The Zombie Extra's Secret

The makeup artist brushed gray paste across my cheeks while I scrolled through Instagram, doing my daily recon. Yeah, I was basically a social media spy at this point—tracking whether Jason had liked Maya's post yet, whether anyone from the squad was at Chloe's party without me.

"You look like a zombie," Tasha said, spraying green mist on my forehead.

"That's the point, right?" I adjusted my flannel shirt—my costume for being extra #47 in the low-budget horror film shooting in our abandoned mall. "Besides, I'm literally running on three hours of sleep and iced coffee. Being a zombie is basically my natural state anyway."

"Relatable content," she laughed.

Truth was, I'd been feeling dead inside for weeks. Midterms had wrecked me, my friend group had fractured into weird cliques, and I still hadn't figured out who I was supposed to be. Maybe that's why I'd signed up to be an undead extra—zero personality required.

Then I saw him across the food court: Jason, the guy Maya had been obsessing over, also in zombie makeup. What were the odds?

I zombie-shuffled over. "So you're literal patient zero now?"

He looked up, confused, then recognition hit. "Oh, hey. Yeah, my mom made me do this for college applications. 'Extracurriculars,' she said."

"Bet that's going in your essay: 'I learned so much from pretending to eat brains.'"

Jason actually laughed. We talked for twenty minutes between takes—about the pressure to be perfect, about how everyone expected us to have our lives figured out at seventeen. He admitted he'd broken up with Sophia two months ago because he couldn't bear pretending anymore.

"I can't believe I'm saying this to a zombie in a dead mall," he said.

"Same," I said. "But honestly? This is the most real conversation I've had in months."

Later, I texted Maya the intel: Jason was single, stressed, and surprisingly normal. But more importantly, I realized something as I washed the gray makeup off in the mall bathroom—I didn't have to bear the weight of being perfect anymore. Being a little undead, a little messy, a little lost? That was just part of being seventeen.

And sometimes the best connections happened when you weren't even trying to be human at all.