Three Bars, No Service

Maya's palms were sweating. Again.

She wiped them on her jeans for the third time, staring at the group chat on her iPhone. Liam's invitation had been casual—"camping this weekend, you should come"—but her heart was doing backflips that felt anything but.

"You're overthinking it," her best friend Chloe had said earlier that day. "It's just a camping trip. Not a marriage proposal."

Easy for Chloe to say. Chloe wasn't the one who'd been secretly crushing on Liam since seventh grade, back when he still wore those ridiculous baseball caps every single day. Now they were juniors, and somehow Liam had morphed into someone who made Maya's brain turn to mush whenever he looked at her.

The camping trip was supposed to be low-key. Just six people, Liam's uncle's cabin, no parents. Maya had packed enough anxiety for everyone: What if she said something awkward? What if she forgot her charger? What if everyone realized she was fundamentally uncool and had been faking it all along?

"You coming?" Liam had asked when they were loading into his car.

She'd frozen, then shoved her iPhone into her pocket like it was a security blanket. "Yeah."

Her palms had sweated through the entire drive.

Now, sitting around the campfire while someone's acoustic guitar covered Taylor Swift, Maya realized her phone was still in her pocket. She hadn't checked it in two hours. Two hours. That was basically a medical miracle.

"Who wants to go look for the bear?" Liam suddenly asked, standing up.

"The what?" Maya's heart stopped.

"Bear." He grinned. "My uncle said there's been one hanging around. Probably just looking for food, but we could try to spot it."

"I'm in," Maya heard herself say.

Her palms were sweating again as they walked into the woods with flashlights, just the two of them. The others had stayed behind, someone mentioning something about s'mores. The forest was dark and alive with sounds Maya couldn't identify. Her iPhone buzzed in her pocket—a text from Chloe asking how it was going—but she ignored it.

"So," Liam said softly, "I'm glad you came."

Her palms were sweating so bad she thought she might literally die.

"Me too," she managed.

They walked in comfortable silence for a minute. Then:

"You know what's weird?" Liam said. "I feel like I've known you forever, but we've never really talked. Just in classes and stuff."

"Yeah," Maya said. "Weird."

"Maybe we should fix that."

Her phone buzzed again. She pulled it out, prepared to check it, prepared to use it as an escape hatch because this moment was too real, too much, too everything.

But then she looked at Liam, really looked at him, and shoved the phone back into her pocket.

"Yeah," she said. "We should."

They never found the bear. But as they walked back to the cabin, Maya realized her palms weren't sweating anymore.