The Summer WiFi Died

When the cable guy accidentally cut our internet, I thought my life was over. Three weeks without WiFi. No streaming. No Discord. Just me, alone, with my thoughts and a fraying sense of who I was without my online friends.

My hair had been doing this weird thing since eighth grade graduation—these random waves that wouldn't commit to curly but weren't straight either. I'd been hiding under beanies for months, which worked fine when my biggest social interaction was gaming voice chat.

"You need actual human contact," my mom said, handing me a vitamin D supplement and a flyer for padel lessons at the rec center. "Your skin looks like you've been living in a cave."

Padel. What even was that? Some tennis-adjacent sport that middle-aged people played? But I was desperate. Anything was better than staring at my ceiling fan.

The first lesson was a disaster. I tripped over my own feet. My hair frizzed into a halo of embarrassment. But then I saw her—Maya, from my algebra class, who apparently spent her weekends serving absolute fire on the padel court.

"Your grip's all wrong," she said, stepping way too close. "Like, you're holding it like it's a cable controller or something."

I laughed. It just came out.

By week two, I'd stopped hiding my hair. By week three, Maya and I were playing every afternoon, and I'd actually forgotten to check if the cable was fixed. The vitamin supplements sat on my dresser, forgotten.

"You're not terrible anymore," Maya said after I returned her serve. "Actually kinda decent."

I caught my reflection in the gym mirror—hair wild, shirt sweaty, grinning like an idiot.

When the internet finally came back on, I didn't race to my computer. I texted Maya instead: "Tomorrow at 3?"

Some things are better than WiFi.