Two
MAYA
Someone’s vomiting on my mother’s investment portfolio.
The sound carries over Cardi B at maximum volume, that specific retch-splash-gasp symphony that means someone just christened the bathroom my mother pays for. And they’ll probably use the towels she pays for to wipe their mouth, which will definitely need to be replaced.
Perfect.
I turn back to the party, which is pumping, glad I slipped the building concierge one hundred to keep the neighbors and the cops off my ass until 3:00 a.m. Three years of practice have taught me exactly where the line is, and I dance on it in Louboutins.
“Maya! This party is legendary !” Kelsey from clinical rotation screams over the music. “How do you always?—“
“Natural talent,” I lie, raising my red Solo cup in mock salute. “Dylan from the football team was asking about you.”
She beams at me, makes some sort of happy sound, then goes searching. Little does she know that I told Dylan she was asking about him only five minutes ago, the puppetmaster manipulating the strings to bring two awesome people together.
I continue my rounds, sipping my drink, buzzed but not drunk enough that it puts my command of this beautiful disaster at risk. Someone needs to stay sharp enough to ensure maximum mayhem that my friends will talk about for months to come.
As I move back into the living room, I find bodies are generating their own weather system. The temperature has climbed past “uncomfortable” into “authentic club experience,” complete with that particular fog of sweat, designer perfume, and sexual tension that turns silk into a second skin.
And it’s not just my guests feeling it.
My dress clings in all the wrong places, and Tyler—or possibly Taylor—from anatomy lab seems to appreciate the view as he attempts to navigate toward me through the crowd. His beer-sticky hands reach for my waist and find only air and attitude.
“Maya, come dance!” he slurs.
“Later?” I spin away with a grin that promises everything and delivers nothing.
In the kitchen, I find tomorrow’s healthcare professionals conducting an impromptu study on ethanol absorption rates. Jessica—valedictorian of our cohort, and also annoyingly gorgeous—is letting an engineering major take a body shot, all in the name of science.
“You missed the clavicle,” I observe, adjusting Jessica’s salt placement. “The suprasternal notch gives better structural support for the liquid.”
I watch as the engineering major completes his task—salt, tequila, lime—and when Jessica wraps her arms around him and kisses him, tasting the tequila and lime and salt that was recently on her body, the lucky guy looks like he’s discovered God.
I laugh, taking in the marble countertop, which now resembles a Jackson Pollock painting. Unfortunately, my mother won’t see that damage until she visits. So, 2037 or so, but meanwhile I’ll just have to be content with the thought of her reading her credit card statement.
Vintners & Vines: $847.23. Pause. Subtle eye twitch.
Campus Liquor Mart: $623.50. Longer pause. Muscle tension in the masseter.
Jim’s DJ Equipment Rental: $450.00. Full stop. Time to call the doctor.
“—need more ice!” Sophie materializes at my elbow during a rare moment of stillness.
I turn and smile at her, but then my smile fades to a frown, because she’s holding what I recognize as her signature “I am drinking” beverage—soda with a homeopathic dose of vodka. It makes me feel like all the years I’ve spent pushing her towards chaos and debauchery were wasted.
And I blame Mike.
What started as a one-night stand with a hot hockey god graduated into a five-months-and-counting relationship that has not only made her more domestic—if that was even possible—but has also made her sickeningly happy. And, while I’m happy about the latter, the former is a buzzkill.
“Having fun?” I ask, wrapping her in a hug that I hope might transfer some of my chaotic energy to her.
As usual, her expression does that thing where concern and admiration wrestle for dominance. “How are you paying for this? I just saw the receipt for?—“
“Creative financing.” I shrug, then press a fresh drink into her hands to cut the interrogation off. “Where’s Mike? Being responsible?”
Her face transforms at his name—that particular luminescence of women who’ve found their someone, the person who sees past their facade and chooses to stay anyway—and I love every microscopic change in her features, because if there’s one woman in Pine Barren who deserves to be happy, it’s her.
“Team stuff.” She smiles. “He said to say hi, and that he might stop by later if he can?—“
Movement in my peripheral vision draws my attention from Sophie: a couple stumbling toward my bedroom with unmistakable intent.
“Absolutely not!” I intercept with the efficiency of someone who’s blocked this particular play a dozen times tonight. “No, no, no, no!”
The guy starts to protest. “Come on, just?—“
“Let me explain something.” My smile could etch glass.
“Behind my bedroom door is lava, as far as you’re concerned.
As far as I’m concerned, there’s a Frette duvet cover that cost more than your tuition.
And if you get any bodily fluids on it, I will make your remaining years at Pine Barren socially radioactive. Clear?”
They retreat toward the balcony.
“You’re terrifying,” Sophie observes.
“It’s a gift,” I say, then notice she’s giving me a look. “What?”
“Nothing. Just… you seem… extra tonight.”
Extra.
Like I’m a coffee order.
Like my entire existence can be reduced to an adjective.
I’m extra because ordinary wasn’t enough to get their attention.
Because being valedictorian of Chesterson Prep just meant I was meeting expectations.
Because choosing nursing over law was considered a character flaw rather than actual character.
Because—as my father tells it—I’m not carrying on the Hayes tradition like my siblings, as if emotional constipation is a desirable hereditary trait.
“Maya?” Sophie’s hand on my arm burns through designer silk. “Everything alright?”
“You said we need more ice.” I pull away with another perfectly calibrated laugh. “Can’t have warm Grey Goose.”
I escape before she can press further, navigating through my apartment like a general surveying successful carnage. The flat screen I bought with Daddy’s “emergency expenses only” card displays music videos that would make my mother clutch her pearls.
Two football players square off near my sound system, all testosterone and no sense. One demands more hip-hop, the other insists on house music. A freshman girl hovers between them with the kind of desperation that makes me simultaneously sympathetic and disgusted.
“Gentlemen.” I slide between their bulk, knowing both of them will back down. “You’re both wrong. What this party needs is throwbacks.”
I queue up Talk and watch 200 drunk twentysomethings morph into flirty seventeen-year-olds. The football players stop posturing and start slow-grinding. The freshman girl looks at me like I’ve read her mind, wishing she could read mine.
“How do you do that?” she asks.
I smile. “Practice.”
I don’t mention the years of studying group dynamics like a survival skill.
How reading a room became necessary when expressing actual emotions was considered poor form.
How family dinners were a knife fight. How I learned to be whoever people needed me to be because being myself was never quite enough.
Someone has to do it.
My father’s words, delivered with surgical precision when I announced my nursing career, proving once and for all that I wasn’t enough. Not ‘I’m proud of you’ or ‘Follow your dreams’, just acknowledgment that someone, somewhere, needs to handle the messy realities of human existence.
Just, preferably, not his daughter.
With the change in tune, bodies move with the kind of uninhibited joy I can only approximate. Even here, hosting the party everyone will talk about tomorrow, I’m performing. I’m the social architect, chaos coordinator, the girl who makes everything more fun just by showing up.
It’s exhausting being everyone’s good time.
But it’s better than being nobody whatsoever.
The party swirls on, fed by spite and premium liquor. Tomorrow I’ll put on scrubs and be competent and professional and everything they’d approve of if they considered nursing worthy of approval. Tomorrow I’ll handle literal shit with more grace than they handle emotional honesty.
But now, I raise my precisely measured vodka-cranberry in tribute to whatever premium glassware just died for my sins. “To bad decisions,” I toast to no one.
“And the credit cards that enable them,” Sophie adds, appearing with her characteristic ability to be present for my worst moments.
She links her arm through mine, and for just a second, the performance slips.
And, for just a second, I’m just Maya.
The queen of her own beautiful disaster.
I can’t remember his name.
The thought detonates through my hangover, ripping me from the merciful void into a world that smells like regret. My mouth is a graveyard where tequila went to die—metallic and wrong—while I just know the morning light is ready to perform laser surgery on my retinas as soon as I open my eyes.
I pry one eye open, immediately regretting every life choice that led to this moment as the room pirouettes. My bedroom looks like CSI: Bad Decisions—clothes scattered like evidence markers, an empty wine bottle standing sentinel on my nightstand like a disappointed parent, and is that…
Yes, that’s definitely someone’s bra helicoptering from my ceiling fan.
Not mine, which means someone stumbled home with tits playing Marco Polo.
As the percussion section in my skull keeps time with my pulse, I haul myself vertical, my stomach protesting. The full-length mirror across from my bed reflects a masterpiece of poor choices: mascara smeared under my eyes, hair that could qualify for federal disaster relief, and?—
“What the actual fuck?” I say.