After dinner, Andy managed to stumble into Cadell’s car.
The asphalt parking lot lurched under her feet, and Cadell laughed at her for being buzzed on one glass of wine because the liver transplant surgeon-in-training evidently needed to work on training her liver.
Andy wasn’t buzzed. She was fine.
She was just fine, she insisted. “Fine. Absolutely fine. I’m fine.”
He was still laughing at her. “Do you feel queasy?”
“No. It was one glass of wine. Surely, I can hold one glass of wine. One glass. I’m fine. Fine.”
Cadell had barely touched his glass of wine, and so he drove them to a nightclub and then around to the back of the building.
For just a moment, even through the haze of the wine, her nerves jangled. Andy was wearing a slutty dress and too much make-up, and she was out at night with a most unsuitable boy. He had driven her to a deserted area behind a building.
But it wasn’t deserted.
In the rear of the building, an awning stretched into the parking lot. Floodlights spilled over the blue canopy. The letters VIP were etched in gold on the front of the fabric.
Cadell stopped the car in front of the entrance and the doors clicked as they unlocked. He got out and threw his jacket in the back beside Emily’s car seat.
A man dressed in a suit opened her door for Andy and held out his hand to steady her as she felt for the ground outside with her high-heeled shoes.
Cadell came around the car and held out his elbow to her.
A small part of her brain was giggling hysterically at the antique gesture, but she slid her hand under his arm. The wine had made her unsteady, and his heavy bicep inside the sleeve of his dress shirt reassured her.
Inside the VIP entrance, a staircase led up to a balcony that overlooked the main area’s dance floor. Couches crowded around coffee tables, and groups clustered around those tables, drinking and laughing. Loud music filled the air and her ears, blocking out what people were saying and laughing as if Andy were trapped in a cone of noise.
On one table, lines of white powder streaked the glass. The people around the table were laughing very loudly.
The alcohol haze around Andy’s head burned away.
They shouldn’t be here. Cadell should not be around people using drugs like that. She said, “Let’s go home.”
“I’ve got to do my set,” he said. “Tryp said that Elfie would be here, so you guys can sit together. I wouldn’t leave you hanging.”
“That’s not it. I just don’t think—”
He looked over the balcony railing. “Hey, there’s Elfie. She’s got a seat right by the stage. I’ll bet Tryp bullied someone out of it.” Cadell took Andy’s hand and led her down the stairs at the other end of the VIP area. The bottom of the spiral staircase was right behind the stage.
A few tables were set up on a riser inside the railing that acted as a perimeter. Elfie, the tiny blond woman, was perched on a barstool and swinging her feet. The other people who populated the tables in the exclusive area were either very well-dressed in glittering cocktail dresses and suits or exceedingly badly dressed in ripped jeans. There must be a bright line of income or fame that, once passed, caused one’s wardrobe to deteriorate quickly. Andy did not know where that line was, so she bet it was a lot higher than she could see.
Andy slid into the seat beside Elfie. “Heya, again.”
“Howdy.” Elfie’s Texan accent made good use of that word.
Cadell high-fived Elfie. “Anything I need to watch out for tonight?”
“No,” Elfie sighed. “The club isn’t rated for pyros. There’re just a few fog effects.”
“Cool.” He turned to Andy. “See you in few minutes?”
She nodded, and Cadell walked toward the far side of the stage. The crowd swallowed him up like thick smoke.
“How’re you doing?” Elfie leaned over and shout-said to Andy.
“Oh, fine.” Andy ordered a diet soda from the waiter, and Elfie got a cranberry juice and seltzer water.
“So how long have you and Cadell been seeing each other?” Elfie asked her in that sing-song cadence that suggested this oh-so-casual question had been roundly discussed beforehand.
“We’ve known each other for almost a year, but we’ve only been out a few times,” Andy told her. That seemed true enough.
“Oh, that’s right.” Elfie waved her hands around her temples. “Brain fuzz. Where’d you meet?” Elfie asked, still in that same sing-song voice.
Evidently, people had been talking. Between Andy showing up at their recording session twice now and that small club a few days ago when he had kissed her on stage, yes, Andy was sure that people had been talking. In an Indian community, she would have had twenty phone calls and an intervention by now.
“At a fundraiser,” Andy said. She would have to coordinate the story with Cadell. “Cadell donated quite a lot of money to the hospital that I work at.”
“Did he?” Elfie asked, watching the band where they were setting up their equipment over to the side of the small stage. “He didn’t mention it.”
“He wouldn’t,” Andy said, surprising herself at how quickly that came to her tongue, but it was correct. Cadell wouldn’t brag about such a thing even if it had been entirely charitable.
“Why, though? Usually, people donate to causes for a reason.” Elfie glanced sideways at her. “Any particular reason?”
“None to speak of.” Indeed, because Emily was her patient, Andy couldn’t speak of it at all according to HIPPA regulations.
The waiter brought their drinks, and Andy turned to accept hers from his hand.
As she took the diet soda, her eyes focused beyond the dewy glass, her attention caught by a flash of eyes and a familiar face.
Many familiar faces.
Andy whipped back to the table. “Shit.”
“Whoa, Nellie!” Elfie said, laughing. “What’s got you riled up?”
“My cousins just walked in.”
Elfie squinted, looking past her into the gloom. “Where?”
Andy pointed, keeping her hand near her chest and down on the table. “That group of Indian boys over there.”
Elfie saw them and tipped her head. “The guys? All of them with mustaches?”
“Yes.”
“Which one of them is your cousin?”
“All of them,” Andy said, trying to find somewhere to hide, a proper table to crawl under, not just this tall, spindly thing with no tablecloth.
“All of them are your cousins?” Elfie asked.
“All of them that I could see. I saw about eight of them.”
Elfie turned back to her and leaned closer. “That seems to be a problem for you.”
Andy ground her teeth. An ache spread up her jaw to her head. “Yes, to put it mildly. If they see me, I’m in trouble. I could never be allowed to leave the house again.”
Elfie looked Andy up and down. “You’re an adult. Tryp said you’re a doctor.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Andy was beginning to vibrate with tension.
“You live with your folks?”
Andy nodded.
Elfie looked over at her cousins again. “They don’t have any chicks with them.”
“No. Of course, not.”
“Are they all gay?”
“None of them, probably. Or few of them, at any rate. Indian young men go out in groups. It’s a community thing. Everything must be processed with multiple people.”
“So come on.” Elfie hopped down off her bar stool.
“Where?” Andy climbed down, too, careful to not flash her underwear at the room. The too-tight red dress rode up at the most inopportune times.
Andy looked over Elfie’s head and then down at the tiny woman. Elfie was shorter than Andy by quite a lot, maybe four inches, but Andy was wearing heels. Elfie wore ballet flats.
Elfie said, “The one place they’ll never spot you: the ladies’ room.”
They skulked through the edge of the crowd, keeping clumps of people between themselves and the group with Vivekananda, Saravanaguru, Kathiravan, Arunprakash, and several other of Andy’s cousins.
They reached the door to the ladies’ room and slipped inside.
Andy had heard about the restrooms at bars. She had never seen one, of course. This restroom was much nicer than she had been led to believe.
They stood in a carpeted room with couches and armchairs. Five other women took up some of the chairs, but four others were unoccupied. Bowls of lavender potpourri on small side tables perfumed the air.
Another woman came through a swinging door in the back of the room. Andy caught a glimpse of white tile and gleaming fixtures inside.
She asked Elfie, “Are we in the right place?”
“Oh, yeah,” Elfie said. “Now, tell me what the hell is really going on.”
“I don’t want to see them. My parents would be terribly upset.”
“And?” Elfie asked.
“And the fight would be unpleasant.”
Elfie peered up at her, squinting again. “Do you need help?”
Andy blinked. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Is there a step-father or something involved? Do you need someone to stay with for a while to get your feet under you? Tryp and I just have a hotel room, but Xan and Georgie have an extra bedroom in their suite that they’re not using.”
Andy said, “I still don’t understand.”
Elfie sighed and flopped on a chair. “Are you being abused? Are they threatening you with physical harm, or is someone sexually abusing you? Is that why you have to sneak out of your parents’ house?”
“No,” Andy said, waving her hands in front of herself to fend off the horrifying thought. “No, heavens, no.”
Elfie said, her light blue eyes looking straight at Andy, “You can tell me. I understand.”
“They’re just very traditional. It’s a very conservative culture.”
“So you don’t want help at this time?” Elfie said.
“I swear, I don’t need help, but thank you.”
Elfie sighed a deep sigh, like pent-up air. “Okay, so you just don’t want to deal with them.”
“Right.”
“Okay, then.”
A waitress stuck her head in the door. “Anybody want anything?”
Elfie raised her hand. “A cranberry juice and seltzer water,” she turned to Andy, “and you had a diet soda, right?”
Andy nodded and said, “Yes, please.” When the waitress had left, she asked Elfie, “So are we just going to hide in here?”
Elfie leaned back in her chair. “You got a better plan?”
“But, the guys wanted us up on stage for that last number. The one that Cadell wrote.” The kissing one.
“You don’t want to be on stage right now, do you? In front of your horde of cousins?”
“Oh. No,” Andy admitted.
“Then we’re hiding in here. We could go up to the VIP area.”
“Cadell won’t know where we went,” Andy said. “He’ll be worried.”
“Tryp knows that I can take care of myself.” Elfie flipped a small, gray tube-thing in the air.
“I’ll just text him.”
Elfie laughed. “Are you kidding me? There are no phones onstage. Those musos would be chatting with the phone pinned between their ear and their shoulder instead of playing music and doing their damn job. They’re all slackers, you know. It’s not like they have a real job.”
Andy texted him that she would find him afterward in the VIP area. To Elfie, she said, “I thought you married the drummer.”
“Yeah, whatever. You’ve got to watch the musicians all the damn time. Laying around, ‘thinking’ about music.” Elfie mimed air quotes. “Listening to other people’s music and pretending to play the drums to it. That’s not a job.”
They talked about Elfie’s job, which was surprisingly technical and involved blowing things up, and sipped their drinks until Killer Valentine stopped playing and the house DJ went back to playing EDM.
Andy and Elfie left the bathroom and sneaked upstairs to the VIP area.