Swimming With Ghosts

By 11 PM on a Tuesday, I was basically a zombie. Finals week had turned my brain into mush, and I was functioning on caffeine fumes and spite. The only thing keeping me sane was Tank — this pathetic orange goldfish I'd won at a carnival last summer, who stared at me through his bowl like he understood my entire existential crisis.

"You're the only one who gets it, buddy," I muttered, sprinkling fish food into his bowl. My phone buzzed. Group chat blowing up because apparently everyone else had finished their AP Chem review and was now living their best lives at Jake's pool party.

Swimming. Seriously. In November. Because apparently Jake's parents were rich enough to have a heated pool, and my friends were chaotic enough to use it.

I almost said no. The old me would have — the me who still cared about maintaining my carefully curated reputation as the girl who had her life together. But the zombie version of me? She was done. Done with expectations. Done with the pressure to be perfect. Done with pretending everything was fine when my parents were basically roommates who happened to share a last name.

So I grabbed my swimsuit and headed out, feeling like I was sleepwalking through my own life.

The pool area was all steam and laughter, bodies cutting through water that glowed from underwater lights. I slipped in, and suddenly I wasn't a zombie anymore. The water wrapped around me like a second skin, and for the first time in weeks, my brain actually shut up. I swam lap after lap, until my muscles burned and my lungs screamed, until I was too exhausted to overthink everything.

I surfaced near the deep end, gasping, and found Jake floating nearby. He looked different in the weird blue light — softer somehow. Less like the guy who sat behind me in pre-calc and made bad jokes, more like someone who might be carrying his own stuff.

"You okay?" he asked. Not like it was a casual question. Like he actually wanted to know.

I treaded water, suddenly aware of how exposed I was. Not physically — emotionally. Like he could see all the things I was trying to bear alone, the weight that had been crushing me since my mom moved out three weeks ago and nobody knew because I hadn't told anyone.

"Not really," I said, and the words felt like swallowing stones.

Jake nodded. "Yeah. Me neither."

We floated there in silence, and something shifted. Not in a dramatic movie way — in a real way, like a muscle unsticking after being tense for too long. We weren't fixed. Nothing was solved. But for the first time in forever, I didn't feel like I was drowning.

"Thanks," I said later, when I was dripping pool water onto his driveway and my phone was blowing up with texts I still needed to answer.

"For what?"

"For not making me pretend."

He shrugged, already turning back toward the house. "We're all just swimming through it, right?"

I walked home under streetlights, cold and exhausted and somehow more awake than I'd been in weeks. Tank was still waiting in his bowl, swimming in endless circles, and I realized something: maybe that wasn't pathetic. Maybe that was just what it meant to keep going. To keep swimming through everything life threw at you, even when you felt like a zombie, even when the water was cold and deep and scary.

I fed him an extra pinch of food. "We got this, buddy."

And for the first time in forever, I actually believed it.