The Riddle of the Living Dead

The zombie apocalypse wasn't coming from outside. It was already here, scrolling through TikTok at 2 AM, my face bathed in the cold blue light of my iPhone. I was Maya, and I was definitely among the walking dead.

"Maya, get UP!" My mom's voice cut through my bedroom door. "You have the SATs in three hours!"

I groaned. "I'm studying!"

"Studying what? How to survive a zombie breakout?"

I actually was. Don't judge. My phone was propped up against my calculus textbook, playing a video about identifying infected wounds versus regular cuts. Important life skills, honestly.

My best friend Jordan's text popped up: *u ready for this psychological torture session??*

*bro i haven't slept since thursday* I typed back, *i am literally a zombie*

*same lets go and be undead together* 🧟‍♀️

At the testing center, Jordan found me immediately. We both looked wrecked. Dark circles under our eyes, slouching, moving like we'd crawled out of graves.

"We're too young to feel this dead," Jordan muttered.

"Speak for yourself," I said. "I feel ancient."

The test dragged on forever. My brain was barely functioning. I was reading passages about ancient Egypt and my eyes kept glazing over. Until I hit the reading comprehension section about the Great Sphinx of Giza.

*The Sphinx posed this riddle: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?*

I stared at the question. My tired brain suddenly clicked. "Man," I whispered. "It's about life stages. Crawling baby, walking adult, elderly with a cane."

Jordan looked over at me like I'd grown a second head. "Since when do you know mythology?"

"I had a Percy Jackson phase in middle school, don't worry about it."

But the riddle stuck with me. What walks on four legs, then two, then three? The answer was so obvious once you thought about it. Kind of like how obvious it was that Jordan and I had been dancing around each other for months.

After the test, we slumped against the wall outside. "We survived," Jordan said.

"Barely." I looked at them—really looked. The way their hair fell over their eyes, the little scar above their eyebrow from that bike accident in seventh grade. "Hey."

"Hey what?"

"The sphinx had another riddle, you know."

Jordan raised an eyebrow. "Oh yeah? What's the answer?"

"Sometimes it's not about the answer," I said, my heart hammering. "Sometimes it's about asking the right question."

"Maya," Jordan said softly. "What are you trying to ask?"

"Do you want to get food? Just us? Like, a date?"

Jordan's face broke into a grin. "Finally. I've been waiting for you to figure that out since, like, October."

I laughed, feeling more awake than I had in months. The zombie apocalypse could wait. I had a life to start living.