Zombie Summer State of Mind

I quit the baseball team three days before summer started, and honestly? My dad took it harder than Coach Miller. "You're throwing away your talent, Leo," he said, while I just sat there thinking about how I'd rather be literally anywhere than sweating through another double-header in polyester.

So yeah, June hit, and I was officially that guy: the one with zero plans and even less motivation. I'd become a total zombie, scrolling through cable channels at 3 AM until my eyes burned, surviving on snacks and the vague hope that something—anything—interesting would happen.

Then Maya's pool party changed everything.

I showed up wearing my oldest swim trunks, prepared to spend three hours awkwardly holding a red solo cup near the snacks. But when Maya's cousin Sam sat next to me on the lounge chair, something shifted. She had this tiny palm tree drawn on her wrist in Sharpie.

"Nice ink," I said, because apparently my brain had stopped working.

She laughed—not the fake kind, but real. "My mom thinks I'm having a mid-life crisis at sixteen. She's probably right."

We talked for two hours while people did cannonballs around us. Sam told me she'd just moved from LA, that she missed real palm trees and the ocean, that she felt like she was swimming through weird suburban silence every day. I told her about the baseball thing, about how I used to love it until it felt like homework with more cleats.

"My brother was a zombie athlete," she said, flipping her wet hair over her shoulder. "Played everything. Miserable. Finally quit lacrosse last month and my parents acted like he burned the house down."

"Same energy," I said.

The cable box at her house had every channel. We spent the rest of July watching weird documentaries and bad reality TV, both of us pretending we weren't skipping our respective summer responsibilities. She read my palm once—badly, deliberately wrong—and I almost fell off the couch laughing.

"You're gonna marry someone named Brenda," she said, dead serious.

"Gross, Sam."

"The palm never lies."

School starts next week. I still don't play baseball, and I'm still tired all the time, but Sam's in my English class and she draws tiny palm trees on my homework now. The zombie state of mind isn't totally gone, but it's different now. Less wandering, more purposeful.

Maybe that's what growing up actually is—not having everything figured out, but finding the people who don't care that you don't.