Zombie Mode

Maya stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, her normally sleek **hair** transformed into a tangled mess. Three hours with a flat iron and way too much product, and she still looked like she'd rolled out of bed at 2 PM on a Saturday.

"Maya! You coming?" Jordan called from downstairs. "The party starts at eight!"

"One sec!" She finger-combed the disaster zone on her head and grabbed her **iPhone**, checking Instagram for the third time in five minutes. Everyone was already posting pics from Chloe's party. Great. They'd be fashionably late, which was just a fancy way of saying awkward.

Her mom appeared in the doorway, holding a plate of **papaya** slices. "You barely ate anything. At least try this—it's from the farmer's market, super fresh."

"Mom, I'm nervous, not hungry," Maya groaned, but she took a piece anyway. The papaya was weirdly good—sweet and musky and nothing like the stale chips she'd been stress-eating all week.

"You're gonna kill it," her mom said, and Maya almost believed her.

Almost.

The party was exactly what she expected: bass you could feel in your teeth, someone throwing up in the bushes, and a room full of people moving through the motions like actual **zombie**s—phones illuminating their faces, laughing at nothing, everyone performing instead of just being. Maya stood by the wall, clutching her phone like a lifeline, scrolling through notifications she didn't care about just to look busy.

Then she saw him—Evan from her history class, leaning against the back door and looking equally out of place. Their eyes met, and something shifted. He wasn't performing either.

"Hey," she said, walking over before she could overthink it. "Having fun?"

Evan laughed, and it was real. "Honestly? I was just thinking about how everyone looks like they're in **zombie** mode. You know, just going through the motions?"

"Literally what I was thinking," Maya said, and for the first time all night, she actually smiled. A real one.

They ended up on the back porch, skipping whatever was happening inside and talking about everything and nothing. Her **hair** didn't matter. Her **iPhone** stayed in her pocket. And when she mentioned the **papaya** earlier, he didn't look at her like she was weird—he said his mom was obsessed with farmer's markets too, and wasn't it funny how parents were always trying to feed us exotic fruit?

Maya checked her phone at midnight. No new notifications. But for the first time, she didn't care.