When the Bull Ran

The papaya sat on the kitchen counter like some alien artifact my mom bought to prove we're cultured. I was supposed to be studying for finals, but instead I was staring at it, wondering if eating tropical fruit could somehow transform me from nobody to somebody before freshman year ended.

Then came the banging on our front door. Like, actual banging.

"ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!" Leo screamed through the wood, because Leo's sense of boundaries had been dead since sixth grade.

I opened the door to find him full-on undead – face paint, fake blood, the works. "Bro. I need your cat."

"My cat?"

"Zoe's doing this TikTok challenge where she recreates that zombie cat video from Japan and she needs an actual cat and yours is the only chill one I know, please, I'm literally begging, I'll owe you forever."

My cat, Mochi, chose that moment to weave through my legs like she was already in on it.

So there I was, Friday night, walking down my suburban street with a zombie and a cat in a carrier, feeling like maybe this was what high school was supposed to be. Weird. Random. Not at all like the movies.

Zoe's house was chaos – kids I'd known since elementary but never actually talked to, laughing way too loud, everyone on that edge where tonight was either going to be legendary or a disaster.

Then her dad came home early. And this man – this man who owned, like, three nosy pittbulls that barked at literally everything – froze when he saw me. Saw my face.

"You're that kid who skateboarded into my garbage cans last fall, aren't you?"

I thought I was dead. Instead, he started laughing. "That was legendary. Most controlled collision I've ever seen. You got bull-like determination, kid."

And then we were all sitting on her front porch at midnight, passing around slices of papaya (which turned out to be actually good), Leo still half in zombie makeup, Mochi purring on my lap, Zoe's dad telling stories about his own disastrous freshman year, and I realized: maybe high school wasn't about transforming into someone cooler. Maybe it was about finding the people who didn't care that you were weird, because they were weird too.

"Next time," Zoe said, grinning like she knew something I didn't, "we're teaching Mochi to skateboard."

I took another bite of papaya. Yeah. Maybe high school wouldn't be so bad after all.