Reckless Girls: A Novel

Lux and Maia clean hotel rooms at Haleakala Resort in Hawaii. Lux has been working at the resort for six months. She moved to Meroe Island from San Diego, California, with her boyfriend, Nico Johannsen. The two were supposed to live on Nico’s boat, but it got damaged on the journey from the mainland. Now, they share one small, cramped house with four other people—not what Lux pictured when she agreed to the move. 

Lux doesn’t hate working at the resort, but she doesn’t love it either. The guests in the room she’s currently cleaning left a pile of sex toys on the bed. This isn’t the worst she’s seen while working as a housekeeper, but she still finds incidents like this bizarre. As she makes a joke to Maia about folding their towels into the shape of penises rather than the swans the hotel requires, the couple walks in and hears her. They complain to management, and Lux is fired. She struggles to care: She didn’t like the job anyway, and now she gets to leave it.