When the Bear Stole My Signal

My hair was a disaster that summer. I'd dyed it electric blue two weeks before camp, thinking it would make me look edgy and mysterious, like one of those Tumblr girls who always have perfect lighting. Instead, I looked like a Smurf who'd been dragged through a bush backward.

"You're obsessing again," said Kayla, my best friend since kindergarten, as we sat on the dock at Bear Creek Lake. She was right. I was.

I pulled out my iPhone, 64GB of anxiety management. The screen reflected my face—freckles, the unfortunate hair situation, eyes that constantly scanned for something wrong. No notifications. Again.

"Nobody's texting, Maya. We're literally at camp. Reception is garbage here anyway."

She was wrong about that. I had two bars. The problem wasn't reception—it was that nobody was texting. Jake, the guy I'd been talking to all spring, had apparently forgotten I existed the moment school ended. Classic.

"I'm going in the water," I announced, standing up with false confidence. "Who cares if my hair turns green-ish? It's already blue. How much worse can it get?"

Famous last thoughts.

I jumped. The water was shockingly cold, perfect for forgetting about boys and social media and everything that made me want to crawl inside myself. I stayed under as long as I could, letting the lake erase me.

When I finally surfaced, gasping and shaking wet hair from my eyes, the world had changed.

On the dock, where I'd left it, my iPhone was gone.

"Kayla?"

She pointed, trembling, toward the woods. A bear—an actual freaking bear—was lumbering away from the dock, phone glowing in its mouth like some bizarre digital snack.

We spent the next hour with counselors, filing reports and "bear incident" paperwork. My parents had to drive up early. My phone was declared MIA, presumably dropped in the woods or eaten or whatever bears do with stolen technology.

But here's the weird part: in the days without my phone, I actually talked to people. Real conversations, where I had to think before speaking instead of overanalyzing every text. I let my hair fade to a weird teal-green color that Kayla said looked "mermaid-core." I laughed so hard at campfire stories that my stomach hurt.

On the last day, Jake's best friend showed up (his family camped nearby). Jake had been grounded all summer—his parents took his phone. He'd been wondering why I never replied to his last message.

"I never got it," I said. And realized I didn't even care anymore.

Maybe getting my phone stolen by a bear was exactly what I needed. Sometimes you have to lose your signal to find yourself.