Poolside Apocalypse

I dragged myself to the community pool like a zombie, thank you very much. Three hours of sleep because Maya finally texted back at 2 AM? Worth it. Totally worth it. My brain was basically mush, but my heart was doing cartwheels.

The pool deck was packed—every popular kid from school already claiming their territory. I spotted Maya immediately, laughing at something Jake-the-Lacrosse-Bear said. Jake, who thought he was hot stuff because he'd hit puberty in fourth grade and grown shoulders the width of a truck.

"Hey, living dead girl!" My best friend Leo tossed me my towel. "You look like you got into a fight with your pillow and lost."

"Shut up," I muttered, but I was grinning. Leo was the only person who could roast me and make it sound like affection. He had this ridiculous bear tattoo on his shoulder—temporary, from some party, but he acted like it was real ink. Said it represented his "ferocious soul." I called it his "fierce middle school phase."

We jumped into the pool, and the water shocked me awake. Swimming laps wasn't really my thing, but Maya was drifting toward the deep end, and suddenly I was Michael Phelps. I wasn't the best swimmer—okay, I barely passed the junior lifeguard test last summer—but desperation makes you fast.

Then Jake splashed me. A tsunami of chlorinated water right in my face. I came up sputtering while his crew laughed.

"That's bull, Jake," I said, wiping my eyes. But my voice cracked—classic—and they laughed harder.

"What? It's just a little water."

Maya rolled her eyes. "You're being a jerk, Jake."

My heart did that thing where it forgot how to beat properly. She defended me. ME. The zombie girl who'd been obsessing over her text for three days.

Leo swam over and high-fived me underwater. "Dude. She just said that. Jake just got checked."

Jake opened his mouth, probably to say something else dumb, but the lifeguard whistle cut through everything. "NO RUNNING. NO ROUGH HOUSING. YOU KNOW THE RULES."

We all froze. Then Maya swam over to me.

"Want to get out of here?" she asked. "There's this sno-cone stand down the street."

I looked at Leo. He winked.

"Yeah," I said, feeling something shift inside me—something bigger than the crush, bigger than the embarrassment. "Yeah, I do."

Maybe being a zombie wasn't so bad if it led to moments like this. Maybe the whole world felt like one big, awkward mess, and we were all just swimming through it together, trying to find the people who made it feel less lonely.