Chapter 5: Bad Luck or Destiny
Maya, in the end, did not dance.
She stood her ground with her arms crossed and her chin up, occasionally firing a sideways look at Jason until he took the hint and moved on. Whether she'd actually driven him away or he'd simply had other things to do, she chose to count it as a victory.
Shortly after ten, the kids started getting ready for bed — little cots pulled out in the nap room, teachers dimming the lights, the noise level dropping from chaos to murmur to near-silence.
Then, past ten-thirty, the pickups began.
Parents arrived in ones and twos, still in their work clothes — a hotel uniform, a restaurant apron still tied at the waist, the reflective stripe of a rideshare jacket. Some kids slept through being lifted and carried out, only tightening their grip on their parent's collar without waking. Others had gotten a second wind and needed ten minutes of negotiation before agreeing to leave.
By midnight, the room had thinned from thirty-plus to five.
Maya was one of the five.
Three of the remaining kids were asleep. One little boy had woken up, sat himself upright with great dignity, and was peering at the door — his dad was almost there, he seemed to know it in his bones.
Maya was not asleep. She was not anywhere close to asleep. She'd been lying on her cot staring at the ceiling for twenty minutes before giving up, retrieving a picture book from the reading shelf, and settling cross-legged under a nightlight to read it. She was perfectly content, though the room was quieter than she preferred.
Jason stayed until the last child was picked up — just past one in the morning — before heading upstairs.
This was the job. Inverted hours, the city sleeping while the school ran. He understood now why his grandparents had needed someone like Ms. Carol to hold it together. It was unglamorous, necessary work, and it asked a lot of the people who did it.
The next morning, Jason ran his laps, went out for breakfast at a diner two blocks over, came back, showered, and packed his bag for the job fair.
On the subway, his phone buzzed with a text.
Sunset Pictures HR — interview scheduled 2:00 PM today, 8th floor. Please confirm.
He confirmed, then kept going to the job fair anyway. No point in changing his morning.
The fair was busy. Screenwriting positions attracted long lines — lots of applicants, not many placements. Jason had seen this before in his previous life and recognized it here too. The industry always needed writers desperately and somehow also couldn't find any. The gap between experienced, hireable writer and technically a writer was vast, and most of the people in line were on the wrong side of it. New graduates applying for jobs they weren't ready for yet, or ready writers applying for jobs that didn't actually exist the way the posting described.
He spent a couple of hours, collected some contacts, didn't find anything worth pursuing, and called it a morning.
Lunch at a taco place nearby. Then he caught a rideshare to Sunset Pictures.
Sunset Pictures' main offices were in a low-rise campus in Burbank — old enough to have history, maintained well enough to feel like it knew it. The lobby had framed original animation cels on the walls, lit like museum pieces. The receptionist checked his interview notification and walked him up to the eighth floor.
The waiting room had maybe a dozen people in it. All ages, men and women, everyone sitting with their own thoughts. Nobody made eye contact. Standard pre-interview energy — collective tension dressed up as calm.
Jason found a seat and waited.
About twenty minutes in, a staff member came out to explain the process. Arrival order, one at a time, they'd call your name.
An hour and fifteen minutes later: "Jason Turner?"
He raised his hand. "That's me."
He followed her into a conference room. Three people at the table — two men, one woman. The woman sat in the center and was clearly running the room.
Jason sat, set his bag down, and waited.
The man on the left leaned forward and looked at his résumé. "NYU Tisch, directing program. Just graduated?"
"Few days ago. I'm back in LA permanently."
"LA native?"
"Grew up here."
"Directing degree, though. Why screenwriting?"
Jason had a clean, honest answer ready for this — the relationship between directing and writing, how understanding one sharpened the other, how he'd always cared more about story architecture than set logistics. He gave it without overselling.
The woman in the center asked two sharp questions about story structure. He answered both directly, no hedging.
Nine minutes after he sat down, they thanked him and told him they'd be in touch.
He got back to West Hollywood as the sun was going down, stepping off the bus onto the boulevard just as the street was shifting registers — the daytime boutiques closing, the bars beginning to fill, the whole block warming up for its evening self.
He paused outside Little Red Wagon and looked at the building next door, which he hadn't properly clocked before.
A boxing gym.
Small — maybe a third the size of the school. Through the window he could see four or five people working bags and a couple sparring lightly. A hand-painted sign above the door: Westside Boxing Club. All Welcome.
He went in, looked around for about ninety seconds, and left. Just filing it away.
Earl waved from the security booth. "Mr. Jason. Good timing — kids are starting to arrive."
"Maya already here?"
Earl's expression was fond and slightly pained. "Not yet. Give her ten minutes."
Jason had heard from Ms. Carol that Maya was, apparently, conducting an ongoing campaign among the children and staff to establish his bad-guy status. She'd also, according to Earl, been trying to recruit allies to take direct action on her behalf, with limited success.
He also found himself wondering about Lily — the little girl who'd been taken by the officers. He'd ask Ms. Carol if there'd been any update on finding her family.
He went upstairs, dropped his bag, changed into a t-shirt and shorts, and headed back down for a walk around the block.
He turned the corner.
A small figure coming the opposite direction, moving fast, head down, hit him directly in the shins and went down hard.
"Ow!"
Before Jason could even reach down to help, she'd already popped back up like a weighted punching toy, hands on hips, eyes blazing.
"You again?! You knocked me down again! What is your problem?!"
She was wearing a faded blue tracksuit today — same vintage style as the red one, same frayed cuffs, two letters across the chest. Different color, same Maya.
"Maya. I'm sorry — are you hurt?"
"You make me so MAD!"
"I know, I'm sorry."
She delivered a full formal complaint — detailed, impassioned, heavy on dramatic emphasis — and then fixed him with one last withering look, turned, and walked away with the dignity of someone who has said everything that needed to be said and refuses to give a single additional word to the situation.
Jason watched her march straight to Earl's booth.
He couldn't hear what she was saying, but he could see the gestures. Earl was nodding with the careful expression of a man who has learned to be very neutral.
"He knocked me down again, Grandpa Earl. Two times! Are you just going to let him keep doing that?"
Earl nodded slowly. "That does sound unfortunate."
"You should talk to him."
"Well," Earl said, reaching for his pretzels thoughtfully, "I've actually been having some stomach trouble lately. Might need to step away for a few minutes."
Maya stared at him.
He was already standing up.
"Grandpa Earl."
"Don't run near the gate," he said, and disappeared around the corner at a pace that suggested his stomach felt completely fine.
Maya stood in the empty security booth and stared at the space where he'd been.
She looked at the front gate. She looked left and right. The Bad Guy had gone. Nobody was around.
She sidled up to the iron gate and pushed.
Locked.
She kicked it once, decisively, and went back into the courtyard.
"Hello? Anyone? Is anybody here yet?"
She walked the perimeter, calling out, fully aware that no other kids had arrived yet, but operating on the principle that you never knew. Maybe one would turn up.
No one turned up.
She found a soccer ball near the equipment shed, dropped it on the ground, and started playing by herself.
The ball rolled away, bumped along the path, and came to rest at someone's feet.
Jason looked down at it. Maya looked up at him.
A pause.
He could walk away. That was probably the sensible move.
Instead, he did a small juggle — knee, knee, foot — and passed it back cleanly.
Maya blinked. Apparently this had not been expected.
The ball came to her and she pulled herself together, squared up, and wound up for a big kick.
"Watch this!" she announced.
She swung her foot with full commitment.
She missed the ball entirely.
Her shoe flew off.
The ball, bouncing back down from a wall, caught her on top of the head.
She sat down on the pavement.
There was a silence.
Jason looked at the shoe. He looked at Maya. He looked at Earl, who had apparently returned to his post and was now studying his phone with intense concentration.
Jason walked calmly back toward the building.
He could not be held responsible for that. Physically, causally, he had no part in it.
From his balcony a few minutes later, he looked down into the courtyard. Maya had retrieved her shoe, retrieved the ball, and was now kicking it ferociously around the yard by herself — working something out, apparently. She looked furious and also like she was having a great time.
Then two more kids arrived, then three more, and within ten minutes there was a full chaotic soccer game happening below, Maya at the center of it, bossing everyone around and laughing.
Jason smiled and turned back inside.
His phone rang. Unknown number.
"Hello?"
"Is this Jason Turner? This is the HR department at Sunset Pictures…"