Wes says. He never did find the keg, but there’s a thirty-rack of PBR beside him, and he’s fishing one out. “Wanna shotgun a beer?”
“I absolutely don’t,” August says, and takes the beer Wes holds out anyway. She untucks her pocketknife from her jean jacket and hands it over, then follows Wes’s lead and jams it into the side of her can.
“I still think that knife is cool,” Wes says, and they pop the tops and chug.
When people start having to do shots in the hallway, Myla flings open the door to 6F and yells, “Shoes off and nobody touch the plants!” And everything overflows into both apartments, drag queens perched on the steamer trunk, Popeyes aprons dropped in the hall, Wes reclined across Isaiah’s kitchen table like a Renaissance painting, Vera Harry cradling Noodles in his beefy arms. Myla busts out the grocery bag of Lunar New Year candy her mom sent and starts passing it around the room. Isaiah’s Canadian friend tromps by with a box of wine on her shoulder, singing “moooore Fraaanziaaaa” to the tune of “O Canada.”
At some point, August realizes her phone’s been chiming insistently from her pocket. When she pulls it out, all the messages have collected to fill the screen. She swallows down an embarrassingly pleased sound and tries to play it off as a burp.
“Who’s blowing up your phone, Baby Smurf?” Myla says, as if she doesn’t know. August tilts her phone so Myla can see, bearing her weight when she leans in so close that August can smell the orangey lotion she puts on after showers.
Hello, I’m very bored.—Jane
Hi August!—Jane
Are you getting these?—Jane
Hellooooo?—Jane Su, Q Train, Brooklyn, NY
“Aw, she’s already learned how to double text,” Myla says. “Does she think she has to sign it like a letter?”
“I guess I left that part out when I was showing her how to use her phone.”
“It’s so cute,” Myla says. “You’re so cute.”
“I’m not cute,” August says, frowning. “I’m—I’m tough. Like a cactus.”
“Oh, August,” Myla says. Her voice is so loud. She’s very drunk. August is very drunk, she realizes, because she keeps looking at Myla and thinking how cool her eyeshadow is and how pretty she is and how nuts it is that she even wants to be August’s friend. Myla grabs her chin in one hand, squeezing until her lips poke out like a fish. “You’re a cream puff. You’re a cupcake. You’re a yarn ball. You’re—you’re a little sugar pumpkin.”
“I’m a garlic clove,” August says. “Pungent. Fifty layers.”
“And the best part of every dish.”
“Gross.”
“We should call her.”
“What?”
“Yeah, come on, let’s call her!”
How it happens is a blur—August doesn’t know if she agrees, or why, but her phone is in her hand and a call connecting, and—
“August?”
“Jane?”
“Did you call me from a concert?” Jane shouts over the sound of Patti LaBelle wailing “New Attitude” on someone’s Bluetooth speaker. “Where are you?”
“Easter brunch!” August yells back.
“Look, I know I don’t have the firmest grasp on time, but I’m pretty sure it’s really late for brunch.”
“What, are you into rules now?”
“Hell no,” Jane says, instantly affronted. “If you care what time brunch happens, you’re a cop.”
That’s something she’s picked up from Myla, who August eventually allowed to visit Jane again, and who loves to say that all kinds of things—paying rent on time, ordering a cinnamon raisin bagel—make you a cop. August smiles at the idea of her friends rubbing off on Jane, at having friends, at having someone for her friends to rub off on. She wants Jane to be there so badly that she tucks her phone into the pocket by her heart and starts carrying Jane around the party.
It’s one of those nights. Not that August has experienced a night like this—not firsthand, at least. She’s been to parties, but she’s not much of a drinker or a smoker, even less of a dazzling conversationalist. She’s mostly observed them like some kind of house party anthropologist, never understanding how people could fall in and out of connections and conversations, flipping switches of moods and patterns of speech so easily.
But she finds herself embroiled in a mostly Spanish debate about grilled cheese sandwiches between Niko and the bodega guy (“Once you put any protein other than bacon on there, that shit is officially a melt,” Jane weighs in from her pocket) and a mostly lawless drinking game in the next (“Never have I ever thrown a molotov cocktail,” Jane says. “Didn’t you hear the rules? When you say it like