Screen-Free Summer

Maya stared at her blackened iphone screen, willing the bars to miraculously appear. Nothing. Camp Cedarwood was officially a dead zone. Two weeks without TikTok, Instagram, or even texts to her best friend back home. This was actual torture.

The first humiliation came during softball. Maya had zero hand-eye coordination, but of course the cutest guy in her cabin, Leo, was watching. She swung at the baseball like she was fighting off invisible bees, missing spectacularly three times in a row. "You'll get it, new girl," Leo said with that annoyingly perfect grin. "Maybe."

Then came the swimming test. Maya could swim—technically—but she'd perfected the art of avoiding actual athletic swimming. The lake looked suspiciously dark, and rumor had it something lived in its depths. She stood at the dock while others cannonballed in like they'd never met a body of water they didn't love.

"You going in or what?" Jenna, the girl with impossibly shiny hair and zero awkwardness, called out. Behind her stood Marcus—everyone called him "the bull" for his massive shoulders and tendency to charge through challenges like they personally offended him. He'd already completed three laps while Maya was still debating whether wet hair was worth the social suicide.

That night, unable to sleep, Maya sneaked to the lake's edge with her useless phone (force of habit). Something moved in the shadows. A fox—a real one, with the most gorgeous rusty coat and suspicious eyes—trotted out of the woods. It didn't run. Just stared at her like she was the weird one for sitting alone in the dark, obsessed with a dead piece of technology.

The fox's tail flicked. It bounded away, toward the cabins, then looked back.

"You're mocking me," Maya whispered.

But something shifted. She'd spent two weeks worrying about what people thought—about her swing, her swimming, her lack of signal. The fox didn't care. It just did its thing, unapologetically.

The next morning, Maya jumped off the dock first. Cannonballed. Splashed Jenna's perfect hair. Didn't even check her phone when she finally found one bar of signal three days later. Some things were better than likes.