Vitamins and Vertigo

Maya's palm was sweating against her iPhone screen as doom-scrolled through party invites. Again. The beach bash was in two days and she'd spent the last three summers watching from her bedroom window while other kids lived their best lives.

"You going?" Kai asked, dropping onto the bus seat beside her. He was the kind of effortlessly cool that made Maya's stomach do backflips.

"Maybe?" Maya lied, shoving her phone deeper into her backpack. "Still deciding."

"You should," he said, all casual shoulder shrugs and easy grins. "We're doing swimming races. Half the people can't even swim properly, so it's mostly chaos and laughs."

Swimming. Right. Because the one thing Maya needed was to be in a swimsuit around Kai.

That night, she found herself running on the treadmill at 11 PM, mostly to avoid thinking about how she'd say no. But somewhere between mile two and three, something shifted. The rhythmic thud of her sneakers, the vitamin D gummies she'd started taking because her mom said she never went outside—it all clicked. She wasn't running away from the party. She was running toward feeling like herself.

By Friday, Maya showed up at the beach wearing a swimsuit she actually liked. Kai was there, splashing water at someone near the pier.

"You came!" he yelled, wading over. "Ready to get absolutely smoked in the races?"

Maya laughed, feeling weirdly light. "Bring it."

When her palm accidentally brushed his while everyone crowded around the race results, she didn't panic. She didn't check her phone for escape routes. She just stood there, sand between her toes, ocean air filling her lungs, and thought maybe sometimes you had to stop running from things to find out you actually wanted to swim toward them all along.