Orange Crush & Zombie Mode

The party was already dead when I walked in, or maybe that was just me running on three hours of sleep and a neon orange energy drink that tasted like battery acid and regret.

"You look like a zombie," Maya said, appearing beside me with her signature timing. She wasn't wrong. I'd been crashing all week, subsisting on whatever passed for nutrition in my parents' kitchen—which, lately, meant those disgustingly chalky vitamin gummies that my mom swore were "basically candy." They were not basically candy.

"Thanks," I muttered. "That's exactly the vibe I was going for."

Maya laughed, but her eyes kept darting toward the kitchen where Tyler—the reason I'd even shown up—was holding court with his friends. Tyler, who somehow made varsity jacket culture look good. Tyler, who I'd had a crush on since September and had approximately zero conversations with.

"Just go talk to him," Maya said, like it was that simple. "What's the worst that could happen?"

I could think of approximately seven hundred worst-case scenarios, but before I could list them, something brushed against my leg. A golden retriever. At a high school party. Because of course.

"That's Buster," said a voice behind me. Tyler. Standing there. Actually talking to me. "My sister brought him. He's technically a therapy dog, but mostly he's just really good at stealing pizza."

The dog—Buster—chose that moment to sit on my foot and look up at me with soulful eyes that said, I am comfortable here, you will deal with it.

"He's, uh, choosing me apparently," I managed, which was stupid. Everything I said was stupid.

"He has good taste." Tyler grinned, and something about the way he looked at me made my brain short-circuit. "So I saw your Instagram post about that documentary you watched. The one about—"

He knew my Instagram? He watched my stories? The ones I posted at 2 AM when I couldn't sleep and my social filter had completely disintegrated?

"The zombie apocalypse one?" I asked, trying to play it cool and failing. "Yeah, I've been kinda obsessed with apocalypse media lately. It's comforting, somehow. Like, at least the world ending would be an excuse to skip calc."

Tyler laughed, actually laughed, and I felt something shift in my chest. "That's exactly how I feel about horror movies. Everything's terrible, but at least there's a monster you can see coming."

We talked for twenty minutes. About movies and school and how we both felt like zombies most of the time. About the weird pressure to be enthusiastic about everything when sometimes you just wanted to lie in bed and eat those vitamin gummies your mom bought in bulk.

Before he left, he wrote his number on my hand in orange Sharpie—because the universe apparently loved its themes.

"Text me," he said. "If you want to talk about more documentaries. Or whatever."

Maya found me later, sitting on the back porch with Buster still glued to my side, staring at the orange numbers on my palm like they might disappear.

"So?" she asked, and I could hear the smile in her voice.

I looked up at the sky, thinking about zombies and vitamin deficiencies and dogs that chose you and boys who remembered your Instagram posts at midnight.

"I think," I said slowly, "I might not be a zombie anymore."

Maya rolled her eyes. "That is SO cheesy."

"Yeah," I said, grinning at nothing. "Yeah, it is."