Spinach Smoothies & Zombie Walks

Max stood in front of the bathroom mirror, staring at the dark circles under his eyes. Three weeks into summer and he'd already binged all seven seasons of that zombie show twice. His brain felt like mush, which was ironic considering the amount of green mush he'd been forcing down his throat every morning.

"You good, bro?" his best friend Leo asked through FaceTime, looking annoyingly fresh from beach volleyball.

"Yeah, just... tired." Max swirled his spinach smoothie, watching the leafy bits float to the top like tiny green icebergs. "Trying this new wellness thing. Spinach, kale, some vitamin supplement my mom got. Supposed to help with energy."

Leo laughed. "Dude, you're not a zombie. Stop acting like one. Just come out tonight. Sarah's gonna be there."

Max's stomach did that thing where it forgot how to be an organ. Sarah, with her galaxy-painted Converse and the way she actually laughed at his terrible puns. But he'd been ghosting everyone lately, caught in this weird spiral of feeling like he needed to "fix himself" before he deserved good things.

"I don't know," Max said. "I haven't been, like... present lately. What if I'm boring now? What if—"

"What if you stop overthinking everything and just show up?" Leo cut him off. "You're not a zombie apocalypse survival guide, Max. You're a sixteen-year-old who needs to get out of his house."

That night, Max found himself at Leo's backyard bonfire, clutching his phone like a safety blanket. The air smelled like citronella and roasting marshmallows, and someone's playlist was that indie music everyone pretended to discover first.

Then Sarah sat next to him on the log bench.

"Haven't seen you much," she said, her voice carrying over the crackling fire. "Everything good?"

"Yeah," Max started, then stopped. Why did he always do this? Why did he hide behind everything except himself? "Actually, no. I've been in this weird funk. Watching zombie shows, drinking spinach smoothies, trying to be this version of myself I think I should be."

Sarah smiled, and it wasn't the polite smile she gave teachers when they made terrible jokes. "That's weirdly specific, but I get it. Last month I tried to learn chess because I thought it made me look smart. Ended up just getting frustrated and eating way too many vitamin gummies."

Max laughed, and for the first time in weeks, the fog lifted. "You played chess to look smart?"

"Shut up," she shoved his shoulder playfully. "What about you? What's the spinach situation about?"

"Thought it would fix everything," Max admitted. "My energy, my confidence, my—"

"Your zombie-like tendencies?" Sarah finished.

"Exactly." He paused. "But maybe I just needed to show up."

"Yeah," she said, leaning slightly closer. "Sometimes you don't need a supplement. You just need to stop watching the apocalypse from your window and actually live in it."

The fire popped, sending sparks toward the stars. Max's spinach smoothie was sitting on his kitchen counter at home, probably developing a weird separation between the green and the watery. And somehow, that was perfectly okay.