The Fish Out of Water

Maya stood at the edge of the pool, clutching her iphone like a lifeline. The screen glowed with twelve unread messages from the group chat, but her thumbs wouldn't move. Above her, laughter rippled across the water—perfect, shiny people doing perfect, shiny things, while she remained stuck on dry land.

"Yo, Maya! You coming in or what?" Jake called from the deep end. His hair was wet and spiked up, droplets catching the late afternoon sun. He'd gotten hot over the summer. Like, disturbingly hot. The kind of hot that made your brain short-circuit and your fingers freeze over your keyboard.

"Yeah! Just, uh"—she desperately scanned for an excuse—"gotta reply to this text first."

Lame. So incredibly lame.

She'd barely survived freshman year, but somehow summer had turned everyone else confident while Maya was still the same girl who brought a book to lunch because she didn't know where to sit. Now, here she was at Jessica's end-of-summer bash, completely failing at the most basic teenage requirement: having fun.

Something orange caught her eye near the pool's edge. A goldfish—one of those cheap carnival prize types—flopped weakly in the shallow water, clearly someone's abandoned joke. It gasped, tiny mouth opening and closing, and Maya's heart clenched.

Without thinking, she dropped to her knees and reached in.

"Whoa, what are you doing?" Jake was suddenly beside her, dripping pool water everywhere.

"It's dying!" She scooped up the fish, cupping it in both hands. It was barely moving now, its scales dull in the fading light.

Jake stared. "That's literally the saddest thing I've ever seen."

"We need to put it somewhere safe." Maya scanned the patio desperately. "Does Jessica have—"

"There's a bowl inside," Jake said. "From the punch. Come on."

They sprinted across the patio, Maya cradling the goldfish like it was the most precious thing in the world. Jake filled a crystal punchbowl with tap water while she gently transferred the fish. It flicked its tail once, twice.

"He's gonna make it," Jake said quietly.

They stood there for a moment, watching the fish swim slow circles in the fancy bowl. Water dripped from Jake's hair onto the counter. Maya's phone buzzed in her pocket—probably more group chat messages she didn't know how to answer—and she ignored it.

"You know," Jake said, "I was literally terrified to come today. I almost said I was sick."

Maya blinked. "What? You're like—" she gestured vaguely at his general Jake-ness "—you."

"Fake it till you make it, right?" He shrugged, but his eyes were serious. "Hey, you want to get out of here? There's this food truck down the street. And we should probably figure out what to do with him." He nodded at the goldfish.

Maya's iphone buzzed again. She reached into her pocket, turned it off, and smiled.

"Yeah," she said. "Let's go."