The Zombie Swimmer

6 AM practice hits different when your best friend is hyperventilating on the pool deck.

"Bro, you good?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

Marcus's cat had decided to give birth in his gym bag. Like, actually. Five kittens, just chilling in his swim trunks like they owned the place. Now he showed up to regionals smelling like feline chaos and bad decisions.

"My hair," Marcus groaned, running fingers through disasters. "Look at it. I look like I drowned, died, and came back wrong."

"You look like a zombie," I said, because friendship means honesty. "A fast zombie, though. A zombie that can crush a 50 free in 23.4."

Coach blew the whistle. Because of course he did.

The water hit like usual—shocking, then instantly right. Swimming is weird like that. You're half-drowning, half-living, existing in this blue nowhere where everything except your stroke disappears. No cats. No locker room drama. No crushing anxiety about whether your crush thinks you're weird for staring at them in algebra.

Just pull, kick, breathe.

Marcus was ahead of me, his stroke smooth and automatic. We'd been swimming together since we were twelve, two awkward kids who bonded over how much we both hated waking up before the sun. He'd been there when I got cut from the team freshman year. I'd been there when his dad walked out.

That's what they don't tell you about swimming—the friendships are weirdly intimate. You see each other at your absolute worst: red-eyed, dripping, smelling like chlorine and exhaustion, stripped down to essentials.

We touched the wall simultaneously, gasping.

" Zombie status terminated?" I asked.

Marcus grinned, water dripping from his chin-length hair. "Nah. Just a zombie who's gonna crush regionals."

"And then eat brains?"

"Obviously. That's the whole zombie lifecycle."