Ivanka Trump's side job, by contrast, had been modeling — and her other gig was working as a waitress at the Hilton. And only during major school breaks: summer, winter, that was it.
Maya didn't have those kinds of options. She'd had to find her own way. And to maximize her earnings, she worked every week — not just during holidays. McDonald's had crossed her mind as an option. Register work, burger assembly, five dollars an hour. But the math was insulting. For someone with Maya's reputation, the hourly rate just wasn't worth the exchange of time.
So she'd ended up at the Sichuan restaurant, talking her way into the job with fluent Mandarin. And Boss Huang, paying twelve dollars an hour plus tips, was working out just fine.
Maya's usual schedule was Saturday or Sunday afternoon, two to three hours. Weekdays were off-limits unless something came up. Between the hourly rate and tips, she was clearing two to three hundred dollars most weeks without it cutting into her studies.
Today had been exceptional. Close to two hundred dollars in tips alone, just from the anniversary crowd and the qipao.
She'd worked until nearly three and then headed out into the afternoon. She checked Huang's red envelope as she walked — two Franklins inside. A two-hundred-dollar bonus on top of everything else.
It made sense. Running a restaurant in Manhattan's Chinatown for a decade was genuinely impressive. The street had competition on every corner — a third of the Chinese residents here were in the food business — but only a handful of restaurants ever achieved real staying power. This block sat between Wall Street and Broadway, which meant any place that established a reputation had a captive audience. Huang had clearly made it into the upper tier.
With time to spare, Maya swung by the Walmart Supercenter on 41st Street. At four feet three, she was immediately dwarfed by the shopping cart she grabbed at the entrance.
It's already February — this hooded spring fleece looks good, Jordan logo. XXL. Into the cart. This one too, might as well. A bag of walnuts — Chinese brand, nice — yes. Hardcover of Jurassic Park — yes.
She exited with a full bag. Chakra is a blessing. Twenty pounds for a few miles with human-only muscles would be miserable.
She found herself standing outside a small street newsstand near the corner, holding the Walmart bag, not moving.
Whatever's going to happen is going to happen. Sooner or later. The owner doesn't know me. Doesn't know who I am. Completely anonymous—
She composed her face into its most professional expression, walked inside, and looked around. After a quick scan, she reached out and drew two magazines from a stand, keeping her voice level and businesslike. "How much for these?"
The heavyset middle-aged white man at the counter — full beard — glanced at the magazine covers, at the nearly-naked men on the front, then looked up at the golden-haired, round-cheeked, clearly quite young girl holding them.
"That's, uh, fifteen dollars total. But listen, young lady — are you sure you didn't grab the wrong ones? If there's something you're actually looking for, I have—" He turned and retrieved something from behind the shelf and offered it over. Maya caught a brief glimpse of oiled abs and a square jaw and immediately understood the implication.
She had to fight the urge to hit him. Jaw set, expression blank, she placed two bills on the counter without a word, turned, and left. She nearly tripped on the doorstep on the way out.
The shopkeeper stared at her retreating back, shaking his head with something like genuine philosophical regret. "Such a waste. What a waste—"
He didn't notice — and Maya certainly didn't notice — that another teenager had been in the newsstand the whole time, browsing a shelf toward the back. A Black kid with small dreadlocks. He was now staring at the door with the expression of someone who had just watched the laws of physics get rewritten.
"No way," he whispered to himself, voice cracking. "I never — I would never have guessed — Student Council President Hansen is that kind of person?"
Maya rounded the corner, ducked behind a building, and finally let herself collapse slightly, hands on her knees, chest heaving, face red.
"I have no dignity left. Absolutely none. It's gone."
She straightened up, eyes narrowing.
"Tom Hansen. Tom Hansen. You're sitting in a prison cell and you're still making my life difficult. Making your own daughter go buy — you complete and total menace—"
She glared at the plastic bag sitting next to her feet on the sidewalk.
She genuinely considered finding a trash can.
But then she thought about it.
Tom had been inside for five or six years now. He was in his early thirties — physically in his prime — and hadn't had any kind of intimacy in all that time. When she thought about it plainly, without judgment, it was actually a little sad.
She remembered the last visit to Ryker's Island. Tom had been unshaven and softened around the edges, the handsome face she half-remembered from earlier years blurred and puffy. Near the end of the visit, he'd brought it up — awkwardly, flustered, clearly embarrassed — and she'd been ready to say no without hesitation.
But she'd looked at his face.
And then, without meaning to, she'd thought about being six years old. When she'd just started really leaning into the competition circuit, stacking up wins and influence points. She'd mentioned once, almost offhand, that she'd like a violin.
The next morning, Tom had come home with a Cristina. Italian-made. Professional-grade.
She'd pieced together how, later — overhearing Tom recounting it to his friends, that casual, boastful tone he used for everything: he'd gone out the same night, stabbed a couple of people in Uptown, and taken three thousand dollars. Then he'd gone to a shop on East Broadway and bought the best violin they had.
All Maya had actually wanted was a cheap beginner's instrument — the kind of thing she still played now, a Fengling, Chinese-made, thirty dollars and entirely functional. A full-sized adult professional violin wasn't what she'd had in mind, and in fact it hadn't even been the right size — children's, youth, and adult models scaled proportionally, and this one was too large.
For Tom, going out and robbing two strangers was apparently equivalent to going out for cigarettes. An extra ten years on a sentence already measured in the hundreds? Negligible, in the arithmetic of someone like Tom Hansen. He'd accepted it with complete equanimity.
But Maya had never stopped thinking about it.
There was something about the way Tom had acted — like it went without saying that his daughter should have the best violin available. Like robbing the people who had it was obviously the logical next step. Like the decade added to his sentence was just the cost of doing business.
He'd been completely matter-of-fact about all of it. No drama, no resentment, no expectation of gratitude.
If Tom could make choices like that — casually, without ceremony — then Maya figured she could be equally matter-of-fact about this one.
She picked up the bag and walked home, resigned.