Dead Man Walking

I was officially a zombie. Not the cool, sparkly kind from movies. The walking-through-high-school-hallways-dead-inside kind.

My summer had been a disaster. Trying out for the baseball team because that's what guys did at my school. Spending hours at the batting cages, swinging at nothing, pretending I cared about RBI stats and technique. My hair was falling out from stress, so my mom suggested these biotin vitamins. I took them religiously, like they were magic pills that would fix my entire life.

And through it all, there was my iPhone. My goddamn lifeline to everyone else's perfect lives. Watching post after post of kids who actually knew what they were doing. Kids with perfect hair and perfect smiles and perfect passions.

"You look tired," Maya said at lunch on the first day of junior year.

"I'm fine," I lied. "Just tired from baseball practice."

"You hate baseball," she said, not even a question.

I froze. How did she know?

"I saw you at practice last week," Maya continued. "You looked miserable. Like, actually in pain."

I stared at my phone, thumb hovering over Instagram. Then I did something I never did. I told the truth.

"I hate it," I admitted. "I hate the vitamins. I hate pretending to care about sports. I hate watching everyone else live their best lives while I'm just... existing."

Maya laughed. Not mean laughter. Real laughter. "So quit."

"What?"

"Quit baseball. Stop taking the vitamins. Put down the phone and actually talk to people." She grinned. "Join something you actually like. The drama club needs tech crew. The art club needs models. The zombie movie club needs... people who like zombie movies."

"There's a zombie movie club?"

"Every Friday after school," she said. "I'm the president."

I looked at Maya really looked at her. Her hair was messy and real. She wasn't checking her phone every five seconds. She wasn't pretending to be someone she wasn't.

"I'm in," I said.

That was the day I stopped being a zombie. The vitamins went in the trash. The baseball glove stayed in my closet. And Friday afternoons? Friday afternoons were for watching terrible B-movies and eating popcorn and finally, actually, feeling alive.