Zombie Pool Party Apocalypse

Maya stood at the edge of the pool, clutching her favorite oversized bucket hat like it was a shield. The chlorine smell hit her first—that sharp, nose-tingling scent that meant Saturday afternoons at Jordan's house. But today felt different. Today, Maya felt like a zombie.

Three hours of sleep and zero texts from Leo will do that to you.

"You good?" Jordan called from the diving board, already doing cannonballs. Maya forced a thumbs-up. Because that's what you do when your best friend throws a beginning-of-summer pool party and your situationship just un-ghosted only to re-ghost within forty-eight hours.

She noticed Jordan's little brother Cisco and his friends huddled around a laptop by the snack table, frantically typing something. They'd snaked an ethernet cable from the house all the way to the patio umbrellas, creating this tech-spiderweb across the deck.

"What are you guys doing?" Maya asked, drifting closer because anything was better than standing alone while everyone else paired off.

Cisco looked up, eyes wide. "Trying to figure out this riddle."

"Riddle?" Maya squinted at the screen. Some old mythology website, zero aesthetic.

"Yeah, it's from this Sphinx escape room thing," Cisco said. "Nobody can solve it."

The riddle appeared on screen: *I move without legs. I have no mouth, yet I swallow. What am I?*

Maya stared at it, and for some reason, her brain actually worked. Maybe it was the zombie fog lifting, or maybe it was just that she'd spent her entire childhood watching riddle shows on cable TV while her parents worked late shifts.

"Time," she said. "The answer is time."

Cisco's mouth dropped. "WAIT—"

The laptop dinged. CORRECT ANSWER UNLOCKED.

"NO WAY!" Cisco's friends started freaking out like she'd just won the lottery. Suddenly, Maya wasn't the girl standing alone by the snacks anymore. She was the riddle solver, the almost-cool older kid who knew things.

Then her phone buzzed. Leo. Again.

Maya looked at the screen, then at the pool where Jordan was splashing everyone, then at Cisco and his friends waiting for her to explain how she'd figured it out. She could jump back into the water with Leo, drown in all that uncertainty again. Or she could stay here, hat on her head, feeling a little less like a zombie.

"Okay," she said, sliding into the seat beside them. "But I'm not teaching you my methods. Trade secret."