The Goldfish Incident

The pool party invitation came via a flood of texts on my iphone, half from people I barely speak to. Jordan's house. Saturday. Swimming.

"You going?" Riley asked, flopping onto my bed. She was my best friend, the only person who knew about my massive crush on Jordan — and my equally massive anxiety about being seen in a swimsuit.

"I can't. I look like a literal goldfish out of water. All awkward and weird."

Riley rolled her eyes so hard I thought they'd get stuck. "Maya, you're not a goldfish. You're a fox. Now put on that bikini and let's go."

A fox? I snorted. "Since when do you say fox? Are you a 70s dad now?"

"It's called vintage slang, look it up."

An hour later, I stood at the edge of Jordan's pool, surrounded by half the sophomore class, my heart hammering like I was about to jump off a cliff instead of into, like, four feet of water. Jordan waved from the deep end, and I waved back like a malfunctioning robot.

Then my phone buzzed in my hand — Riley had posted a photo of us with the caption "foxes in the wild" and tagged me. I stared at it. Was I a fox? Could I be?

"You coming in?" Jordan called out.

I jumped.

Not like a graceful diver. Not like someone who understood social cues. I jumped like a startled cat, phone still clutched in my hand, and hit the water with the least elegant splash in recorded history.

When I surfaced, sputtering and wiping chlorine from my eyes, everyone was laughing — not mean laughing, but real laughing. Jordan was grinning. Riley gave me a thumbs-up.

"That was legendary," Jordan said.

I held up my dripping phone. "My mom is going to kill me."

"Totally worth it," Riley said, and something in her voice made me believe her.

Later that night, as I sat on my bedroom floor with a bag of rice and my waterlogged phone, I couldn't stop smiling. Maybe I wasn't a goldfish. Maybe sometimes you just have to take the jump and see what happens.

And maybe, just maybe, Riley was right about the fox thing.