Signal Lost

The internet went down at exactly 7:43 PM. I knew this because I was watching the seconds tick by on my phone, counting down until my weekly FaceTime with Maya. The Comcast guy had cut through something—turns out our entire building's cable was dangling from a loose pole, a casualty of Tuesday's storm.

"Zombie mode, activating," I groaned, face-planting into my pillow. Without WiFi, I was basically a member of the walking dead. No Instagram, no TikTok, no Maya.

My phone buzzed—not a notification, just Maya calling anyway. I stared at it like it was an alien artifact. I couldn't just NOT answer. We'd been flirting for three weeks, and this was supposed to be THE call. The one where we finally made it official.

"Hello?" I squeaked. Smooth.

"Elena? You're breaking up. Everything okay?"

"Yeah, just, you know, the cable situation—"

"Meet me at the rec center," she said. "We can talk there. I'm teaching my brother to play padel anyway."

Padel. Because obviously Maya was the kind of perfect human who spent her free time playing sports I'd never heard of. When I showed up twenty minutes later, wearing my best "I'm totally athletic" hoodie, there she was: swooshing around a court that looked like tennis married squash and had adorable babies.

She spotted me and waved, racket gleaming. "You came!"

"Wouldn't miss it," I lied, trying not to think about how I'd rather be literally anywhere else.

But then she handed me a racket and somehow—I STILL don't know how—we ended up playing. And I didn't suck. Like, at all. My serves were decent. I even managed to dive for one ball and look cool doing it.

"You're a natural," she said, and the way she looked at me made my stomach do backflips.

"Guess the zombie finally woke up," I replied, and she laughed.

We played until the streetlights flickered on, sweat dripping and cheeks sore from grinning. I forgot about the cable outage. I forgot about being awkward.

Later, when I finally got home and the WiFi was back, I had three missed calls from my actual friends, two Snap streaks crying for attention, and a DM from Maya: "Same time next week?"

Sometimes the best connections happen when you're completely disconnected.