There are six lines of Vyvanse waiting on the iPad mini. One for Ottilie, one for Kaylee, one for Hadleigh M., and two for me. I already snorted so much that I remembered my entire Torah portion—
—that’s how good this stuff is. I could dig a hole to China and save the Uyghurs. I’d be happy to take the SAT or the ACT here on this carpeted floor. I feel like I’m Saturday morning. I’ve just solved the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. I can’t tell you who did it. I can smell the 5G in the air. The whole world tastes like Pop Rocks on my tongue. Getting high is so fun. We’re going to stay up all night. No one is the boss of us.
Ottilie says she wants to take Greta Thunberg’s virginity. I tell her that one day I’m going to fuck Barron Trump. Kaylee has a nosebleed. Hadleigh M. licks it up. We talk like Alvin and the Chipmunks. Our words flutter around the basement like anime butterflies on CIA crack cocaine. Nothing is funny. Everything is funny. It’s all so good. It’s all so bad. We don’t even have our learner’s permits. No one can blow our minds. We’re best friends forever and ever and forever will be over soon.
Out of the girls at the slumber party, I have the newest nose. It’s small and straight, just like me, but natural, and it makes my whole face just work. I got it for my fifteenth birthday. You’d never guess I wasn’t born this way. As the anesthesia kicked in, the doctor told me the story of how, at my age, he fled North Korea. I dreamt of his hunger and mother and fear and worship and turnips as he cut into my face. My nose was his masterpiece, he said, it made it all worth it. The white tiger he had to shoot as he crossed the DMZ, the family he knows will be punished for generations because of his crimes, the guilt constantly dripping at the back of his throat, it was worth it now. Ottilie, Kaylee, and Hadleigh M. all booked consultations, not that they even needed them, but he ended up shooting himself in the face before he could fix their noses. In his note he apologized to the family he left behind and the new family he left in Santa Monica. He wrote that my nose had set him free. He had finally brought something beautiful into the world and now he could leave it. I still dream about that white tiger. I wonder who it became next.
The bathroom is a Roman vomitorium. Even though I know I know there were never actually vomitoriums in Ancient Rome. Hadleigh M. has her fingers down Kaylee’s throat. Ottilie is brushing the enamel right off her teeth. I am staring at the clumps of Nobu and Pinkberry swirling like dervishes in the toilet. We all want to be Dachau liberation day–skinny for spring break on Little Saint James. We need a vacation because LA is like Narnia now. Climate change is real. It’s always winter, but never Christmas. I celebrate Hanukkah anyway so I don’t really even care. When I grow up I’ll control the media or the banks, but first I’ll study comparative literature or new media or Nietzsche like my brother did at NYU. College will be fun, but I’ll miss my friends and our slumber party conversations and their fingers down my throat.
We are the most popular girls in school now. All the other girls are fat from the hormones in their chocolate milk or paralyzed by vaccine injuries or too busy saving up for their top surgeries to even care. The other most popular girls in school threw themselves off a bridge and into the dry LA River. They just couldn’t see the point in doing anything else. Ottilie, Kaylee, Hadleigh M., and I weren’t invited. We still had our baby fat and braces. We watched the most popular girls in school get power washed off the concrete. I even saw a few pigeons scavenge around for pieces of meat. We had a slumber party after the funeral and we knew that somewhere the dead girls were doing the same. That’s what death is, an eternal slumber party. If they’d have invited us, I know we would have gone. Thank God we were ugly ducklings. Now we are swans.
The night is dark like it always is. ISIS blew up the moon. The tide doesn’t know when to come in anymore. Surfers committed mass suicide. It was so gnarly. There was another sarin gas attack at Disneyland. This time Mickey had the masks ready for sale in every gift shop. It’s still the happiest place on earth. My parents had sex on Space Mountain. Nine months later I would be the second-worst thing to happen on September 11, 2001. One second, I was a martyr, piloting a plane right into a skyscraper, filled with love. Then, there with a puff, I was a beautiful baby girl being pulled out of a soap opera actress in Los Angeles. That’s a fun fact about me.
Here are some fun facts about my best friends. Hadleigh M. doesn’t have to run the mile in gym class because she has popcorn lung. All that cotton candy nicotine she vaped in middle school turned her lungs black like a coal miner’s. The Make-A-Wish Foundation gave her a wish, but she hasn’t spent it yet. Kaylee bought a heart attack gun on eBay when the CIA went out of business. It’s worked on every stepdad she’s had. Now that they’re gone we can have slumber parties at her place on weeknights. Ottilie got radicalized on a Vocaloid message board. She came to the homecoming dance with a bomb up her skirt. Someone spiked the punch and she got so drunk she forgot to detonate. It was pretty embarrassing, but we can all laugh about it now, and we’ll be laughing about it all night and all the other Friday nights that make up forever.
I’m cutting more lines with my debit card when the iPad mini starts singing some song from that Disney movie about the nonbinary prince(ss) and the talking poodle. It makes my heart beat too fast and bouncy like a possessed pogo stick. We can’t figure out how to turn it off without disturbing the heaping mound of crushed Vyvanse sitting on the screen. The song is teaching us a lesson about the end of the self and eternal return. Kaylee’s autistic brother is moaning from his room upstairs. He wants his iPad mini. We’ve stolen it to do our drugs, because all our phone screens are broken and trap the precious powder in their cracks. Kaylee’s brother is a buff Boo Radley sobbing like a baby on a flight to Tokyo. He wants to be near his song. But he can’t tell on us and he never will.
The undocumented night nurse has no idea why Kaylee’s brother is melting down. I can hear how much she needs a green card as she attempts to cover him with a weighted blanket. That blanket is only making him stronger, Kaylee says. He’s too strong. Only a stepdad can subdue him. He doesn’t want the weighted blanket. He wants the song. This Vyvanse has given me the power to telepathically communicate with your little brother, I tell Kaylee. He wants you to know that he lives in hell. We all do, she says as she scampers up the stairs with the iPad mini. She’s right. The song gets farther and farther away and so do the tormented telepathic waves. They turn into just ripples. I’m higher than that really high building in Dubai.
I look like Addison Rae or Loren Gray or リカちゃん. My face is beautiful. I am blonde. I am Jewish. My Bat Mitzvah was beautiful. My parents were so proud. My recitation brought the rabbi to tears. I think he could feel who I used to be before I was me with my old nose and big eyes. I gave my other life to God. Instead of seventy-two virgins, I got to be a girl from LA. At the party after the ceremony I came in flying on a trapeze. There were cupcakes that looked like circus tents and contortionists and a friendly chimpanzee named Travis. I held his hand and saw something I don’t want to talk about in his eyes. Travis is famous now because he ripped off a woman’s face and she had to get a face transplant and then a second face transplant because her body rejected the first. I think my body is beginning to reject this face that is mine for now. I might drink Windex. I might eat a Tide Pod. I might even just let time move as fast as it does and die an old lady with this same wrinkled face.
We think that Hadleigh M. will be the first of us to die. Her parents will join a class action lawsuit against single-use fruit-flavored nicotine products. They promise to still let us use her tree house as our smoke spot, but only weed allowed, no vapes. Hadleigh M. says I can have first dibs on her tracksuit collection. This makes Ottilie and Kaylee so mad that they start moaning in wordless yearning. Hadleigh M. explains that I will probably die next, so it’s only fair that I get to pick first. Everyone agrees that I will meet some tragic and sudden death, like Addison Rae did on that yacht. It’s such a coincidence that I look like her. I don’t want to end up like her. I guess there are worse ways to end up. I guess it’s a compliment.
We are in the basement speeding toward something as we laugh and laugh. It’s 3 a.m. now. The basement, paneled in wood and decorated with WWE memorabilia by so many stepdads, is now a medieval dungeon. I could be trapped down here forever. The night might never end. All this speed will get me nowhere. What if we’ve just been running in place? What if it’s one long big treadmill? What if it’s an eternal loop? A demon steals after me into my loneliest loneliness and speaks to me. I think I am crying a little bit. Everyone else is too busy practicing their one-handed cartwheels to see what I see, to feel eternity recurring.
The neon Budweiser sign begins to flicker faintly. I can smell some dead stepdad’s aftershave, a manly musk mingling with the burnt toast and Silly Putty smell of 5G. The little men of the foosball table begin to play a match. I wonder which dead stepdad will win. Hell can be anywhere, but usually it’s everywhere. Is that where we are speeding off to or are we all already there? I want to tell the dead stepdads that I like the way they paneled the basement, but Kaylee is chanting something in Latin and they are gone again and I am doing a one-handed cartwheel as fast as I can.
Now it’s time for us to play truth or dare. I say, “Truth. For everyone. What if I told you this life we’re living right now and have lived, what if we have to do it again and again and all over again forever? Every 
, every 
? And there will be nothing new in it, literally, and we’re all specks in the hourglass of eternity and it’ll never stop turning?”
Ottilie asks me what an hourglass is. I show her the emoji, 
.
None of them throw themselves down on the carpet or gnash their Invisalign teeth or curse me, who spoke thus. We have all experienced a tremendous moment and so we can answer: “Then I would say, you are a god and never have I ever heard anything more divine.”
All the cities are on fire like the Amazon was when the Amazon still was. I’m on TikTok watching them burn. I order communion wafers on Amazon Prime. I have been trying to get better. I do primal movements and meditate. I reach 
every time. I get ketamine infusions for my oppositional defiant disorder. They make me feel like a pony who broke her leg, healing like a miracle. I’m just like Jeffrey Epstein. I didn’t kill myself. The slumber party is over. The sun is rising. It happens every morning, still. This is just one of many Saturdays. The sun is up again.