The Summer We Didn't Sleep

The chlorine from the community pool still clung to Marco's skin as we sprawled across his basement couch, eating stale chips and watching whatever nonsense the cable guide offered. It was July, the kind of humid that makes everything feel sticky and slow, and we were officially bored out of our minds.

"Dude, pick something already," I said, throwing a pillow at him. "We've been scrolling for twenty minutes."

"Chill, Jordan. I'm looking for the perfect vibe." Marco finally settled on some zombie apocalypse marathon — the kind with terrible effects and worse acting. Perfect.

My phone buzzed. Lily. AGAIN.

"You gonna answer that?" Marco grinned, knowing exactly who it was.

"Shut up." I did answer though. Because I was pathetic.

She wanted to meet at the pool tomorrow. My stomach did that annoying fluttery thing it had been doing since seventh grade, when I suddenly realized my best friend's cousin was, like, actually a human being instead of just Marco's annoying relative.

The next afternoon, I showed up early. Too early. Lily wasn't there yet, but someone else was — a baseball team practicing in the field next to the pool, and suddenly I was remembering how last summer I'd played every day until I broke my wrist falling off a skateboard trying to impress absolutely no one. Now? I just watched other people do things. Coach said I'd "grown out of it," whatever that meant.

Then Lily arrived in this swimsuit that made my brain short-circuit, and suddenly I was underwater.

"You look like a zombie," she said, splashing me. "Up all night again?"

"Maybe," I deflected. Because the truth was embarrassing — I'd stayed up until 3 AM thinking about how to say the things I actually wanted to say.

We swam until our fingers turned pruny. Talked about everything except the things that mattered. The air between us felt thick, like waiting for something to happen but neither of us making the first move.

On the walk home, something rustled in the bushes near the old railroad tracks. A fox — sleek orange and impossibly calm — just stared at us like it knew something we didn't.

"That's literally the coolest thing I've ever seen," Lily whispered.

"Yeah," I said, and for once I didn't overthink it. I just took her hand.

She didn't pull away.

That night, Marco caught me smiling at my phone like an idiot.

"You are SO done for," he said, already planning our next cable-fueled zombie marathon. "But hey, at least you're not bored anymore."