The Last Summer of Us

The chlorine smell still clung to my skin as I burst through the back door, finding Mateo exactly where I'd left him three hours ago—glued to his phone on my bed, legs up the wall like he didn't have a care in the world. Meanwhile, I'd just survived my first week of **swimming** practice at the community center, and my arms felt like they might actually fall off.

"Dude," I said, dropping onto the floor beside his pyramid of empty Gatorade bottles. "Are you seriously still here?"

Mateo finally looked up, grinning like he hadn't a) blown me off for the third time this week, or b) forgotten that we'd promised each other we'd spend every day of our last summer before high school together. But now he was all caught up in whatever group chat explosion was happening with those kids from the summer enrichment program—the ones whose parents had money for actual camps.

"Chill, Maya," he said, like I was being the dramatic one. "I was literally just about to text you back."

But I knew he wasn't. That was the thing about Mateo—he got distracted, and then he forgot, and then he acted surprised when I called him on it. He'd been my best **friend** since we were seven, back when our biggest problem was who got the last fruit snack. Now everything felt different, like we were drifting toward different planets and neither of us knew how to stop it.

My phone buzzed—a message from Mom: "Don't forget, dinner at 6. Dad's bringing home something special."

"Whatever," I muttered, grabbing my running shoes from the corner. "I'm going for a run."

"You're always **running** somewhere lately," Mateo called after me, but he didn't move to follow.

The summer heat hit me like a wall as I jogged down the street, past Mrs. Chen's house with its perfect lawn and the Miller twins' place where they'd built that weird shed shaped like a **pyramid** last summer. Everything in this neighborhood felt stuck in time, everything except me and Mateo, everything except the way I couldn't stop noticing how different we were becoming.

Two weeks later, Mateo told me he'd made the soccer team at his new school—some fancy private academy across town with uniforms and a pool and kids whose parents actually knew people. I tried to be happy for him, I really did. But when he said, "You should come to my first game, it's gonna be lit," all I could think about was the mascot on his school's jersey—a grinning **bear** wearing a crown, like it owned the whole world.

"Sure," I said, even though we both knew I wouldn't go. "Maybe."

That night, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the fan cut through the humidity. Everything was changing. Everything was ending. And somewhere in the space between who we were and who we were becoming, I realized the scariest part wasn't growing apart—it was that Mateo didn't even notice it happening.