The Zombie Finals Protocol

Three days into finals week and I was running on pure panic and residual caffeine. My skin had that distinctive 'I haven't seen sunlight since Saturday' pallor, and walking through the hallway felt like trudging through invisible molasses. Around me, everyone else looked equally zombie-fied — dead eyes, slumped shoulders, the collective groan of students who'd forgotten what REM sleep felt like.

'You need actual nutrition, not just stress-induced adrenaline,' my mom had declared that morning, sliding a plate of sautéed spinach toward me. I'd stared at it like it was radioactive waste. 'And take your vitamin D tablets. Your brain literally cannot function without them.'

I'd choked down both because I was too exhausted to argue, which is how I found myself in Mr. Harrison's English class, staring at the Sphinx poster he'd taped to the whiteboard. The Egyptian monument's inscrutable gaze felt way too judgmental for someone who'd just spent three hours analyzing symbolism in The Great Gatsby.

'So,' my best friend Maya whispered, tapping her pen against her notebook. 'What do you think a riddle about a teen who accidentally consumes actual brain food would sound like?'

I snorted. 'Probably something about how eating spinach and taking vitamins transforms you from zombie to... slightly less pathetic zombie?'

Maya grinned, and for the first time that week, I saw something like genuine energy in her eyes. 'That's actually brilliant though. What if the Sphinx was, like, a metaphor for the system trying to figure out if we're actually learning anything or just regurgitating information?'

We spent the rest of the period crafting the world's weirdest riddle about a creature who forgets everything except which breakfast foods contain iron and which vitamins prevent scurvy. Mr. Harrison actually laughed when we presented it.

That night, I actually cooked myself vegetables. I took the vitamins. I slept for eight hours. Somewhere between the sphinx's ancient wisdom and my mom's relentless health campaigning, I'd figured out that surviving wasn't about endurance — it was about actually taking care of myself. Being a functioning human was way better than being a finals week zombie anyway.