The Zombie on Court 3

I dragged myself through the school hallway like a literal zombie—hoodie up, eyes half-lidded, surviving on three hours of sleep and an iced coffee that had given up on life two periods ago. Junior year was eating me alive.

"You coming to padel club?" Mia appeared beside me, bouncing with that infuriating morning-person energy. "Tryouts today."

Padel. The sport everyone was suddenly obsessed with. I'd picked up a racket exactly once, mostly because Lucas—the crush I'd been lowkey spying on via Instagram stories for three months—had mentioned he might join. Social media stalking wasn't my proudest moment, but desperate times, you know?

"Yeah," I lied. "Totally."

Cut to the community center courts, where I stood in my sister's old volleyball knee pads and a borrowed racket, feeling like an impostor. The game was somewhere between tennis and squash, played on a small court with glass walls. I watched Lucas effortlessly return serves, his movements fluid and confident. Meanwhile, I'd already tripped over my own feet twice.

"You're overthinking it," Lucas said, suddenly beside me as we rotated positions. His eyes had this annoyingly genuine warmth. "Just... stop trying to play perfectly. You play better when you're not a zombie."

I laughed. "Is it that obvious?"

"You literally fell asleep in calc yesterday."

Heat rushed to my face. He'd NOTICED?

The ball sailed over the glass wall, and we both went to retrieve it. That's when I saw it—Lucas's phone background. A candid shot from the fall dance. Of ME.

"Wait, why do you—"

"Oh, crap." He practically threw his phone face-down. "That's not—look, I was going to ask you to homecoming, but then I heard you were already going with... someone."

"I went with my COUSIN."

We stared at each other for what felt like thirty years but was probably five seconds.

"So," Lucas said, breaking the silence. "You wanna get boba after this? Unless you have to go home and... sleep for twelve hours?"

"Zombies need caffeine too," I said, feeling weirdly alive for the first time in weeks. "And yeah. Yeah, I do."