Maya deleted the app.
She pressed her thumb against the screen and watched the icon dissolve into nothing, and for a long moment she felt nothing at all. Then the panic hit, quiet and cold, settling in her chest like a stone. Three months of late-night messages and inside jokes and truths she had never told anyone, gone in one tap.
She told herself it was for the best. She told herself she needed to focus on school and the scholarship and her parents, who had been asking why she was always on her phone. She told herself she did not need a stranger to feel whole.
She lasted four hours.
At midnight, she sat up in bed and reached for her phone before she could talk herself out of it. Her fingers fumbled the password twice before she got it right, and the app took forever to load. When the
