The Goldfish Summer

Maya clutched the oversized bucket hat her mom made her wear, feeling like a total fraud at Jordan's pool party. Everyone looked like they'd stepped out of a TikTok, while Maya looked like she was hiding from the sun. Which she technically was, but still.

"You coming in?" Jordan called, doing a backflip off the diving board. Maya watched, mesmerized. Jordan made swimming look easy—graceful, confident, everything Maya wasn't.

"I'm good!" Maya yelled back, lying. She wasn't good. She was terrible.

Her phone buzzed. Jordan had actually asked for her number in chemistry last week, and now: "hey! u gonna swim or just hold up the wall lol"

"maybe in a bit haha" Maya typed, fingers shaking. Smooth. So smooth.

What she didn't say: that her swimsuit was from sixth grade, that she hadn't been swimming since the Great Incident of 2021 when she'd belly-flopped in front of everyone, that she felt like a goldfish in a bowl everyone was watching but nobody actually saw.

Goldfish. Right. She'd won one at the carnival last month. Named it Finnigan. It died three days later. She'd buried it with a popsicle stick grave marker because that's what you did when you were sixteen and everything felt too big.

Jordan climbed out of the pool, water dripping like they were in a music video. "You okay?" Jordan asked, suddenly right there.

Maya jumped. "Yeah. Fine. Just... you know. Chilling."

"You've been standing there for like twenty minutes."

"I'm contemplative."

"You're hiding."

Jordan laughed, and Maya felt it in her chest. "You know what my little brother calls me? Zombie. Because I'm always half-asleep from swim practice at 5 AM and I just shuffle through the house looking for coffee."

"You don't look like a zombie."

"That's because the pool water wakes me up." Jordan's expression shifted softer. "I failed my driver's test three times. The instructor asked if I knew what a stop sign was. I said, obviously, I'm not a goldfish. I then proceeded to drive through a stop sign because I was overthinking."

Maya actually laughed. "Seriously?"

"Straight up. We're all pretending. Some of us just do it with better hair."

Maya looked at the pool where everyone was laughing and splashing like they knew what they were doing. She thought about running from everything since seventh grade, the way Jordan had noticed anyway.

Maya took off the hat.

"Race you," she said, and jumped.

Later, she'd realize Jordan let her win. But bursting through the surface while Jordan whooped like they'd won the lottery, Maya felt something shift. Like she'd been running from nothing for years and finally, finally stopped.

The goldfish would've been proud.