at my BA one lousy class at a time. Anyway, enough about this joint. What’s your deal? You new in town?”
“Sort of. I grew up here, lived in New York for a few years, now I’m back. Living in Margate with my mom.”
“Jesus, why the hell would you come back?”
“Breakup.” I didn’t want to go through the whole story with Emily. She was so self-possessed. I risked becoming her counterpoint: a ridiculous hysteric, babbling about betrayal and performance art. Breakup. The word was so simple that it felt untrue.
“That’s rough. Still should have stayed in the city.”
“It wasn’t … it wasn’t really an option. What about you?”
“From a flyover state. Religious family. Ran away from all that shit, clearly. Went to L.A. when I was eighteen and tried to find work as an actress.”
“Did you ever get any roles?”
“Some soft-core porn, but other than that, nothing. Waited in a lot of lines to try out for Coke commercials.” She drummed her fingers on the counter. “I’m just kidding about the porn, you know. Thought about it but it actually doesn’t pay shit. Not unless you’re willing to let someone fuck you up the ass on camera, and you don’t even get much for that. Oh, and speaking of cameras, you should know that Skeletor is crazy enough to actually review the footage—when she’s not back there in her office watching it live.”
She took me by the shoulders, forced me to pivot, and gave me a little shove.
“There. Memorize this spot right here. If you hold your phone out six inches, the cameras won’t be able to see what you are doing, only that you are standing here reaching for something.” She crouched, reached around my knee, swung a cabinet door open. “And here, behind the gift certificate boxes. That’s where you’ll want to stash any contraband. Soda, candy, gum, pills—whatever your jam is.”
“Pills?”
“Hey, whatever gets you through the day. Anyway, you get one free meal in the cafeteria every shift, but they use the same vendor as that prison over in Delmont. That’s all to say you’ll want snacks. But whatever you do, don’t buy a hot dog from that guy with the cart out front. I made that mistake when I was new and I shat my brains out for three days straight.”
The guffaw I let out surprised me. I didn’t recognize it as my own right away—it’d been so long since I’d really laughed. Emily shrugged. “Just trying to tell you what I’ve learned the hard way.”
* * *
AS EMILY went over the phone system I watched as a girl hanging on a man’s arm left the Swim Club and walked toward the main lobby, her limbs loose. She leaned her head on his shoulder like it was too heavy to hold up. When the police questioned me about Steffanie’s attacker, I tried to remember his face and his clothes through the haze of rum, the darkness of the club, and the fog that rolled out of machines, the buzz in my ears from the throb of the bass, but I couldn’t say anything definitive. Had his shirt been gray or blue? His eyes brown or green? I remembered him as an outline: broad shoulders, muscular arms, a paper cutout of a man. I wasn’t surprised that they never found him. I never mentioned to anyone that I had watched her leave the dance floor with him, and when I saw her stumble, I told myself it was only because of her heels. Or that she swayed into his shoulder on purpose. One of those girlish tricks we were always reading about in Cosmo: make him feel needed. I let myself believe that she was in control, that she wanted him to put his arm around her, so that she could have an excuse to get close to him and press against his side.
Steffanie quit the field hockey team after that night, and whenever we passed one another in the halls at school she gave me a look that I could only call pity—like there was something plain and obvious between us that I didn’t understand.
All of it felt tied together—the spa and its rules about how we were allowed to act and look, Steffanie, Ramona. I thought back to the night Ramona showed me her first large-scale paintings, when I was trying to woo her to sign with me as my first client. The one I liked the most was of a woman reclined on a divan.