Chapter Text
You do your thing and I do my thing. You are you and I am I. And, if, in the end, we end up together, it's beautiful.
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It’s 1994.
“Riley, it’s 1994.”
New York City is currently afflicted by the disease the rest of the known universe would simply refer to as celebration; Maya is simply hoping, maybe even praying if she gets desperate enough, that Riley will unglue herself from the television soon.
The fireworks don’t interest Maya much. Or at all, really. Even the shouts across Bleeker, which the Matthews apartment faces, are irritating her with increasing speed.
( Usually, she’d be entertained — she always is when Bleeker gets rowdy, says that the Alphabet City noise she’s used to has come to visit for a short time. )
Riley loves watching the ball drop, loves the controlled chaos that follows it. Always has. Maya knows this, and she won’t drag her away in an effort to save herself from the dull pounding now coming from her temples.
Besides, it’s best to stay still. If she moves any closer to Riley, she’ll trip that unlucky imbalance of equilibrium that’ll trigger the now frequent bouts of projectile vomiting she’s come to know. No thanks.
Riley also loves New Year’s Eve. Maya so wish she could say the same. She never has, and swears she never will. The Matthews insist that no fifteen year old is capable of torpedoing through the looking glass and deciding, definitively, what they will and won’t want in the future. Even five, ten years out.
( Maya insists she never wants kids and they laugh, mercilessly. She grumbles every time the topic comes up at breakfast, but only aggressively pokes at her eggs and doesn’t protest. )
But Riley, Riley — she’s the one who matters right now, in this very moment. She is still watching the television with a wide-eyed sort of clarity. The mayor announced that this was the return of a New York City he’d been familiar with when he was young. Everyone was insisting that the city was much prettier than it had been in decades.
“1994 might be the start of something incredible,” Riley muses excitedly, finally turning away from the screen and towards Maya, who doesn’t have enough time to change her irritated-slash-indifferent expression. “What’s wrong?”
Maya’s gaze quickly shifts from Riley’s, down to her scuffed lace-up boots. “Oh, nothing. You know I don’t really do the whole holiday thing.”
Riles seems slightly perplexed, scooting closer to her best friend and abandoning her fascination with the streamers that have aggressively colored Times Square.
“But you actually said it was 1994 and it had me thinking — what if all of these people are right? What if this changes everything?” She takes tight hold of Maya’s forearm, attempting to shake her into an enlightened state. “C’mon, my parents might actually let us go out together. On the subway! Open mics at Nuyorican, Broadway shows…”
Maya is already gone elsewhere, her mind traveling into some sort of dimension where she doesn’t have to consider the passage of time. Had she actually announced the arrival of the new year? She doesn’t remember now. Everything is blurry, uncertain, indecipherable.
Nothing makes sense.
“Maya!”
She jumps, startled by the sudden sound of her name.
“Are you even listening to me?” It’s the type of question that would come out in a semi-biting tone off of anyone else’s tongue, but this is Riley, and she’s being gentle. Her brows are knitted together in deep concern. Sure, Maya can be a space cadet, but she tries her best to listen to Riley’s musings past the ten seconds she allowed this time around.
“Seriously, what’s wrong? You’re somewhere else tonight. I thought you’d be happy, after all this time you’ve been begging my parents to let me see the city.”
Riley is fifteen, but a staunch sort of fifteen, still adorable in the face and yet altogether demanding when she needs to be. She is a collection of the traits that Maya has always believed makes one complete person — even before they met each other when they were five.
Maya is sixteen. Newly sixteen. Uncertain. About so many things. So, when she looks Riley in the eye again, she’s not sure what to say.
Because Riley is worried and Riley has most of the answers the universe contains, but Riley does not have the answers that Riley’s best friend Maya so desperately needs right now.
“We’re gonna see the whole world, you and me.” It’s a response that comes late out of the gate, but it comes, and Maya wants to sound as sincere as humanly possible when she says it. She thinks she’s succeeded, because when she reaches over to grab Riley’s hand, her best friend grabs onto it tightly and squeezes it for good measure.
She wants to believe in the statement as much as Riley does, which is why she doesn’t say when or how they’ll see it.
Because Maya does not live on Bleeker Street and Maya knows her life is halfway headed where nearly everyone said it would, but Maya’s best friend Riley does not know that yet.
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For the first time in over a decade, she misses breakfast at the Matthews apartment. She thinks, maybe, that they have no choice but to assume something is really wrong with her. That she might be dead in an alleyway, or something.
( Riley’s parents seem to love Maya with everything they’ve got, but they’ve never considered Alphabet City the most palatable. Riley never visits. It’s something Maya has accepted, because she has no other choice. )
When the phone rings, it’s Riley’s father, and her assumption is proven correct.
“This is really unlike you, Maya.”
She really hasn’t ever missed breakfast. Sure, she cuts class, but she’s always there at Riley’s dining table, keeping her parents under the guise that she’ll sit in a desk all day and be the student that Riley is.
It doesn’t really work as well as it once did. Her truancy slips are of particular interest to the principal now, who knows that Maya shouldn’t even be attending Adams; it’s not the high school in her district, and Mr. Matthews has done a great deal of maneuvering to get her a seat in a place she doesn’t belong.
She feels awful for wasting his time more often than not, but she thinks maybe, just maybe, he’ll stop being so adamant about her attending if she can’t even bother to show up for her ride to school with Riley.
“I’ll get there on time, I promise. I just got a late start.”
She’s sick. She’s never let that stop her from sitting down for breakfast with the Matthews until now.
Some afflictions, she now realizes, are easier to show off than others.
But when she makes her promise, she means it. Bleary-eyed and anything but bushy-tailed, she captures her hair into a messy ponytail and swipes the subway tokens her mother’s left sitting out on the counter.
They’re not for her, she knows, but it doesn’t matter much.
She’ll replace them later, she notes to herself, as she rushes out of the door.
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Homeroom is alive with the energy of students who are equally thrilled and horrified to have returned to school.
Mr. Matthews threatens ( though not at all in a threatening voice ) that their PSAT scores are in, and so Maya has been given some time to avoid discussing her noticeable absence. Riley is too busy freaking out over her future, and Maya can mercifully zone out during her panic; she never needs advice or an explanation during an academic crisis, only a presumed listening ear.
As Riley reviews the math section with herself, Maya counts. Just counts. Days until the semester is over. Days until her presumed graduation. Hours until finally, the dam in her will break and she will tell Riley and the Matthews that —
“Is this sophomore homeroom eight?”
A different dam in her breaks then, because it just can’t be.
But it is. She knows the voice, the one she's reviewed in her head, over and over.
You’re an artist.
I’d like to be.
So you must see the world differently.
Different how?
You can see what makes it turn.
She turns her head towards the back of her room, and there he is, in a relaxed stance, backpack only hiked onto one of his shoulders, a curious expression in his eyes as he reviews the unfamiliar faces that are now transfixed on him. New students are a time a dozen, sure, but he has a magnetizing quality.
It takes his gaze some time to travel to the front of the room where Maya sits, but when it does, her chest tightens with a pain beyond belief and she realizes she can only look at him for just a second.
But even when she looks away, she can still see him in her periphery, trying to peel the layers back and see her insides so he can assure she is who he thinks she is.
Her first instinct is to turn to Riley and share her terror, but when she does, she remembers that he’s just as new to her as he is to everyone else.
She’s on air now, Maya knows — she can see it. Her eyes are lit up with a sense of fascination. Riley can only do crushes the way Riley does them, and they are full throttle.
“Lucas has recently moved here from Texas.”
And Maya hopes, maybe even prays, that he’ll get himself back there.