Signal Lost in the Suburbs

Maya's palms were straight-up sweating. She gripped her iPhone like a lifeline, thumbed through TikTok for the third time in five minutes, and tried to look like she belonged at Taylor's party. She didn't.

Across the room, Caleb leaned against the kitchen counter with his baseball cap backward and that easy grin that made everyone forget he'd failed English twice. Maya had spent all week imagining how their conversation would go—natural, witty, the kind of meet-cute that went viral on Twitter. Instead, she was pressed against a wall, too awkward to even make eye contact.

Then her screen went black.

4%.

She'd forgotten her charging cable. Of course. The one night she needed her phone as a security blanket, and she was stranded. Social death imminent.

"You're Maya, right? From AP Chem?"

She jumped. A girl with cropped denim jacket and smudged eyeliner stood there, solo cup in hand.

"Yeah. Hi?"

"I'm Riley. Your phone's about to die, and you look like you're calculating escape routes. Come with me."

And suddenly Maya was following this stranger through Taylor's crowded hallway, into a quiet bedroom where a fat orange cat slept curled on a faded quilt. The cat opened one yellow eye, judged them both, then went back to sleep.

"That's Slider," Riley said, digging through her backpack. "Taylor's dad is way too into baseball. Hence the cat. Hence the memorabilia everywhere. Hence Taylor literally cannot throw a ball to save her life."

Maya blinked. Riley was funny.

"Here." Riley held out a cable. "My dad's paranoid about preparedness. I've got five of these at all times."

"Why?" Maya asked, then immediately regretted it. Who asked why?

Riley didn't even hesitate. "Freshman year, my phone died at my sister's graduation. Couldn't find my family, wandered campus for two hours. Never again."

They sat on the bed, careful not to disturb Slider, and talked for an hour. About Mr. Harrison's impossible tests, about how surreal high school felt, about how everyone seemed to know exactly who they were supposed to be except them.

"I feel like I'm constantly waiting for my actual life to start," Riley said, palm up like she was weighing invisible words. "Like this is all just the prologue."

Maya nodded. She'd never said it out loud, but that was exactly it.

When they finally emerged, Caleb was gone. So was Taylor's original crowd. It didn't matter.

"Hey," Riley said at the front door. "There's a diner down the street. Waffles are aggressively mediocre, but they're open all night. Want to bail?"

Maya looked at her phone—67% charged. All those notifications she'd been stress-checking earlier suddenly felt irrelevant. The boy across the room didn't matter. The perfect Instagram-worthy moment didn't matter.

"Yeah," she said, and the word came out easy. "I'd love that."

Outside, the night air was cool, and for the first time all night, her palms didn't sweat at all.