding the royal treasury, and we're going to have actual fun. Deal?"

I looked at the water, sparkling and chaotic and full of people who were probably just as nervous as I was.

"Deal."