Zombie Mode Off

I'd been walking around in full **zombie** mode for three weeks straight—junior year was absolutely eating me alive. My mom kept pushing these massive **vitamin** D supplements on me every morning, claiming they'd help with my "energy levels," but honestly? The only thing that helped was sneaking onto my phone during lunch to watch padel tournaments.

"Marcus, you coming to **baseball** tryouts today?" Tyler asked, slapping his hand against my locker. Tyler was the kind of guy who'd already been accepted to State College on a partial scholarship. Everything was effortless for him.

"Nah, I think I'm sitting this one out," I mumbled, even though baseball had been my thing since freshman year. Coach would kill me if I didn't show. But the truth was, I'd stopped caring about months ago.

That's when I saw her—Chloe, the girl from my AP Calc class who sat in the back and never spoke to anyone. She was carrying a padel racket bag, and I swear my heart did this weird little flutter thing. I'd been secretly watching padel highlights on YouTube since summer, obsessed with how the game moved—fast, unpredictable, nothing like baseball's slow rhythm.

"You play?" I asked, gesturing to her bag.

She shrugged, all casual about it. "My cousin's got a court near his house. You should come sometime. It's way more fun than hitting balls at a fence."

So I ditched baseball tryouts. I know—career suicide, right? But something about Chloe's confidence, like she didn't care what anyone thought, made me feel brave. Like I could actually choose something for myself instead of what my parents or coach wanted.

Her cousin's court turned out to be behind this rundown warehouse, and we played until sunset. I was terrible at first, whiffing shots and tripping over my own feet, but Chloe just laughed—not mean laugh, but the kind that made you want to laugh with her.

"You've got to **bear** down on your backhand," she said, demonstrating. "Like you're swinging for real."

Later, sitting on the curb sharing stale granola bars from her bag, I realized I hadn't checked my phone once. No doomscrolling, no stress about college applications, no pretending to be someone I wasn't. Just the sound of the ball against the racket, Chloe's ridiculous stories about her zombie apocalypse survival plan (which involved stealing a boat and living on an island), and the feeling that maybe—just maybe—I didn't have to have everything figured out at seventeen.

"My parents think I'm wasting my time," I admitted. "With padel, with everything that's not 'building my future.'"

Chloe wrapped her uneaten granola bar back up. "Marcus, we're literally teenagers. We're supposed to waste time figuring out what we actually like. That's the whole point."

Walking home under orange streetlights, phone battery dead, muscles tired in a good way, I finally felt like myself again. No zombie mode. No pretending. Just me, possibly failing junior year, possibly disappointing everyone, but for the first time in forever, actually okay with that.