The Goldfish Protocol

The problem with being fifteen is that everyone expects you to know how to exist in rooms without immediately calculating all available exits. I was standing at the deep end of Chloe's above-ground **pool**, clutching a red solo cup like it contained the antidote to something, while my crush laughed at something someone else said.

"Hey." A girl with hair dyed the color of a traffic cone appeared beside me. Riley, from my biology class. "You look like you're mentally reciting the Gettysburg Address. That your coping mechanism?"

"Is it that obvious?" I said, and she laughed, which made me feel weirdly proud.

She pointed toward the shallow end where some sophomores were—yep, actually throwing a carnival **goldfish** into the pool. The fish flared its ridiculous fan-tail, translucent and panicked, doing tiny frantic laps in chlorinated water.

"That's literally torture," Riley said, already moving.

We improvised. I didn't think. I just moved. We fished that stupid fish out with a butterfly net someone had left on the deck, and I cupped it in my hands while the sophomores made confused sounds behind us. Riley produced a **orange** plastic bucket from somewhere—she'd seen them bring it out earlier, she'd been preparing for this moment specifically, she was kind of brilliant—and we transferred the fish into water she'd thoughtfully dechlorinated with drops from her pocket.

"You carry dechlorinator drops in your pocket?" I asked, impressed.

"You never know when you'll need to rescue a fish," Riley said solemnly. Then she grinned, and I noticed for the first time she had a tiny gap between her front teeth. "Anyway, you were going to let that fish die?"

"I was calculating exits, remember?"

"Same thing." She sat on the pool deck, dangling her feet in the water. "You're at a party. That's the scariest thing that can happen to a person. You survived. You can handle rescuing a fish."

Maybe she was right. Maybe growing up was just doing things without thinking them through first, then figuring out the rest later. I sat beside her.

"What happens to the fish now?" I asked.

"My brother has a tank. It'll live its best fish life." She bumped my shoulder with hers. "We're friends now, by the way. Rescuer alliance."

Chloe walked by then, and I didn't mentally calculate all exits. I said hey. She said hey back. It wasn't a moment. It was just a moment.

But sitting there with Riley and the fish, I finally stopped thinking about leaving.