Signal Lost

Maya's phone lay face-down on the **palm** of her hand, screen dark, like a dead fish she couldn't bring herself to toss back into the ocean. The pool party raged behind her—splash fights, laughter that sounded too loud, someone blasting that song everyone pretended to hate but secretly loved. She was hiding behind the **pool** house, wearing a swimsuit she'd bought three days ago after twenty minutes of spiraling in the Target aisle.

"You know they're doing TikToks in there," said a voice from the shadows. Maya jumped. It was Leo, leaning against the stucco wall, holding a tangled mess of **cable** in one hand. "The WiFi got cut. Someone tripped over the router cable outside. Absolute chaos."

"Chaos," Maya echoed, then surprised herself by laughing. "Is that why you're out here?"

"Nah." Leo held up the cable. "I'm the designated IT guy, apparently. But I'm taking my sweet time fixing it." He dropped the cable on the grass. "Social battery hit zero an hour ago."

Maya looked at her silent phone, then at Leo, who was staring at the pool like it contained answers to questions he hadn't articulated yet. She thought about the carefully curated posts she'd draft-and-deleted twelve times that day, about how she'd spent weeks overthinking this party, about how everyone else seemed to have some innate cheat code for being a teenager that she'd missed in the character selection screen.

"I don't think anyone actually likes these things," she said.

"No kidding." Leo picked up a palm frond that had fallen near his feet, started shredding it. "We just show up because that's what you do when you're sixteen and someone says 'pool party' like it's a sacred rite."

They stood there in comfortable silence while someone shrieked about getting pushed in, while bass thudded against the pool house wall, while the real world felt strangely distant. Maya thought about how she'd spent all day refreshing posts, checking likes, overanalyzing emojis—when all along, the best part was here in the disconnected shadows, no filter required.

"Hey," Leo said, finally, "want to not fix the cable for like five more minutes?"

Maya smiled, finally setting her phone down on the grass. "Make it ten."