The cabin was three hundred miles north. Her phone had 12% battery. Her friends—Jade, Marcus, and Theo—were already en route, presumably blasting music and leaving crumbs everywhere. Kenzie did the only logical thing: she rented the last available car at the counter, a lime-green compact with a dented bumper and a faint smell of wet dog.

“You’re not in the protocol,” she whispered.

Her friends, of course, laughed. Then they ignored it.

That night, around a campfire, she told them everything. They laughed, passed the jam, and listened without once checking their phones. Kenzie realized she hadn’t thought about her email folders in forty-eight hours. The world hadn’t ended. The refrigerator at home was probably a mess, and she didn’t care about that either.

Back in the city, Kenzie didn’t reorganize her email. She didn’t color-code her vegetables. Instead, she bought a small cactus, named it Mildred, and started getting lost on purpose—once a month, no itinerary, no protocol.