Page 1 of Take Two

Chapter 1

Cyaire

(Three Years Ago)

“Your father and I didn’t spend this much money raising you for mediocrity, Cyaire.”

My mother’s voice pours through my AirPods while I walk through the marble lobby of The Langham, tie hanging loose around my neck, headache pressing hard and insistent behind my eyes like some alien creature trying to escape through my skull. I pause near the entrance, squeezing my eyes shut as if that might drown her out, but my momma is relentless, not loud, exactly, just utterly impossible to ignore.

“Cyaire? Do you hear me, boy?” She sharpens the question, and the pitch of it sends a spike of pain through my temple that makes me wince visibly enough for a passing couple to glance at me sideways.

“Yes ma’am,” I reply, drawing a slow breath through my nose as I force myself to take in my surroundings rather than the inside of my own skull.

The hotel is exactly what people expect when they think New York luxury. Gold lighting catches across polished marble floors in wide amber pools, and expensive perfume trails through the air every time someone moves past me. Somewhere near the elevators, a pianist is playing softly enough to dissolve into the ambient texture of clinking glasses and low, careful conversation. The kind of music that exists purely to remind you that you are somewhere elevated.

Everything about this place feels fancy. Stunning and perfect in every conceivable direction I look.

I am so fucking tired of perfect.

“Well. Do you?” My mother continues, her tone making clear she is very much still waiting on a satisfactory answer to the question she asked before I stopped listening.

“I’m aware, Momma. I’m blessed to have the things you and Dad have afforded me.” I shift the strap of my overnight bag higher onto my shoulder, already knowing those words won’t be enough.

“I don’t think you are,” she replies immediately, not appeased in the slightest. “Your interview at Mount Sinai was an opportunity most people would spend their entire lives praying for. The fact that you sound exhausted right now, instead of grateful, is genuinely concerning to me.”

I press the button for the elevator. Then I stand there and stare at the closed doors as my reflection assembles itself slowly across the shining gold surface.

The doors don’t open and I don’t move.

The version of me looking back is immaculate by the professional standards instilled in me. Navy blue suit tailored to my mother’s exact specifications, shiny brogues, crisp white button-down, silver cufflinks shaped like stethoscopes. A gift from my brother, Julian, last Christmas, delivered with a knowing smile and absolutely zero irony. My tie is the only thing off. Hanging loose around my collar. I started undoing it somewhere between the cab and the lobby and then simply lost the motivation to finish.

Julian. I would rather be talking to him right now. He would tell me to fall in line. Give her what she wants, if I want her to stop her nagging. Keep my head down, go to my room, review my notes for tomorrow. Julian has always been better at folding himself up neatly when the situation demands it. . .but I’m not him. I don’t want to be.

Something ugly and suffocating twists deep in my chest at the thought of going upstairs, changing into pajamas, and sitting cross-legged on an expensive hotel bed reviewing interview notes for programs I have absolutely no intention of attending..

Exhausted doesn’t begin to cover what I’m feeling right now.

I’ve spent the last four days pretending my future still belongs to me. Four days walking through pristine medical school campuses with their gleaming buildings and their hushed, reverent corridors, while admissions boards smile at me like the shape of my life has already been decided and I’m simply waiting to be handed the paperwork. Four days of listening to people tell me how impressive I am, how bright my future is, how incredibly lucky I am to even be sitting in these rooms at my age.

Lucky. That word keeps coming at me like something I’m supposed to catch and hold close to my chest.

“Tomorrow’s interview is even more significant than today’s,” my mother continues, shifting gears without pause. “Columbia’s acceptance rate alone should convey to you exactly how fortunate you are to even be considered for a seat in that room.”

“I know the acceptance rate.” I say it quietly, already turning away from the elevator, walking without any particular destination through the lobby because standing still is making everything worse.

“You should know it. Considering how hard your father and I have worked to put you in a position where schools of that caliber would even look at you in the first place.”

There it is.

That damn line. The one she always returns to eventually, like a compass finding north, like she needs me to feel the full geometry of what I owe them before she’ll feel complete.

As if I wasn’t the one who spent four years grinding through undergrad. As if she was sitting beside me at two in the morning trying to untangle organic chemistry. As if she survived back-to-back exams on three hours of broken sleep, sat through MCAT prep courses, suffered through Biochemistry labs, dragged herself through every miserable and demoralizing stretch it took to make myself competitive enough to even stand at the threshold of schools like this.

My parents gave me opportunity. I know that. I have never pretended otherwise.

I also did the work. Every brutal, unglamorous second of it. Alone, in rooms they never entered, for years.

None of that appears to register once my mother begins talking about sacrifice. Every achievement I have ever managed somehow folds back into them. The money they spent, the schools they chose, the future they already constructed for me before I was old enough to understand that I might want something different. Something that was actually mine.