Kass grabbed the flashlight from the bar as Maze drifted towards the patio of the exposed basement. Kass held a finger to her lips through the dark, so Maze was cautious as she lifted the lock on the patio door.

The door creaked on the track, but the movement upstairs was loud enough to drown it out. One-by-one, they slipped out onto the concrete platform before shutting the door and skirting around the building, hidden by the raised deck above them. Their stealth was surely a product of having done this dozens of times before, for street racing, drinking with friends, and other illegal activities back in high school. Maze was surprised by how smoothly it went.

Kass was wearing a hoodie now that the sun was down. A cool breeze swept down the gravel road down to the lake, and Maze took a deep breath of it and sighed. The trees were nothing but shadowy stripes in her periphery, and the sky was far from starry. In fact, the orange hue from Indy obscured all of them except Venus, which she could spy above the open expanse of the lake.

They paused at the platform so Kass could identify the spot where they had gone before—around a faint bend in the lake that obscured their tomfoolery from any nearby houses.

Kass pointed off to it and said, "There's a switchback path that connects down to a dock that's by the water."

"So cool," Maze breathed, shivering from the excitement of it all. It was different from the adrenaline she felt when racing—racing felt like life or death, but this felt scandalous.

Kass flicked the flashlight off through their walk around the outskirts of the lake. There was a road that circumnavigated it—it wasn't all that large, and Maze suspected a walk around it would roughly be a mile. As they approached the switchback trail, she picked up her pace, all but prancing down the steps and running down the wooden boards to the dock where the moon reflected on the water.

The water was so inky and dark that the reflections on the water made it look like glass. She ducked down onto her knees to reach off of the dock and glide her fingers through the water. She tossed the superhero towel aside in favor of sitting back and pulling off her sandals.

And then, she sat there with her feet in the water like she had done the entire day, and sighed. Content.

"Hate to break it to you, but that isn't skinny-dipping," Kass said as she sat cross-legged beside Maze.

Maze smiled, her eyes closed. "I know. The water's so warm," she commented, kicking her feet out. The water sloshed around her ankles. "Are you gonna go in?"

"Yeah, probably."

They sat in silence for several more seconds before they both took a deep breath to speak again.

Maze stammered out, "Oh, no, you go."

Kass scoffed, rubbing at her damp hair. "I was just... gonna say that it sucks we can't see the stars."

Maze looked up at the dull, inky sky where it merged with the orange haze from the city. "At least we saw them that one weekend," she said. "If you could live anywhere, where would you go?"

"Probably Canada," Kass confessed.

Maze startled to look at her. "Wait, really? Why Canada?"

Kass shrugged. "I dunno. Just sorta makes sense. You?"

Maze grinned, tipping her head against her shoulder. "Anywhere you are."

Kass laughed. "Fuck off."

"I'm serious," she said. She shrugged when Kass said nothing and said, "I mean, sure. I came here for my mom... and stuff. And it's great that Bryan's still around. But you've always been a hinge on everything in my brain."

She flattened out her hands in front of her, so all the scars showed over the veins and tendons protruding from the backs of her hands. "There are all these things that matter to me, but nothing is more effective at pivoting them than me thinking, like... 'What if I get to see Kass again?' 'Wouldn't it be nice to talk to Kass again?'"

She turned her hands inward, on a hinge, like the doors in her mind opening up. And then, she slapped her hands down.

"I just think about you constantly. I have for years. It's just sort of routine maintenance at this point. Tallying up the number of times I thought about you in a day. Usually once or twice or three times, which doesn't... seem that bad until you realize that, oh, you've thought about Kass more than a thousand times this year. And if you had a dollar for every minute you spent daydreaming about her, you could pay your rent in a month."

"That's... a lot," Kass said.

"Yeah," she laughed. "It is."

"What would you even think about? Because we both know it wasn't me in a compromising position considering you were straight before this," she said, and Maze laughed again, this time nervously.

"You'll think it's corny," she said, looking down at her folded hands.

"Try me."

She glanced over at Kass, who was watching her with wide eyes turned black in the night. She couldn't pick out the color in her irises, or even much more than her fair complexion in the dark.

Maze smiled a little. She leant back on her hands and said, "I'd just... daydream about what college woulda been like with you. I'd be at... a party or something. And you could just catch my brain drifting off thinking about, fuck, I bet Kass woulda badgered me to a keg stand right about now."

Kass cackled, passing her hand up the side of her face as she looked away. She shook her head as Maze went on.

"Or I'd just space out in the middle of lecture and think about what sorta notes you'd pass me in class. Like, if we took the same lib eds together, I bet we'd doodle or watch YouTube videos together with our earbuds in."

"Not paying attention?" Kass commented.

"No, no—"

"Of course not, why would we?" she said, and Maze grinned. "Sounds nice, though."

"Yeah," she sighed, and in the silence, she splashed her feet around in the water a bit more. After a moment, she said, "I sometimes daydreamed about you getting a girlfriend."

When Kass said nothing, Maze half-assumed Kass hadn't heard, but it was so quiet, she knew that was impossible. She swallowed hard.

"I'd just... make up scenarios in my head. About meeting her and... how I'd react. How happy I'd say I was, but I think I was just... jealous of girls that didn't even exist. Like I was just biding my time before you'd break up, and I'd emotionally nurse you back to 'health', whatever that is, and we'd move on and joke about what a bitch that girl was. And how you're so much better off without her, because you're the fucking greatest and you don't need a girlfriend anyway 'cause you've got me, or whatever. 'Cause who needs girlfriends when you've got a best friend."

"I think you need to go to therapy," Kass said.

It was an instant and automatic slap to Maze's face, but she couldn't stop babbling.

"What?" she said, shaking her head. "That's—I mean, yeah maybe. Everyone should go to therapy—"

"I mean, you're crying right now."

"No I'm not—" she started, but out of paranoia, she brushed a hand over her cheeks.

The dampness was from the fact that she had been splashing her feet around in the water.

She felt more than heard the boards creak as Kass turned to face her, one foot dipping off of the edge of the dock and swinging towards the water. Maze brushed her hands over her eyes, baffled by the heat underneath them and the fact that her eyes couldn't seem to stop burning now that Kass had pointed them out.

A spike of fear shot through her. How many times had her friends looked at her with concern and she had been crying like this without knowing? Before she could overanalyze every time Bryan or Declan had looked at her like she was insane, Kass spoke up.

"Maze, you had one semester left in college and you quit," Kass said.

"That was because of finances," she said, shaking her head. That didn't matter.

"You were in a fucking car accident and now you're racing again. You shouldn't be racing, first of all," Kass said, and she didn't waste a breath as if she knew Maze had a dozen excuses already in order. Finances, mostly. "Your dad is literally on life support, and I know you don't want to talk about it because you barely see him as it is. And yeah, I know, because I've only seen your name on the sign-in list twice since you got back."

Maze blinked, struck by that fact. How could Kass possibly know that unless she went to visit Maze's dad? She resisted the urge to look at Kass because the knot in her throat felt close to bursting. Any sudden movement might rupture the floodgates.

"We had a huge fucking fight before you left for college that we've barely even talked about," Kass reminded her, as if she ever forgot it. "And I'm not about to psychoanalyze you right now, but half of the time it feels like I'm talking to High School You. I don't even know who you are anymore."

Maze's voice was fragile. "I haven't changed."

"Yes you fucking have," Kass said, voice raising. "You lived in New York City for three and a half years and you're gonna tell me that didn't change you as a person? I haven't heard you talk about New York or your old apartment or your friends from college at all."

"If you want to hear about New York, I could tell you," she insisted, but it was a little too late for it to have any bearing on Kass's impression of her.

Kass just stared at her, and the only reason Maze knew that was because Kass's gaze had a weight to it that pressed like a needle through her ribcage.

Maze cleared her throat. She couldn't deny that therapy felt... Well, she wasn't quite sure what it felt like to her. All her contradictions rose up at the thought of sitting across the room from some person holding a clipboard asking her how she was feeling. She didn't want to talk about feelings the way she and Bryan always bickered about. She didn't want to be told by someone with a PhD that what she was feeling was wrong.

But it was more than that and she knew it. She knew that every reason she might have for going to therapy was marked on a timeline—one that Kass laid out for her that night on the dock. It was racing cars, the adrenaline junkie in her head, her dad in the hospital, the way she often pretended like Hiromichi's still belonged to her dad even though it was Mr. Peter's office now. Like it didn't bother her that, while she was off in New York, Kass was practically living her dream life at Hiromichi's.

It was the fight they had and every terrible thing she had said. Why had she said all those things and why couldn't she confess to it without feeling like someone had their hand strangled around her throat?

"Declan brought it up tonight," Kass confessed.

"You guys were talking about me?" she said, slowly. Her head felt like it was held together by a dozen rubber bands around her forehead.

"Yeah," she sighed. "It was actually Declan's idea. That you should see a therapist."

Declan.

It stung just a little more to know that every last one of his friends from high school was convinced that something was wrong with her. Out of all of them, Declan felt the most normal, the least tentative with her, and she appreciated that.

She just didn't realize that he was analyzing her behind her back.

"Maybe after I pay off the medical bills," she said, shaking her head. "I just don't want to think about it until then."

"Why did you pick street racing for that, though? You have a day job, you could've asked Mr. Peters for a part-time gig—literally anyone would hire you in town," Kass said, but Maze was already standing up. "You could be the fucking DJ at the skating rink right now for kid birthday parties."

Maze snorted as she reached down to the hem of her shirt. She tugged it up and over her head, balling it up between her hands. She used it to cover the grafting scar on her stomach, like that was so much more scandalous than her exposed chest as she said, "You said it yourself: I have the music taste of an emo middle schooler."

"Yeah, and I swear to God that's all they play there."

"I'll think about it," she sighed, though she knew she wouldn't. "Could you look away for a second?"

Kass turned away. As Maze tossed her shirt aside along with her shorts, Kass pulled off her shirt. Maze kept her unsteady eyes as much to herself as possible, but the instant Kass stood and let her shorts slip down her lean hips, Maze's attention scattered. She swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and dove from the dock.

It felt like nothing she had experienced before. Regularly swimming—with her swim shorts and shirt on and all—was far more restrictive, and without the fabric suctioning itself to her arms and legs, she tried to compare it to something else instead. She hadn't taken an actual bath in ages, so that was out of the picture. Besides, with no bottom to the lake, she fell into the deep end with all its open majesty before returning to the surface to sigh and say, "This is amazing!"

Kass hissed from the dock, "Pipe down! You tryna get us arrested or something?"

Maze covered her mouth, cackling a little.

Kass took a running start. Maze covered her eyes, grinning like a fool, as Kass slipped into the water without rousing a wave. The instant she cut through, all visual of her vanished until the pale ghost of her silhouette cut through the water a few paces away. She surfaced, gasping.

Maze pushed away and swam out into the great expanse of the lake. The lake itself wasn't all that large—she could see the opposite cliff just a long swim away, and she whisper-shouted over to Kass, insisting that they race to the other side.

"I'm too exhausted," Kass confessed, sighing.

Right, Maze realized, because Kass had taken the trek down here three times in total now. She glided back, saying, "Okay. We can just float here then."

They turned onto their backs so their eyes were on the sky. Maze pried her arms away from covering herself, trembling with the effort. She reached her arms back, feeling for Kass's shoulders. Kass swatted her hands away, but Maze clasped onto them as her hips buoyed onto the surface. She stretched their arms out on either side as Kass's damp hair dripped like silky fabric against her shoulder.

"Synchronized swimmers," Maze whispered.

"I'm guessing that's us now."

"Yeah. I bet we could do it. On the count of three we pedal left. One—two—three—"

They pinwheeled, slowly, the water slopping around their ankles. Maze closed her eyes, smiling at the sensation of Kass's pruney fingertips against her wrist. They counted again and kicked, turning full-circle in a matter of minutes.

"I bet an owl is looking at us right about now wondering whether or not our nips are snacks," Kass said, turning her head to look at the shore.

"Oh, God, I don't want to think about that."

"Better duck and cover then."

Maze slapped her hand over Kass's face, laughing. She dropped her hand into the water a second later, stretching her arm back out to grab hold of Kass's extended hand.

They drifted onward past two in the morning, all but falling asleep on the water. At some point, they were pushed back towards the dock where Maze's leg bumped into one of the pillars, so they climbed out and toweled off so they could shimmy back into their clothes. They were too exhausted to bother feeling self-conscious.

At the house, the air conditioning was still on full blast in the basement. With their hair still damp from the lake, they huddled under the covers of their queen-sized bed, and Maze determined that she really didn't mind the thought of cuddling with Kass again. She shuffled closer as each passing second pressed her deeper and deeper into the mattress. Her limbs weighed a ton, and Kass grunted when Maze all but flattened herself onto Kass's chest.

"Fat-ass..." Kass groaned, half-asleep.

Maze smiled, weakly, and said, "Maybe so," before passing out.