I’ve never been to Tami’s family’s condo in the city, but it looks exactly as I’d imagine it—same sparse, modern furnishings as her house, near the top of a high-rise, with a wall of windows looking west.
“There’s my house,” she says, pointing toward the northern tip of Commodore Island. “Do you see it?”
“Yes,” I say, though all I see are a line of indistinguishable, identical lights on the shore reflecting back at themselves.
Vaughn comes up and puts his arms around her waist and kisses her on the neck.
“Why don’t we ever go out?” he says. “I want to go out.”
“You know I can’t be seen in public with you.”
“I should go,” I say, and turn around. It is the right thing to say, but I don’t know if I mean it.
“Nonsense,” Tami says. “Vaughn’s friends will be here soon. He has a friend I want you to meet.”
I have only been tipsy a handful of times in my life and never really understood the appeal, but the few sips I’ve had from Tami’s flask have seemed to turn on a switch inside that I don’t remember ever feeling. A yearning for more. A spark of something new and wild and reckless.
I think maybe I will get drunk tonight.
They arrive in a pack, Vaughn’s friends. He introduces them to me one by one while Tami stands looking out the window, her back to us all.
They are too excited to meet me. I almost feel sorry for them, for their misunderstanding. They think I am another girl like Tami.
Kayla and Amir are both low-level coders at A-Corp. Esteban is a bartender at a nice restaurant downtown, and his girlfriend, Tracy, is in community college and is a server at the same restaurant. Jordan is training to become a junior real estate agent, the only one without a partner, no doubt the one intended for me. They are all friends from high school, which they graduated from two years ago.
“Do you want a drink?” Jordan asks me. There’s something vague about his face. He looks like the image that would come up if you searched “average white young man.”
“Sure,” I say. He has a face that is meant to be forgotten. I understand why Tami thought we’d be a good match.
Tami and Vaughn disappear into one of the bedrooms down the hall, and I am left with strangers to sit around a glass coffee table that looks sharp enough to cut someone. I try to follow the conversation but it’s all gossip about people I don’t know. I look out the window and count the few stars strong enough to shine through the light of the city. I let Jordan make me another drink.
There is a brief moment, after the second drink, when I think I finally understand the appeal of alcohol. I am in a miserable situation but somehow not miserable. I am not on this hard couch listening to a conversation into which I have no entry; I am floating out of this building altogether, over Seattle and the Puget Sound, over the hills in the middle of the island, back to my home and maybe snuggled on the couch in between my dads, or in my bed, where I will call Lily and be comforted by her tough love as I tell her all the strange things I’ve been up to. But first, I have to pee.
As I walk back to the living room from the bathroom, I hear someone say, “Ivy Avila,” and stop in my tracks. I lean against the wall and listen.
“I read that she was down to like ninety pounds and her hair was falling out,” says Kayla.
“No,” says Tracy. “It was drugs. She had a thousand-dollar-a-day coke habit.”
“It was drugs combined with bipolar disorder,” says Amir. “She went off her meds.”
“She’s not as pretty as she used to be,” says Kayla.
“I think she’s hot,” says Jordan.
That’s when I come in and sit down, and everyone smiles, and no one says anything more about Ivy Avila.
I want to tell them about how she has my number, about our plans, about how she chose me, but then Tami and Vaughn emerge from the hallway, Tami looking as perfect as usual, not a hair on her head displaced. She doesn’t seem to feel any need to directly acknowledge or speak to any of the people sitting in her living room, like she just wants us here as filler.
Jordan puts his hand on my knee and I don’t push it off.
If Lily were here, she’d say something about this being Tami’s castle, about how she is the queen and we are all her servants, her hired fools. Just like the games she used to make everybody play in elementary school.
She pulls out her baggie of Freedom and pops one in Vaughn’s mouth.
“You ready?” she says to me, holding up a glittering pill. “Or can’t you afford it?”
“She can’t afford Freedom,” says Kayla, giggling a drunk girl giggle.
“Join the club,” Jordan says.
I think I will let him kiss me tonight.
“I know you’re trying to be good,” Tami says, walking over to the hallway table and picking up my purse. “But in case you change your mind. See, I’m putting one in this pocket here. It’ll be there in case you want to do something naughty. You can thank me later.”
“It still trips me out that Raine lets you deal this stuff,” Amir says.
“This shit saves people’s lives,” Vaughn says. “And I don’t need Raine’s permission to do anything.”
“Don’t let her hear you say that,” Tami says, and everyone laughs. Is this something people do? Laugh about someone’s wife with the girl he’s cheating on her with?
“She’s just so . . . principled,” Kayla says, and everyone laughs some more.
“You mean uptight,” Tracy says.
Tami just watches, a satisfied smile on her face, as she leans against the kitchen island, stirring her drink. She’s being strangely quiet, like it’s beneath her to join us, but it’s okay to have us here to watch.
“Raine is still so determined to be good,” Vaughn says. “Like that gets you anywhere.”
“Being good is entirely overrated,” Kayla says.
“Like last month,” Vaughn says. “She gave our last fifty bucks to her cousin who was about to get his electricity turned off. So then our electricity got turned off.”
“Damn,” Esteban says. “That’s cold.”
“All these things I used to love about her just make me tired now,” Vaughn says.
“Everybody’s tired, man,” Amir says. “You know how many hours I worked last week? Sixty-one. I don’t even know if I can pay my rent this month.”
Tami’s not tired like this. These are things she’s never had to think about and never will. My family’s not anywhere near rich by her standards, but somehow we’ve been spared too.
“She’s pretty and everything,” Esteban says. “But seriously dude, why’d you even marry her?”
I realize everyone is drunk. I’m getting there too, but they’ve all been drinking much faster than me. These are the kinds of conversations people have when they are drunk.
“She’s smart,” Vaughn says. “Much smarter than me. For a while, being around her made me feel smart too. But now it just makes me feel stupid.”
“And being with me doesn’t make you feel stupid?” Tami says, and all heads turn in her direction.
Vaughn seems to panic. “Well, you don’t make me feel bad about it at least,” he says. “You don’t want me to be someone I’m not. Raine is just always trying to make me . . . better.”
“What’s wrong with trying to be better?” I say for some reason, and everyone looks at me like they’re trying to figure out what exactly I’m doing here.
Tami laughs and the rest of the group decides it’s okay to laugh too. “She’s trying to be better,” she says. “It’s admirable, really. But some of us are lucky and don’t need to work that hard.”
Before I can figure out how to feel, Jordan hands me another drink. I am long past the point when I should stop. But I’m also nowhere near the point of feeling like I belong in this place or with these people, and those two things seem to even each other out in some weird way that I think I am starting now to understand.
Vaughn walks over to the wall of windows. “Just wait,” he says to his reflection in the glass. “I’m going to start winning all my fights, and I’ll shoot up in the ranks, and then I’ll get sponsored and buy a house on Commodore Island too. And it’ll just sit there empty while I fly around the world in my private jet.”
“Where you going to go?” says Esteban.
“You’re not going anywhere,” says Amir.
“Fuck you, man. I’m going more places than you.”
“At least I got a marketable skill.”
“What skill? Being an asshole?”
“Make me a drink, Esteban.”
“Make your own damn drink, Amir.”
“Lazy immigrant.”
“Look who’s talking. My parents paid good money to buy their place here. My mom was a fucking neurosurgeon back in Colombia. Your people just hopped on the bus in Arizona.”
“Dude, there was no water left. It was a hundred and forty degrees in the summer.”
“At least people weren’t chopping off each other’s heads with machetes.”
“Are you really having a pissing contest about whose parents had it worse?” Kayla says.
Tami’s face is pure amusement. To her, we’re all just a bunch of puppies, brought here to tumble over each other and make a mess and chew on each other’s ears.
I try to get up but I can’t. It’s the drinks, or it’s Jordan’s hand now farther up my leg, or it’s the laser beams of Tami’s eyes, holding me in my place.
“But what about Ash?” Vaughn says, walking in our direction from the windows. He is shrinking. He is shriveling up. All his muscles are deflating balloons.
“What about Ash?” Tami says, her eyes darkening.
“You have goose bumps,” Jordan whispers.
“I’m cold,” I say.
“Why are you with that loser?” says Vaughn.
“Any second now,” Amir says, “Vaughn’s going to start talking about how he can bench-press him.”
“I looked him up once,” Kayla says. “He’s beautiful.”
“You looked up my boyfriend?” Tami says.
“No,” the girl says. “I mean, yes. I’m sorry.”
“I have to piss,” Esteban says, standing up, then wobbling.
“You don’t get to talk about Ash,” Tami says to Vaughn in a calm voice.
“I think I’m going to go,” I think I say, but no one can hear me.
“But I don’t understand!” he says. “What do you even see in that guy? He’s just . . . limp. It can’t just be that his family has money. Your family has money. You don’t even like him. You think he’s pathetic. You—”
But then Tami punches him in the face, with a closed fist, and the sound of impact reverberates. We all just stare, in total silence, as the tableau unfolds in front of our eyes—Vaughn’s hand reaching for his cheek, the tears welling in his eyes, the blood seeping out of his nose and dripping onto the wood floor.
“Darling,” Tami says calmly. “Go get some paper towels. I don’t want the blood staining the bamboo.”
She looks at me and smiles, and I get the strange impression that she’s done all of this for me.
Esteban sits down again. Tracy stumbles into the kitchen for paper towels. Amir just keeps saying “Damn” over and over again. Kayla reaches into her purse and starts poking around on her phone, like she suddenly realized she had some important correspondence to conduct.
“No phones,” Tami says. “You know that. No pictures of me and no pictures of her.” She glances in my direction. “You know what’ll happen if any photos of us get online. Our lawyers will destroy you.”
Lawyers? I don’t know what she told them, or if anyone’s buying it, or why she’s doing it. But I do know Tami gets bored easily. This could be some new game for her that she’ll lose interest in any minute now—selling me to strangers like I’m someone and seeing if she can get away with it.
Maybe the glimpse of her I thought I saw in the car was just a trick of light and shadow.
But then she walks over to where Vaughn is kneeling on the floor, trying to hold a wad of reddening paper towels to his nose while helping Tracy smear the blood drops on the floor. Tami puts her hand on his shoulder, gently, and looks down at him with the closest thing I have ever seen to tenderness on her face. He tilts his head toward the touch, already forgiving her.
Vaughn looks up for a moment and our eyes connect, and I see his humiliation flare, I see this giant man made suddenly small, and I realize no matter how big he gets, even if he becomes a star fighter and makes a bunch of money, he will still be this guy on his knees wiping up his own blood.
He will never end up with Tami, not for real. Maybe he and Ivy are alike in that way. They were both born on the outside of this world, and no matter how hard they try, they will never really belong in it as anything besides entertainment.
And what does that mean about me?
I stand up and the apartment swirls. We are so high up, higher than humans were ever meant to be. Our bodies are not made for sky.
Tami doesn’t even bother watching as they clean up the mess. She’s making herself another drink. She doesn’t ask anyone else if they want one. I have lost track of how much she’s had to drink tonight. How is she still upright? How is she still so in control?
I grab my purse from the table by the front door. The gold pill sparkles inside it.
I walk over to the window to tell her I’m leaving, but before I have a chance to speak, Tami says to me, “You know these would be your people if you weren’t so special.”
She says “special” like a curse. I have no idea what she’s talking about. How am I special? Because by dumb luck I was adopted out of poverty?
“How does it feel to be so loved?” she spits, then she walks away, down the hall, and closes a bedroom door behind her.
If I could fly out that window, I would.
But instead, I have feet. I have gravity that does not know how I got here.
All I want is the ground. I want what is beneath the street and sidewalks. I want the soil to fill in the holes burrowed inside me.
This is the part of drinking that happens after the split second of warmth and invincibility: want, want, and more want.