Washed Up

The chlorine stung my eyes as I clutched my iPhone against my chest like it was my own heart. Pool parties at Jessica's house weren't really my thing—too many people, too much skin, way too many opportunities to say something weird. But Maya had insisted, and anything was better than another Saturday night doom-scrolling through everyone else's highlight reels while my phone died on the charger.

"You okay?" Jake's voice cut through the splashing. He was standing at the edge, holding one of those fancy vitamin water things his mom was always pushing. He looked good—sun-bleached hair, board shorts, the kind of effortless confidence I'd been trying to fake since seventh grade.

"Yeah, just... thinking." I treaded water, my phone hidden beneath the surface like a terrible secret.

"About what?" He slid into the pool beside me, smooth as anything. The water rippled between us, distorting his face in ways that made him somehow more real.

"Everything." I laughed, but it came out wrong. "How weird it is that we're all here pretending to have fun while our actual personalities are just... curated content?"

Jake was quiet for a minute. Then he said, "You know those vitamin gummies my mom makes me take? The ones that taste like artificial strawberry despair?"

"Yeah?"

"I stopped taking them months ago. Just flush them down the toilet every morning." He shrugged. "Sometimes you gotta fake it to get through the day, but other times... you just gotta do what actually works."

My phone buzzed against my chest underwater—Maya, probably, wanting to know where I was. And suddenly it hit me: I could stay here, treading water with Jake, talking about secretly flushing vitamins, or I could surface and check my messages and miss whatever this was.

"Hey," I said, letting my feet sink until I was standing on the bottom, my phone dripping onto the concrete deck beside us. "Want to just... hang out here?"

Jake grinned, and it wasn't his curated Instagram smile. "Yeah. Yeah, I do."

The party raged on behind us, but neither of us moved. Some moments aren't meant to be captured anyway.