Zombie Mode at the Deep End

I was operating on pure caffeine vibes and three hours of sleep, which basically meant I was a **zombie** in cargo shorts. Mia's pool party raged around me—laughing, splashing, the kind of effortless social energy I'd been faking since seventh grade.

"You good?" Emma asked, floating near the edge. She was wearing this bikini that made my brain short-circuit, and I was wearing a t-shirt because my abs had apparently gone on permanent vacation.

"Totally," I lied. "Just conserving energy. Strategic chill mode."

The real problem wasn't the sleep deprivation. It was that I'd been crushing on Emma for six months and my entire personality dissolved around her. My friends were playing what they called "**baseball**" in the pool—basically just throwing a tennis ball at each other's heads while screeching about innings and strikeouts. Jake, being Jake, had already invented an entire league and was keeping stats on his arm with a Sharpie.

"Game!" Jake shouted, pointing at me. "Zach's up."

I dragged myself toward the shallow end like I was wading through molasses.

"Bro, you're moving like you're dead," Marcus said.

"**Zombie** mode," I muttered, which wasn't entirely a joke. Between finals, college apps, and my parents' divorce announcement last week, I'd been running on fumes for days. The pool party had seemed like a good idea until I got here and remembered that pools meant taking my shirt off and socializing and existing.

Emma swam over, water slicking her hair back. "You know what helps with zombie mode?"

"Coffee?" I guessed. "Maybe a time machine?"

"Actually **swimming**," she said. "Like, really swimming. Not standing in the shallow end looking like you want to dissolve. Come on."

She dove, surfacing near the rope markers. "Race you to the other side."

"I'm gonna lose. Badly."

"Obviously." She grinned. "But you'll feel less like a zombie."

So I dove. The water shocked me cold, and for a second, everything drowned out—the party noise, Jake's baseball commentary, my spiraling thoughts about grades and parents and whether Emma could hear my heart hammering when I was anywhere near her. I pulled myself through the water, arm over arm, breathing rhythm that felt like the first real breathing I'd done in weeks.

I lost the race spectacularly. But when I surfaced, gasping and laughing at the same time, Emma was waiting.

"Better?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said, and it wasn't a lie. The zombie fog had lifted. "But I'm still not playing your psychotic version of water baseball."

"Deal." She treaded water, studying me. "You know, you don't always have to be the chill one. It's okay to be a mess sometimes."

The ball sailed past my head, Jake screaming something about a home run, and for the first time all day, I didn't feel like I was drowning.