The Pyramid of Last Summer

I started running because it was the only time my brain would shut up. Every morning at 5 AM, before the rest of the world woke up to demand things from me, I'd lace up my worn-out Nikes and hit the streets. My dog Buster—this chunky golden retriever mix who looked like a loaf of bread with legs—would waddle alongside me for the first half-mile before giving up and waiting by Mrs. Henderson's porch for me to loop back around.

That morning changed everything. I was cutting through the old construction site behind the abandoned strip mall when I saw it. A pyramid. An actual, perfectly-formed pyramid, maybe eight feet tall, built entirely from Diet Coke cans, old textbooks, and what looked like three years of homework assignments. Sitting on top was a stuffed zombie doll with one eye hanging loose, its plastic grin somehow mocking everything.

"What the actual—" I started, until I heard voices.

I ducked behind a rusted dumpster. Three kids from my grade emerged from the shadows—Maya Chen, who sat behind me in pre-calc and never spoke; Marcus Williams, the lacrosse bro who looked like he'd been carved from marble; and Sofia Rodriguez, who I'd never actually seen without her AirPods in.

They were building something together.

"The zombie goes on top," Maya was saying, like this was completely normal. "It's symbolic."

"Symbolic of what?" Marcus asked, stacking another layer of biology textbooks.

"Of us, dummy. Of how we're all just walking through school like zombies, doing what they tell us, climbing this pyramid that someone else built."

I inhaled sharply and kicked a can. They all turned at once.

Four hours later, I learned that Maya, Marcus, and Sofia had been meeting here every Sunday for months. They called themselves the Pyramid Committee. They built art installations out of garbage to process their feelings about high school. The zombie was recycled from a Halloween display. The dog—I was now holding Buster, who'd somehow followed me—was now the committee's unofficial mascot.

"You running from something, or running toward something?" Sofia asked me, the first words I'd ever heard her say without AirPods involved.

"Both," I said.

"Good," Maya said. "We need both." She tossed me a can. "Start building."

Now when I run at 5 AM, I'm not running away anymore. I'm running toward the pyramid, toward three friends who somehow get what it means to be seventeen and exhausted and weirdly hopeful. Buster still only makes it half a mile. Some things don't change. But most things do.