Screen Dead at Sunset

The bonfire crackled as Maya clutched her iphone 13 like a lifeline. Her palms were literally sweating—like, actual drip-down-your-wrist sweating—because Jason was two feet away, and she'd been staring at the same Instagram post for seven minutes without actually seeing it.

Around her, the party had gone full zombie mode. Kids sat cross-legged in the sand, faces illuminated by blue light, thumbs scrolling in perfect unison. Nobody talked. Nobody danced. They just consumed.

Maya pulled her beanie hat lower, suddenly self-conscious about her frizzy hair. She'd spent forty minutes curling it, then panicked and shoved the hat on when she saw Jason's Instagram story with those girls whose hair somehow defied physics.

"You gonna swim or just guard your phone?"

Maya jumped. Jason stood there, actual Jason from AP Bio, whose eyes were the exact color of the Pacific right before sunset. He was shirtless. She forgot how to English.

"Uh, what?"

He pointed toward the ocean. "Everyone's zombie-scrolling. I'm going in. You coming?"

He held out his hand.

Her mind scrambled. If she went, her iphone would have to stay behind. What if someone posted something? What if she missed a notification? What if she got—she shuddered—ghosted?

But Jason's palm was waiting, and the ocean looked like liquid ink under the rising moon, and suddenly she wanted to be real more than she wanted to be connected.

"Yeah," she said, and her voice didn't even shake. "Yeah, I'm coming."

She left her phone on her towel. Just left it. The screen glowed with a new notification as they ran toward the waves, but by the time they surfaced, gasping and laughing like actual humans instead of curated versions of themselves, Maya couldn't remember what she'd been so afraid of missing.

Some things, she realized, don't need to be captured to be real.