The Pool Party Protocol

Maya's iphone buzzed in her pocket, but she ignored it. Probably just another group chat blowing up about Jordan's pool party — the party she was already standing outside, heart hammering against her ribs.

The pool glittered like something from a music video, laughter spilling over the water's surface. Popular kids. Kids who didn't have to rehearse casual entrances in their bathroom mirrors. Maya adjusted her oversized bucket hat, part of her armor lately. A shield against expectations.

"Hey! You made it!" Jordan waved from the diving board, dripping confidence. "Come on in!"

Maya's phone buzzed again. Then splashed.

Her iphone had slipped from her sweating palm, directly into the deep end. Time slowed. She watched it sink like a tiny, expensive submarine into the blue, carrying her entire social life downward.

"No, no, NO—"

Before she could process this disaster, something streaked past her leg. A cat. A very confused, very determined calico that somehow—how even—leaped from the patio chair onto the diving board, then executed a perfect, gravity-defying pounce into the pool after the sinking device.

"What the—" someone screamed.

The cat resurfaced a moment later, iphone clamped firmly in its jaws, paddling toward the edge like it did this every day. Maya scooped up both cat and phone, her hat falling off, revealing the frizzy hair she'd spent forty minutes straightening.

Silence. Then laughter. But not mean laughter. Genuine, bewildered, delighted laughter.

"That was literally the most badass thing I've ever seen," Jordan said. "Your cat just saved your phone."

"She's not my cat," Maya said, water dripping from her chin, from her hair, from her newly-ruined phone that the mysterious calico had just fished from the depths like it was nothing. "But she's definitely my hero."

The cat shook itself off with feline dignity and vanished under a hedge, leaving Maya standing there, hatless, phoneless, but somehow lighter. Someone handed her a towel. Someone else offered her a spot on the loungers.

"So," Jordan said, grinning. "You coming in? The water's actually perfect."

Maya looked at the hedge where the cat had disappeared. Looked at her iphone, somehow still working despite its swim. Looked at the kids waiting for her to join them.

"Yeah," Maya said, stepping forward. "Yeah, I'm coming in."

She didn't put her hat back on.