The Goldfish Summer

The **hat** was supposed to be my armor. A beat-up dad cap from that thrift store on Main, pulled low enough to hide the fact that I was sweating through my shirt. Summer before sophomore year, and I was determined to become someone new. Someone who didn't sit alone at lunch watching **goldfish** dart around a bowl in the biology lab, wishing I could be that invisible.

"You gonna stand there all night or actually jump in?" Marcus called from where he was already waist-deep in the **water**, that stupid charismatic grin on his face. The pool party of the year. And I'd only come because Maya said she might be here.

My **palm**s were slick against my phone. I should've just stayed home.

Then I saw her. Maya, sitting on the pool edge in cutoffs and that vintage tee she always wore, dangling her feet in the water. My stomach did that embarrassing flip thing.

But before I could even say hey, disaster struck. Some idiot threw a football, and it knocked into the patio table—sending Maya's phone flying straight into the deep end.

"NO!" She scrambled up, panic in her eyes. "My life is literally on that phone!"

Everyone froze. The phone was at the bottom of eight feet of water, and nobody was moving.

That's when I saw it—a **cable** snaking across the patio. A pool vacuum hose. And suddenly I was moving, grabbing it, jamming one end into the skimmer where the suction was strongest.

"I got it," I said, and my voice didn't even crack.

I lowered the other end carefully, using the suction to pull her phone toward the surface. My arms shook. Marcus watched with his mouth open. Maya watched with—was that respect?

The phone broke the surface. I handed it to her, water streaming down my arm.

"You literally just saved my life," she said. And then she smiled.

Later, when I'd dried off and was sitting beside her on the patio chairs, she pointed at my hat.

"You know, you don't need to hide behind that," she said. "You're kinda brave when it matters."

I pulled off the hat. My hair was ridiculous, but I didn't even care.

"Yeah," I said. "Maybe I'm learning."