Hailey had always been fearless and a little too curious for her own good, but she’d always had Claire there behind her, urging her on, concocting their plans. She stuck her toes in the water and wondered what would become of her once she was all by herself. A nobody, a nothing, with no one to talk to and no one to call in the middle of the night when she heard her mother crying, or when a stray dog knocked over a garbage can. Hailey stood at the very edge of the pool. Before Claire could tell her it wasn’t a good idea, before she lost all of her courage, she dove in.

Hailey was such a good diver, there wasn’t a sound when she entered the water, just a series of ripples circling out from the center of the pool. Claire quickly clambered over the ropes and ran to the spot where Hailey had last been standing, making certain to hold onto the railing so she wouldn’t fall in herself. Claire had spent her whole life worrying that her friend would do something foolish and jump in headfirst where she didn’t belong, and now Hailey had done exactly that.

The strange, cloudy water made Claire more nervous about the pool than she usually was. She had never even learned the Dead Man’s Float, which, when you really thought about it, wasn’t the most comforting name. You never could tell what might happen in the water. You’d have to have faith in yourself to dive in, and that was something Claire didn’t possess.

Sixty seconds later, Hailey came bursting back through the surface, sputtering and shaking with cold. She dragged herself up the rungs of the ladder, too chilled and breathless to speak. In the deep end of the pool, the moon jellyfish rode the current through strands of brown seaweed.

Best friends don’t need to be told when something extraordinary has happened, and this was the case with Hailey and Claire. One look, and Claire knew that her friend’s swim had been anything but ordinary.

“What did you see?” Claire asked. “What’s down there?”

Hailey didn’t say, You’ll never believe me, which is what she would have told anyone else. She knew Claire would believe her, no matter what, so she whispered the name of what she’d seen in the deep end of the pool where everything was hazy and dim. Claire held even more tightly to the railing, lest she fall in and be faced with the creature Hailey had seen, because she absolutely, positively, without a doubt, believed.

On this day when Claire’s grandfather asked, “What’s new Susie Q’s?” the girls stared at each other, eyes shining.