Free Messy by Heather Cocks, Jessica Morgan Page A

time-traveling coma that taught him life lessons, and Max didn’t particularly want to go there.
    “Don’t freak out,” Molly said, watching Max’s face.
    Max exhaled. “How could you tell?”
    Molly smiled. “Your nostrils get all flare-y.”
    “I just want to do a good job.”
For the money. And because if I can’t manage to write a blog about someone whose only thoughts are about shoes, maybe I’m not cut out for NYU.
    “You’ll be fine,” Molly told her. “Don’t think about what Brooke would want you to write. Think about what would make a fun read, and go from there.”
    “Well,” Max said, “I guess the bathroom is as good a place to start as any. If people aren’t debauching themselves in there, then this party is officially a failure.”
    Molly perched on the edge of a nearby leather sofa. She waved her phone. “I’ll be right here, texting Teddy words that rhyme with
leggings
. I guess Bone wants to write a song about some girl he met at American Apparel.”
    Max tried to make herself as narrow as possible and plunged into the immense, noisy crowd, hoping it would carry her in a helpful direction. Instead the sea of bodies bounced her around as if she were caught in a riptide.
    “—and then he said he couldn’t date me because his boyfriend wouldn’t like it. And I was, like, but it’s the
Golden Globes
,” Max overheard as she people-surfed past two tiny actresses she recognized from HBO. “It’s not like I was going to have
sex
with him. Probably.”
    Next, she was whipsawed toward where Moxie had made her entrance, thus getting jostled by people scrambling to get a photo with the actress, and then past a woman in giant square glasses screaming into her phone about how childbirth was an unacceptable excuse for missing a script deadline. Max was dumbfounded at how many people were inside the guesthouse. It had to be violating the fire code ten times over, although maybe it just felt crowded because she kept somehow getting shoved back past the same crazy people.
    “… But if I did sleep with him, do you think I could get him to change teams?”
    “… Oh, please, you can still
type
, why do you think they invented C-sections?”
    Max couldn’t take it. Parties like this were why Valium was invented. She gave up on delicacy and barreled in a straight line until she couldn’t feel flesh anymore. The mob spit her out near the kitchen, where an industrial-looking door was labeled MEN’S ROOM . Max cursed under her breath. But nobody was anywhere near it, so—after a look back at the suffocating crowd, and no sign of the ladies’ room—Max decided this was the hand of fate at work again, this time giving her bladder a nudge. Sheyanked open the heavy metal door, found nobody in any of the three stalls (just how many guests did the Stilts family usually
have
, anyway?), and was in and out in a flash, drying her hands on her pants as she hurriedly threw her shoulder into the door. This time, instead of opening, it smacked into something squishy and soft. Surprised, she stopped dead halfway through the doorway, which promptly swung back at her and banged into her face.
    “Ow!” Max said, stumbling backward, as a sharp pain shot through her sinuses, accompanied by fireworks behind her eyelids. She sank to her knees, holding her face.
    “Holy crap,” a male voice said from behind the door. Then he pulled it open and extracted Max while rubbing his own nose. “You okay?”
    “Blurgh,” was all Max could manage. Her vision was blurry.
Can you knock yourself blind?
    “Let me see your face,” the man said, leading her into the kitchen. “Are you bleeding?”
    Max leaned against something that she hoped was solid, since she still couldn’t see very well. She gingerly touched her nose. “I don’t think so.”
    The man hoisted himself up onto the kitchen counter and wiggled his own face. “Well, that cleared
my
sinuses.”
    Max blinked the last bit of water out of her eyes and