Zombie at the Pool Party

Maya felt like a zombie, literally dead inside from staying up until 3 AM scrolling TikTok, but here she was at Tyler's pool party, clutching her iPhone like a lifeline. The blue light from her screen was practically her personality at this point.

"You coming in or what?" Tyler called, doing a cannonball that sent chlorinated water everywhere. Tyler, who had somehow gone from awkward eighth grader to padel tournament champion over the summer. Now he was the reason half the swim team was here.

Maya's thumbs hovered over her screen. Three notifications. Two from her mom asking if she'd eaten, one from group chat—her "friends" wondering where she was. She was actually five feet away from them.

"I'm good," Maya said, voice cracking. Great.

Then she saw it—a goldfish floating near the pool drain. Not moving. Just... drifting.

"Is that... dead?" asked Chloe, the girl who'd won homecoming queen and never spoken to Maya before.

"No," Maya heard herself saying. "That's Goldie. Tyler's had him since third grade. He goes into this trance sometimes when he's stressed. It's called—get this—playing dead. It's his whole personality."

She had made that up entirely.

But Chloe was nodding. "That's actually kind of iconic behavior."

"Right?" Maya said, surprising herself. "Like, same, Goldie. Same."

Chloe laughed. Not a fake mean girl laugh, but a real one. "You play padel? Tyler's got a court out back."

"I... don't even know what padel is, honestly," Maya said, then immediately regretted being uncool.

"Perfect," Chloe grinned, grabbing her wrist. "You can be on my team. We're gonna lose spectacularly."

Maya looked at her iPhone, then at the pool, then at Chloe's hand still on her wrist. She made a choice—slid the phone into her bag. Dead to the world.

"Let's do this," Maya said, feeling something shift inside her. Not dead anymore. Just waking up.