Maya's Turn

She told Maya almost by accident, on a Thursday, over the particular kind of dinner where nobody was really paying attention to the food — chicken tacos assembled with the enthusiasm of people who had somewhere better to be, eaten at the kitchen counter instead of the table because the table currently had a half-finished 500-piece puzzle colonizing it.

"Can I show you something," Sam said, already regretting it a little, already bracing for the exact eye-roll she'd gotten in eighth grade when she'd tried to explain why she liked the Jonas Brothers unironically. "It's a video. Music thing."

Maya, fifteen and constitutionally suspicious of anything her mother introduced with the word thing, took the phone with the wary caution of someone checking for a trap. Sam pulled up the Fallon clip.

She watched Maya's face for the eye-roll. It didn't come.

"Wait," Maya said instead, leaning in, "is this Diljit? Like, the Diljit?"

Sam blinked. "You know who this is?"

"Mum. He's massive. Like, genuinely one of the biggest artists in the world right now, he's been on, like, every awards show, half my For You Page is just clips of him." Maya scrolled through the video a second time, this time with actual attention rather than politeness, and something shifted in her posture — less humoring my mother and more oh, we're actually talking about this. "Also this is Morni, it's, like, a whole genre unto itself at this point, there's a million versions of this on TikTok. Wait, how do you even know about this."

"I saw it at midnight and fell down a hole."

"A hole," Maya repeated, delighted, the way teenagers are delighted whenever a parent accidentally does something recognizably human. "Okay, wait, show me the hole. What else did you watch."

And so, for one strange and genuinely lovely hour, over cooling tacos and an abandoned puzzle, Sam and her fifteen-year-old daughter sat shoulder to shoulder passing a phone back and forth, Maya pulling up the corners of this world Sam had only just discovered and Sam realising, with a small jolt, that Maya had been living somewhere near its edges for years without either of them ever mentioning it — a whole layer of her daughter's actual cultural life that Sam had simply never asked about, because it had never occurred to her that there was a question worth asking.

"There's this whole thing on my feed lately where people do, like, workout versions," Maya said at one point, pulling up a clip of a fitness influencer doing something with her arms that bore only a loose resemblance to anything Sam had seen so far. "I don't really get it, honestly. Like some of it looks like the actual dancing and some of it looks like a completely different thing wearing the same hashtag."

Sam filed that away without quite knowing why it mattered yet — a small, strange observation from a fifteen-year-old that would take her another several weeks and a Saturday afternoon with Amrit to fully understand.

"I found a class," Sam said instead, because it felt like the natural next thing to say, now that the door was open. "Actual class. In Birmingham."

"Are you gonna go?"

"I don't know. Rachel thinks I'm going to flake."

Maya considered this with the total lack of diplomacy that was, Sam had come to learn, one of her daughter's more valuable qualities. "Rachel's not wrong, you did quit the running thing." A beat. "But also you cried a little just now when you showed me the video, so, I don't know, this one might be different."

"I did not cry."

"Mum. Your eyes were doing a thing."

Sam laughed, and swatted her with a dish towel, and didn't argue the point further, because Maya was right, and because there was something steadying about being seen this clearly by someone who loved her enough to say it anyway. Dave had always been the gentle one, the diplomat, careful with Sam's feelings even after the divorce had made careful diplomacy a professional requirement rather than a marital one. Maya had never quite inherited that instinct. Maya just told you the true thing and let you deal with it, which, on nights like this one, felt like exactly the kind of company Sam needed.

"You should go," Maya said, later, unprompted, already halfway back to her room. "The Birmingham thing. Just go once. Worst case you get an hour drive out of it and a story."

"Since when are you the encouraging one?"

"Since you started actually finding things you like instead of just, like, surviving Tuesdays," Maya said, with the casual, devastating accuracy of a teenager who had clearly been paying more attention to her mother's life than Sam had given her credit for, and disappeared down the hall before Sam could figure out how to respond to that.