Their buses arrived late into New York, torrential downpour slowing their progress, but Sierra didn’t mind. Like everyone else, she had slept nearly the entire ride, the intensity of the past few weeks catching up with her. She had awakened to a soundtrack of honking horns as they swerved into Manhattan, Ethan’s head on her shoulder, peaceful, while cars and taxis zipped between swarms of pedestrians and bikers. She felt the pace instantaneously enter her bloodstream.
They stashed their bags at their Times Square hotel—assigned four to a room, in the same pairs as the dorms, unfortunately—and changed. (“Is that what you’re wearing?” Harlow asked of Sierra’s satin tank and pleated skirt, which did seem tragically demure alongside Harlow’s little black dress.) Then they embarked on a preshow whirlwind: touring the Winter Garden theater—home of Abby’s Road; a Q&A with the writer/director/composer himself; dinner at a hole-in-the-wall pizza place; and back for showtime. They slipped into their balcony seats minutes before curtain.
Sierra clutched her program the entire show, feeling every note echo in her heart, reverberate through her veins. She had been to a Broadway production only once before—a Phantom of the Opera revival—but this felt so brand-new, exotic. And to be just one degree of separation from three cast members—two of the soldiers in the chorus and the girl in the lavender hoop skirt were Harlow and Alex’s friends—gave Sierra a shot of inspiration that felt like pure adrenaline. This kind of life was possible. She had never been in such close proximity to people her age, living the life she dreamed of. This, all of it, was what she, Sierra Suarez, wanted.
Ethan and Tripp watched beside her just as rapt. Harlow, seated a row in front of them, shifted endlessly. She swung her leg, tied her hair back, took it down, tied it back again. Scowling during John Adams’s death scene, she whispered something to Alex, then perched her head on her fist, looking bored.
After the curtain call, they were invited into the tight corridors of the backstage to meet the cast. Sierra hung back in the pack, but loved viewing these creatures up close. They looked even younger, slighter, and it was hard to fathom that those voices had come from some of those bodies.
It was midnight when they returned to the hotel and 12:01 when Alex pulled Harlow, Ethan, Sierra and Tripp aside. “Still in for the after-party?”
Ethan and Sierra raised their eyebrows at each other, lucky to be included.
Alex and Harlow—quieter than usual, still scowling—led them to the fifth-floor walk-up their three friends shared above a Greek restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen. The grimy shoebox of a two-bedroom apartment, posters and playbills taped and tacked onto the walls, was nothing short of thrilling to Sierra. These three were living an artist’s life, here in the middle of this chaos and madness. It seemed incredibly romantic, gutsy, intoxicating, and any bit of supposed suffering just made it all the more alluring. Sierra was almost too excited to speak.
Ethan was still in a heady fog—from the show, which had infected him, and the lights of Times Square and the energy and the everything—when they arrived at the after-party, music spilling out, along with an herbal, musky, charred scent he couldn’t quite place.
Alex led them straight through the dim-lit, thumping-bass dance party to the kitchen, like he owned the place. Tripp peeled off from their group, beelining for the runway-model-looking guy who had played Charles Adams. In the kitchen, they found several pots on the stove top, a bearded, skinny hipster in thick glasses stirring them with the care of a DJ spinning. He and Alex shook hands, slapped each other on the shoulder. “Looking good,” Alex said to him. Then to the group he said, “This is Stone.”
Stone nodded, Ethan reciprocated.
“And you guys know each other? And all these people?” Sierra asked, in awe.
“Juilliard.” Stone pointed at Alex and himself. A man of few words.
“Wow, so this is Juilliard Drama.” Ethan surveyed the room.
“I’m ballet,” Stone said. “He’s drama.” He pointed at Alex.
“And also a lot of NYU. Harlow knows everyone too.”
Sure enough, Harlow already stood at the center of a group, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, chatting and looking relieved to be home. Ethan could only imagine what she was telling them about her summer. He suspected a lot of exaggeration.
“This ready to go, man?” Alex asked.
Stone shrugged, nodded. “Let’s do it.”
“So what’s goin’ on with all this?” Ethan asked, aware he was confirming his utter lack of cool.
“Oooh, is this ayahuasca?” Sierra leaned over Ethan, peeking into the pots, which bubbled like three soups of varying consistencies.
“Seriously?” Ethan looked at her in disbelief. “What do you know about ayahuasca? They do a lotta this at Wellesley?”
“What do you know about ayahuasca?” she laughed. He was 99 percent sure she knew as much as he did, which was nothing.
“Ayahuasca is over,” Stone cut them off, expressionless.
“Good to know.” Ethan nodded.
“This is what you need to be doing now,” Alex said. “This is, like, ayahuasca 2.0.” Stone combined the three saucepans into a larger pot, ladling the concoction into disposable coffee cups. “It’s, like, next-level stuff. It’s, like...” Alex put his hand to his head to signal an explosion and mouthed BOOM.
Ethan and Sierra looked at each other like they had walked into some kind of college drug-movie shoot. “It seems kind of complicated,” Sierra said. “For something that’s ultimately supposed to be freeing or whatever.”
“It’s cool, it’s herbal, so it’ll blow your fucking mind but it won’t kill you or anything,” Alex said easily.
“Bonus,” Ethan said.
“It’s all natural, and practically FDA approved,” Alex went on, handing them cups.
Ethan held it near his lips: it smelled like dead flowers and gasoline.
“Cheers,” Stone said, tapping his cup to Ethan’s and Sierra’s, then slipping into the low lights of the living room, the throbbing music, the roar of chatter, the party respectably raging.
Ethan watched him and Alex get swallowed into the dancing crowd, and when he turned back around, Sierra was knocking back her drink.
“Wait!” Ethan grabbed her forearm. “You really think it’s okay?”
“It’s weirdly delicious.” She shouted to be heard over the music, which had cranked up. “And I feel like, I don’t know, maybe I’ll make tonight a night I’ll remember in twenty years when I’m old and probably boring—especially if this whole acting thing doesn’t work out—and I’ll be like, damn, I was exciting once when I drank that crazy poison during my seventeen hours in New York.”
“Is this absorbed immediately into the bloodstream or what?” he asked, laughing.
“Here’s hoping,” she said, drinking the rest.
He held up his cup, deep breath, and downed it.
Sierra felt like she should be feeling more by now. She had been so game to drink the stuff, shake up her world, for once, but she had been hoping for...more. So she chased it with a beer and chased that with a shot—and another and another and another and another—of something, anything that was circulating. Ethan did the same. They threw themselves into the party, jumping, jumping, jumping, arms in the air, dancing for what felt like hours but may have been minutes, who could tell? Until the room finally started to look like something being constructed in real time on a pottery wheel, spinning too, too, too fast. While their bodies seemed to be moving tooooo sloooowly, and they collapsed beside each other onto the faded sofa, laughing about everything and nothing.
Just a breath later, something, someone hurtled at them, smashing through the glass coffee table before them. At the crash, they rose to their feet, Ethan yanking Sierra away as fast as his dulled reflexes could manage. Tripping over the feet of whoever sat beside them, they stumbled together into a wall as the room’s collective screams modulated to cheers when Stone—it had been Stone, so ungraceful for a dancer—sprang right up, dusting shards of glass off himself.
Still wobbly in the chaos, people jostling them in the dim hallway, Sierra steadied herself, clasping what turned out to be a doorknob behind her back. Someone pushed past them, shoving Ethan against her in the process, and as she looked at him in that tenth of a second, it was as though that drink finally kicked in. His lips just millimeters from hers, she closed the distance, kissing him, and he kissed her back, arms wrapping around her waist. Dizzy all over again, she somehow twisted the doorknob open and they fell into someone’s empty room, nearly pitch-black, music still playing. She shed her satin camisole. He pulled off his button-down shirt. Or maybe she pulled off his shirt, and he hers. It was impossible to know and unimportant to her: what mattered was the impulse felt equal—mirrored—and relentless in that way of anything left simmering too long.