Worst Luck, Best Timing
Chapter Five: The Boy Who Never Gets Unlucky
I fell asleep during a test.
Not a nap. Not a brief, forgivable blink. A full, unmistakable, head-on-the-desk collapse, somewhere in the middle of question fourteen, from which I woke up to the sound of my own name being said with increasing concern by a teacher who had clearly said it several times already.
"Ms. Ellis. Maya." Mr. Donnelly was standing over my desk, holding my mostly blank answer sheet like evidence in a trial. "Did you get any sleep last night?"
"Some," I said, which was technically true, in the sense that four hours is, technically, some sleep.
A girl two seats over, someone I barely knew outside of this class, slid me a folded note during the confusion that just said you okay? in small, careful handwriting. I gave her a thumbs up I didn't entirely believe in myself, and she looked unconvinced, but let it go, the way people do when they've decided it isn't their place to push.
The week had simply stacked up on me the way weeks sometimes do — closing shift at Moon & Maple on Monday, an extra shift covering for a coworker's sick day on Tuesday, homework I'd pushed to nearly midnight both nights because the campaign videos needed editing and Milo needed help with a school project and my mom needed someone to watch the register for twenty minutes while she ran to the bank. None of it was, on its own, unmanageable. Stacked together, it had quietly become a kind of weight I hadn't noticed accumulating until my body simply refused to hold it up anymore.
I finished the test in the last four minutes, guessing on the last three questions, and told myself it was fine. I have a long history of telling myself things are fine directly before they turn out not to be.
• • •
I hadn't meant to sleep through the whole lunch period beforehand either, curled into the corner of the library with my head on my folded arms, but exhaustion has never once asked my permission before taking what it needs.
Wednesday's broadcast slot came and went without me noticing, which should have been my first sign that something was wrong. I only found out afterward, standing at my locker, when Juno showed up practically vibrating with information she clearly considered too good to sit on for even a second.
"So you know you were supposed to co-host today," she said.
"I was in the library. I completely forgot." My stomach dropped somewhere around my shoes. "Please tell me Ms. Alvarez didn't have to scramble."
"She didn't have to scramble," Juno said, drawing the moment out with visible relish, "because Theo covered for you. Did the whole segment solo. Told everyone you were finishing an assignment for the campaign and he didn't want to rush you."
I should have felt relieved. Instead, something hot and uncomfortable settled in my chest, a feeling I didn't have a polite name for yet.
"He was actually really smooth about it," Juno added, watching my face with the particular attentiveness of someone gathering material for later. "Didn't miss a beat. Whole school thinks you two coordinate like a well-oiled machine. Which is objectively hilarious, given everything we know about the two of you and open flames."
"That's not the point," I said.
"What is the point, exactly?" Juno asked, and for once I didn't have a ready answer.
• • •
I'd rehearsed a version of gratitude on the walk over — something short, something that acknowledged the favor without opening the door to a longer conversation about why I'd needed it in the first place. That plan lasted approximately as long as it took to actually see him standing there, calm and unbothered, like covering for me had cost him nothing at all.
I found him in the media room after school, coiling up cables with the methodical patience of someone who liked having something to do with his hands.
"You covered for me," I said, by way of hello.
"You looked like you were about to fall over in the hallway this morning," he said, not looking up. "I figured one broadcast wasn't worth you passing out on camera."
"You should have told me. Or woken me up. Or literally anything except quietly handling it and letting me find out from Juno."
He finally looked up, something flickering across his face that wasn't quite defensiveness but was close enough to it. "I was trying to help."
"I don't need you managing my life behind my back," I said, sharper than I meant to, the exhaustion of the week finding an outlet it probably didn't deserve. "I can handle my own schedule."
"Can you, though?" The words came out faster than he clearly intended, and I watched him hear himself say them, watched the wince follow half a second too late. "That's not — I didn't mean it like that."
"How else was I supposed to take it?"
"I meant that you're running on no sleep, three jobs, a full course load, and a media campaign that exists because I couldn't keep my own life together for one broadcast," he said, voice rising slightly, a rare crack in the composure he wore like a second skin. "You can't keep pretending you're fine, Maya. Everyone around you can see you're not fine. You're just the last person to admit it."
The words landed harder than I expected, mostly because some small, exhausted part of me suspected he was right, and I did not, in that particular moment, have the energy to be told the truth kindly.
"Well, I don't need you to fix it," I said, and left before either of us could say anything else, my sneakers squeaking too loudly against the media room floor on my way out.
• • •
I sat with Juno at her locker for twenty minutes afterward, not talking much, which she seemed to understand better than I expected her to. "You're allowed to be tired and still be mad someone pointed it out," she said, eventually, tucking a textbook under her arm. "Doesn't make you a bad person. Just makes you seventeen and stubborn, which, frankly, tracks."
"Thanks. Very comforting."
"I do my best," she said, and bumped my shoulder with hers before heading off to her next class, leaving me alone with my own thoughts for slightly longer than I wanted.
I regretted it almost immediately, the way I regret most things I say in the heat of a bad week, but pride is a stubborn thing, and I spent the rest of the walk home rehearsing all the things I should have said instead, none of which made me feel any better.
I came back the next afternoon anyway, not because I'd decided to apologize, exactly, but because the campaign's Friday post needed a plan and neither of us could avoid the media room forever. What I found instead was Theo, alone, standing very still in front of the camera rig with his notecards clutched so tightly the edges had started to bend, his breathing visibly too fast, too shallow, his face gone pale in a way I had never once seen on him before.
"Theo?"
The room felt too quiet in a way it never had before, the usual hum of confident chatter completely absent, replaced by something brittle and thin. I set my bag down slowly, the way you'd approach something easily startled, and crossed the last few feet between us with more care than I usually gave anything.
He didn't answer right away. When he finally looked at me, his eyes had a glassy, unfocused quality that scared me more than anything he could have said.
"I can't remember the opening line," he said, voice thin. "I've done this a hundred times. I don't understand why I can't—"
"Hey. Hey, look at me." I crossed the room without deciding to, took the notecards gently out of his hands before he could crumple them entirely, and set them face-down on the desk. "You don't need the cards. Just breathe for a second. In for four, okay? With me."
He looked at me like I'd said something in a language he was only half fluent in, but he counted with me anyway, in for four, hold for four, out for four, his shoulders slowly dropping from somewhere up around his ears back down to where they belonged.
"Better?" I asked, after the fourth round.
"A little," he admitted, and the honesty in it — no performance, no easy smile smoothing it over — startled me more than the panic had.
"What happened? This isn't — you do this every week. You're good at this."
I pulled a stool over and sat across from him instead of hovering, close enough to be present but not so close it felt like pressure, a balance I was still figuring out as I went.
He sat down heavily on the edge of the desk, dragging a hand down his face. "My dad called this morning. He'd seen the market video. Said the numbers were down from last week, said it looked unfocused, said I need to remember what's actually riding on this." A short, humorless laugh. "He has a way of making a school project feel like a quarterly earnings report."
"That's not fair to put on you."
"It's just how it works," he said, like he'd said the sentence to himself so many times it had worn smooth, lost its edges. "I mess up, it's not just me who notices. It's him, it's the family page, it's every relative who follows the account and has an opinion. So I don't get to mess up. Except apparently I just did, in front of you, which somehow feels worse."
"It doesn't feel worse to me," I said. "It feels like the first completely honest thing I've seen you do all semester."
He looked at me for a long moment, something unguarded and a little raw sitting behind his eyes, the mask nowhere in reach for once. "I'm sorry about yesterday," he said quietly. "I shouldn't have said it like that. You get to decide how much you're carrying. That's not my call to make for you."
"You weren't wrong, though," I admitted, the words costing me more than I expected them to. "I am tired. I have been tired for a long time. I just don't know how to be anything else without everything falling apart."
"Maybe it wouldn't fall apart," he said. "Maybe you'd just be tired and let people help, and it would still be fine."
"That's a nice theory."
"I didn't say I follow it myself," he said, with a small, self-deprecating smile. "I'm just very good at handing out advice I don't take."
"For what it's worth," I said, "nobody at this school actually needs Lucky Park. They need someone who shows up. You already do that. The luck part was never the important half."
He didn't say anything for a moment, just looked at me like he was turning the sentence over, checking it for a catch he hadn't found yet. "Nobody's ever put it that way before," he said finally.
"Well, now someone has. You're welcome."
That got a real laugh out of him — small, but real — and something in his shoulders finally let go the rest of the way.
• • •
We sat there for a while after that, not saying much, the media room quiet except for the low hum of the camera equipment cooling down. It was, strangely, one of the more comfortable silences I'd had all week — no cameras rolling, no script, no version of either of us performing for anyone.
"Can I tell you something I've never told anyone at school," he said, eventually, staring at a point somewhere on the floor.
"You don't have to."
"I know. I want to." He took a breath. "Sometimes I think everyone likes an idea of me more than they like me. Lucky Park. The kid things just work out for. And I don't know what happens to all of that the day something actually doesn't work out. I don't know who's still around for that version."
"I am," I said, before I'd fully thought it through, and meant it more than I'd meant almost anything all semester. "For the record. In case that helps at all."
Something shifted in his expression — surprise, mostly, like he hadn't expected the offer and didn't quite know where to put it. "That helps," he said, quietly. "More than you probably realize."
• • •
Before I left the media room, he'd walked me to the door, lingering there a second longer than the moment strictly needed. "Thank you," he said, "for staying. Most people would have used it as an excuse to leave and post about it later."
"I'm not most people," I said.
"No," he agreed, quietly, something warm settling behind his eyes. "You're really not."
I walked home that evening replaying the whole afternoon, the particular fragility in his voice when he'd said I can't remember the opening line, so different from the easy, camera-ready boy who joked about screwdrivers and fire alarms. I thought about how much effort it must take, every single day, to keep that mask fitted so perfectly that almost no one ever saw the seams.
I thought, too, about my own mask — the one where I insisted I was fine, where I turned exhaustion into a joke before anyone else could turn it into a concern, where I'd rather collapse quietly at a desk during a test than admit, out loud, that I couldn't carry everything alone.
For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe we weren't as different as I'd assumed the day I spilled coffee on his shirt. Maybe we were just wearing different versions of the same exhausted disguise, each of us convinced the other one had it easier.
I didn't know yet how much that afternoon would end up mattering. I only knew that for the first time since the semester started, someone had seen me — actually seen me, tired and imperfect and barely holding it together — and hadn't looked away.