Poolside Zombies and the Last Good Summer

The first week of July, Maya's older brother Jay called them the poolside zombies — the group of twelve of us who'd spent every day that summer floating in the Johnsons' backyard pool, phones face-down on the patio chairs, practicing our best impression of people who didn't care that everything was about to change.

"You're all just floating there like zombies," Jay had said, his voice cracking that way it did when he thought he sounded tough. "Waiting for something to happen."

We ignored him. That was summer before senior year, the last summer before colleges and decisions and whatever came after. We were determined to make it infinite.

The cable guy came on a Tuesday. Mr. Johnson had finally decided to cut the cord after years of threatening to, which meant the house WiFi was down for four hours. Four hours without TikTok, without Instagram, without the constant low-grade anxiety of missing something.

At first, we panicked. Maya practically hyperventilated. Tyler actually got out of the pool to pace. But then something weird happened. We started talking. Really talking.

"My dad thinks I should apply to Stanford," Tyler said, spinning a basketball on his finger, the one thing he couldn't quit even when he was supposedly chilling. "But I don't know if I even want to go to college."

"What would you do instead?" I asked, because someone had to ask.

He shrugged. "I don't know. That's the problem."

We spent those four hours talking about everything we'd been too busy scrolling through to mention. Maya's fear that she'd picked the wrong major. My secret writing blog that nobody knew about. The way Leo's parents were getting divorced and he hadn't told anyone because he didn't want to be That Guy with the Broken Family.

"We're not zombies," Maya said finally, when the cable guy's van finally pulled away and the router blinked back to life. "We're just scared."

"Yeah," I said, looking around at all of them — at Tyler still spinning his basketball, at Leo whose eyes were red-rimmed from holding it together, at Maya who was shaking a little from saying it out loud. "We're terrified."

That night, we all went back to our phones. But sometimes, when the WiFi went down or the battery died, we'd remember: we weren't dead yet. We were just at the pool, waiting to figure out who we were becoming.