Summer Scheme Zombies

The **orange** sunsets in Florida were supposed to be beautiful, but mostly they just signaled another night of pretending to be someone I wasn't. I slouched against the **palm** tree behind the convenience store, nursing a warm Orange Crush and watching the parking lot fill up with expensive cars.

"You're missing the opportunity of a lifetime, cuz," Marcus said, his eyes glazed with that terrifying intensity. "This isn't just selling protein powder. It's about building your **pyramid**—your network, your future." He'd been recruited into some multi-level marketing scheme over spring break, and now he was trying to recruit everyone he'd ever met.

I nodded, feeling like a **zombie** from three hours of sleep and too many iced coffees. Finals had drained me, and summer was supposed to be about recovering, not about becoming an "entrepreneur" at sixteen. But Marcus had that desperate look—the same one I'd seen on seniors who'd peaked too early and were now scrambling to find something, anything, that made them feel special again.

"My downline could be huge," he kept saying, oblivious to my thousand-yard stare. "You know everyone at school. Imagine if you got the popular kids involved—"

I looked at his phone, open to some app showing his "earnings" (which were definitely negative) and his "team" (which was definitely just our aunt and his roommate). The pyramid was real, but not in the way he thought. He was at the bottom, digging himself deeper while someone somewhere rich got richer off his desperation.

"Marcus," I said, surprising myself with how steady my voice sounded. "You're not an entrepreneur. You're a customer who recruits other customers. That's not a pyramid. That's a circle, and we're both stuck in it."

He blinked, something shifting behind his eyes. The spell broke, just for a second. The zombie walked away from the pyramid, and the palm tree became just a palm tree again, and the orange sunset was still beautiful after all.

"Wanna get actual jobs at the beach instead?" I asked. "Minimum wage, no recruiting required."

He smiled, and for the first time that summer, he looked like my cousin again. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I think I'd like that."