Zombie Mode at the Country Club

The August heat baked the tennis courts until the air shimmered like something out of a fever dream. I stood at the edge of the padel court, gripping my racquet like it was a weapon I barely knew how to use. Around me, the country club kids moved with this practiced ease, laughing at inside jokes I'd never been part of, their conversations flowing like water—effortless, continuous, always somewhere I couldn't quite reach.

"You good, Maya?" Jake called out. He was everything I wasn't: tan, confident, wearing pastel shorts that somehow worked. His family had belonged here since forever. Mine had just scraped together the membership fee because Mom thought it would be "good for my social development."

"Yeah," I lied. "Just in zombie mode. Didn't sleep much."

"Finals week will do that." He nodded sympathetically, already turning back to his friends.

Zombie mode wasn't far off. Between AP classes, the SAT prep course Mom insisted on, and the volunteer hours I needed for college applications, I'd been running on caffeine and adrenaline for weeks. Sometimes I'd catch my reflection in the bathroom mirror—purple under my eyes, hair somehow both frizzy and flat at the same time—and wonder when I'd started looking like the walking dead.

The game started. I missed the first three serves. My phone buzzed in my bag—probably Mom asking if I'd "made any nice friends yet"—and I felt that familiar twist in my chest. The homesick feeling, even though I was only twenty minutes from home.

During the water break, I sat on the bench while everyone else clustered around the fancy fruit platter someone's mom had dropped off. That's when I saw it—a single papaya wedge sitting there like an alien artifact. No one touched it. Of course not. Too exotic, too weird, too much.

I reached for it, and Jake's friend Rachel wrinkled her nose. "You actually like that stuff?"

"My abuela used to make it with lime and chile," I said, before I could stop myself. "It's actually really—"

"Weird," she finished, and the group laughed, not meanly, but in that way that still managed to make me feel like I was observing them from behind glass.

I ate the papaya anyway. The sweetness hit me—familiar, uncomplicated, real—and for the first time all day, I didn't feel like a zombie. I felt like me. Someone who didn't quite fit in this world of pastel shorts and padel courts and conversations that flowed like water over smooth stones. Someone who preferred things a little strange, a little sour, a little unexpected.

"Same time next week?" Jake asked as we gathered our things.

"Sure," I said, and this time when I smiled, it actually reached my eyes. Because I'd figured something out: I could survive their world. I just didn't have to become one of them.