Two #2
There’s a hickey blooming on my collarbone like a participation award.
“Who the actual fuck?”
Him. Right.
Tyler? Taylor? Tanner?
Absolutely started with a T. Or maybe a D.
The apartment beyond my bedroom door maintains an eerie silence, and I just hope everyone made their way home, because the only thing worse than this hangover would be this hangover with company. I shuffle out into the living room and freeze so hard I could moonlight as a med-school cadaver.
Whoa.
It looks like several frat houses had an orgy, got pregnant, and gave birth to this disaster right in my living room. There are red cups everywhere, the coffee table has a glaze of dried… something, and as I step out to take it all in, my bare foot discovers something wet and viscous.
The smell hits next—a complex bouquet of stale beer, vapes, and body spray. On top of that, someone definitely offered the porcelain god a sacrifice somewhere, because I can smell it lurking beneath everything else like a predator waiting to pounce when my gag reflex least expects it.
This is your rebellion , I remind myself, snatching a garbage bag from under the sink. Your giant middle finger to Chestnut Hills champagne brunches.
I start cleaning—collecting cups, wiping surfaces, opening windows—content in the knowledge that my parents would flatline if they witnessed this, which was partly the point. My efforts to maximize the negative ROI I represent on their parental investment portfolio paid dividends.
When the worst of the trash is bagged, I decide my head is clear enough to get the bra down from my fan. I drag a kitchen chair into my room and ascend, the room doing the cha-cha as I wobble, and I’m almost done liberating the bra when my phone starts screaming at me.
The screen lights up like a bomb timer: FATHER.
My blood freezes in my veins. He hardly ever calls, but he never calls on weekends. Weekends are for golf at the club where memberships cost more than medical school and charity galas where they discuss how to help “the less fortunate” without actually having to see them. Unless?—
He knows.
Maybe I could just… not answer. I could claim I was in the library… in a coma… decomposing in a dumpster somewhere. I doubt he’d care either way. But ignoring Dr. Robert Hayes only compounds the interest on your suffering, the disappointment growing like a blob until it can’t fit through the door.
So, with a sigh, I descend and answer.
And he speaks before I can say a word.
“I have your credit card statement pulled up on my screen, Maya.”
No greeting—no ‘how’s my daughter’ or similar—just straight to the prosecution. I can picture him in his study, the statement displayed on his monitor like damning evidence in a murder trial, as if any amount of money would make the slightest bit of difference to his life.
“Good, I?—“
He cuts me off, reading each charge like he’s presenting symptoms of a terminal diagnosis. Each word lands like a scalpel incision—precise, sterile, designed for maximum damage with minimal visible trauma—so I let him go on, rolling my eyes at each item and smirking at more than a few of them.
“Is this how you choose to hemorrhage my money?” The disgust in his voice could sterilize surgical equipment. “On bacchanalian excess?”
Bacchanalian.
I roll my eyes so far back in my head they spot my brain. Trust him to name-drop ancient Rome. Like hosting a party for nursing students drowning in student loans and existential dread is equivalent to running a Victorian opium den crossed with a very low-class brothel.
“Dad, it was just?—“
“An embarrassment.” He bisects my explanation with surgical precision, the technique he’s perfected over twenty- three years of never letting his daughter complete a fucking sentence. “Twenty-three years old and still behaving like a freshman.”
“To be fair?—“
“Your siblings are building their practices, establishing themselves as contributing members of society, joining their place in the correct echelons with the right people, and you’re… what?” He sighs. “Hosting keggers like some state school sorority president? Studying nursing ?”
Suddenly, all the fuck-yous I’ve rehearsed in the shower for the last few years, while scrubbing twelve-hour shifts’ worth of blood and bodily fluids out of my hair evaporate. I’m fifteen again, standing in his office while he alphabetizes my failures.
“I maintain a 3.9 GPA.”
“Academic performance was never your deficiency, Maya. Character and decision-making are the problems.” There’s a long pause. “And your mother and I have decided that continuing to enable this lifestyle in the hope that you might one day grow up is no longer sustainable.”
The bomb lands right on target.
Breathe.
He talks like I’m mainlining cocaine and vodka. Like it’s a crime to blow off steam after holding someone’s hand while they flatline, after cleaning every fluid the human body can produce, or after watching a six-year-old code because life’s just that fucking hilarious.
“Your credit card has been terminated, effective immediately.”
My knees buckle and I white-knuckle the counter to prevent from falling.
No. Fuck no. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck ? —
“Additionally,” his voice hardens. “We will not be renewing your lease. You have thirty days to secure alternative accommodations.”
The line goes dead.
I stand there, phone still suctioned to my ear, listening to the sound of my breathing doing a passable impression of a dying ventilator. Around me, the apartment— my apartment for thirty more sunrises—suddenly feels like I’m already trespassing in my existence.
Thirty days.
The number loops in my brain. Thirty days to find shelter with no money and no job. Thirty days to figure out how civilians without trust funds navigate capitalism. Thirty days to learn skills like “paying for groceries” and “not dying of exposure.”
Thirty days before I’m?—
Homeless.
Maya Hayes, daughter of Boston’s medical dynasty, owner of more La Perla than a boutique, is about to be catastrophically, undeniably, living-in-a-box homeless. My legs give their two weeks’ notice at the thought, and I slide down the cabinet until my ass meets carpet.
Last night I was invincible. Determined to piss off my parents and orchestrate hedonistic chaos for my friends. The one who could help them escape their ramen-for-dinner reality and their terror about residencies for just one night. And I accomplished the mission.
But, this morning, I’m just another broke grad student with a hickey.