Cable Boys and Midnight Zombies

The summer before junior year, I learned that seventeen feels exactly like being a zombie—minus the cool supernatural backstory. It's more like: exist, scroll, repeat.

Me and Jay spent half our break behind his dad's garage, hunched over this tangle of ethernet cable we'd snaked from the router through a hole in the siding. Jay called it our "operation." I called it pathetic. We were literally running outside every twenty minutes to reset the modem because his mom kept unplugging it to "save energy," whatever that meant when we were just trying to rank up in Apex.

"Dude," Jay said, wiping sweat from his forehead. "If we don't hit Diamond by August, I'm actually gonna lose it."

"You say that every week," I muttered, but I kept grinding.

That's when Chloe found us. Not like, lost-in-the-woods found us. She knew we were there. She'd been watching from her back fence for days, probably judging us hard for doing absolutely nothing with our lives.

Chloe Martinez, who ran track and made everything look effortless, stood there in cutoffs and this oversized band tee that I low-key wanted to steal. She held up her palm like a stop sign.

"You guys know you can literally see my room from here, right?"

My brain did this weird glitchy thing. I'd been stuck in zombie mode all summer—just coasting, barely present. But suddenly I was hyper-aware of everything: the cable digging into my knee, Jay's stupid grin, the way Chloe's hair caught the afternoon light.

"We're not creeping," I said, way too fast.

"Never said you were." She stepped closer. "My wifi's garbage though. You guys think you could...?"

Jay snorted. "She wants in on the operation."

"Shut up, Jay."

So we spent the next hour running cables under her fence, setting up this whole network that definitely violated some HOA rule or electrical code. Chloe sat crosslegged in the grass while we worked, asking about games and school and why Jay's laugh sounded like a dying hyena. I caught her looking at me a couple times—not looking through me, actually at me.

That night, lying in bed, I realized something: I didn't feel like a zombie anymore. Maybe it was the cable running across the yard connecting our houses. Maybe it was how Chloe had squeezed my hand before she left, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Maybe, finally, I was actually waking up.