I sent a message to a celebrity on the internet. It said, I think we’d make a good match. I added my phone number at the end.
I didn’t expect him to respond. Still, now that the message had been sent, I was checking my phone constantly—scrolling my thumb down to refresh the screen ten, fifteen times a day. Three days passed like this: me unlocking my phone, opening the message, closing it, then opening it again. On the third day, I typed out, nevermind. I let the words sit in the text box for a few hours to gather some heat. Then I went back and deleted them. I felt like a loser. My boyfriend didn’t seem to notice.
“I’m being ignored,” I said. He was standing at the stove, making vegetable curry for dinner. I was sitting at his kitchen table, waiting to eat. We’d met at a potluck thrown by a mutual friend who needed Tupperware. To the friend’s disappointment, most people had brought raw, whole foods — pineapples, eggplant, heads of broccoli. I had brought pizza bagels. They were not A Hit.
“Lots of sodium,” my boyfriend had said, before he was my boyfriend. Now we’d been together for almost a year. He had this messy, shoulder-length hair, bleached blond from a life in the sun, that he combed through with his fingers in the mornings. Sometimes I watched him tug at the knots and thought I was in love. Other times I thought about how relieved I would feel if he died—or better yet, if he had never existed. We didn’t have a lot in common. He made his own chili garlic paste, grew cilantro in his backyard. He was in graduate school for social work and used terms like “relationship coefficient” and “primitive midbrain.” Once, after I’d posted a video of myself organizing my refrigerator, we’d gotten into a fight about my inability to activate my “prefrontal cortex.” I was always at a disadvantage during our fights, because I never had any idea what we were talking about.
“That sounds like the inside of a computer,” I’d told him. Then he called me shallow and naive, said I was “chasing fame’s elusive fart,” or something like that, and I said, “Oh, yes, please, all-knowing Man God, Decider of Destinies, please tell me more about myself.”
After that we didn’t talk for a few hours, and later that night I snuck into his backyard and sprayed his cilantro with Febreze.
“Who’s ignoring you?” he asked me now. He adjusted the heat on the stove and stirred. “Smell that?”
Veganism was our newest Thing. It had been my idea originally (something about the testosterone levels in red meat contributing to the volatility of arguments). Over the last few weeks of nuts, root vegetables, and milk substitutes, my boyfriend had become lean and hyper-aware of his surroundings, all his senses operating at full speed. But as far as I could tell, the diet was only making me gassy.
“Arlo Banks,” I said.
“The actor?” The curry bubbled and splattered against his white shirt. He looked down at the mess and then kept stirring.
“Yes, the actor.”
Arlo Banks had been a teen star. Back then, he was known for his falsetto on a musical show about Catholic school boys. Also his icy blue eyes and the way he flipped his hair off his forehead. Now he had short hair. According to his profile, he made documentaries. He’d been to Antarctica to film people who studied ice, to the Amazon to film people who’d never heard of film. He was a very active person. I liked to watch him travel. This video of him riding a dirt bike through a jungle was particularly inspiring. And another of him climbing a very tall, flat rock. He looked like someone who did whatever he wanted, executed his life plans with great zeal. If he did end up calling me like I’d asked, that would mean he was also a good listener. Reliable. That’s not something you see often in a famous actor.
“Why would he be ignoring you?” he said. “Ow, fuck.” He turned the heat down. “Do you know him? I’m confused.”
I stared at my phone, at the unanswered message.
“I sent him a message and he didn’t respond.”
“Are you talking about the guy from that Christian show? The one who sings and dances?”
My boyfriend was confused but not upset. He seemed more concerned about the curry than my sadness. “Here,” he said, “try this.”
He dipped a spoon into the sauce and then held his hand under the spoon while he walked it over to the kitchen table. He held the spoon to my mouth. “It’s hot.”
It smelled spicy. I licked the spoon and started to cough. “He doesn’t really do that kind of thing anymore.”
“Did you expect him to respond?” he asked. “Does it need more salt?”
“I guess so.”
He went back to the stove and added salt.
“I guess I thought he would want to know me.”
My boyfriend plated the food and brought the plates to the table, then sat down next to me. “Forks,” he said. He stood up and got two forks and brought them to the table.
“Napkins.” He got up again and got two napkins.
“This looks delicious,” I said. It looked sloppy and a little grey, like it had been cooked for too long. I stared at it and thought it looked exactly like me in the form of food.
“No offense,” he said, “but why would Arlo Banks want to know you?”
It wasn’t as crazy an idea as it sounded. I was five-foot-seven, one hundred and sixteen pounds, with olive skin, green eyes, and long brown hair. I could have been a model. When I was a kid, a man in a suit at a Nordstrom department store confronted me and my mother, asked if I wanted to be in an upcoming shoot for pajamas. I started crying. Maybe I was scared. I certainly hadn’t known that I’d just been offered a career path. Whenever my mother told the story, she said that I’d grabbed onto her leg and buried my face behind her knee, that she had to pick me up and carry me out of the store. I had a lot of regret about this, about how stupid and scared I’d been in the face of something so propelling. Often, I wondered where I’d be if I had said yes. Maybe I’d already be dating Arlo Banks, or someone like Arlo Banks. I had once heard him say in an interview that he was lonely even though he had a roommate. His fame isolated him. He wanted a partner, someone to collaborate with, to be inspired by—a muse. The more I thought about it, the less invested I felt in my current relationship and the more certain I felt that Arlo Banks and I belonged together.
“Every time you start a sentence with ‘no offense’ you end up saying something offensive.” I nudged my plate away. My boyfriend shoveled the slop into his mouth, leaning over his plate so that any food that fell from his fork would land back in the slop pile and he could scoop it up again.
“I guess I’m just confused about your motive. Like, what’s the goal?” my boyfriend asked, showing off his new plant-based reasonability.
“The goal is maybe he would want to take me sailing or jet skiing. Maybe he’d want to take me to the Amazon.”
My boyfriend chewed on the slop, swallowed, coughed it back up, then re-swallowed. “You don’t want to go to the Amazon.”
He was right, actually. I had no interest in exploring the Amazon. But if Arlo Banks wanted to fly me there first class, I would not complain.
“You have no idea what I want,” I said.
“I have some idea.”
The spices in the curry were making him sweat. He wiped his forehead with his napkin and stared out the window. “It was hot today. Maybe I should buy a window unit.”
“Maybe,” I said. I was so sad I could have died.
Over the next few days my message to Arlo Banks remained unanswered. His most recent post was a video of himself in a canoe in some vast, unnamed body of water. His arms were raised in the air and he was wearing a turquoise shirt that matched the color of the water. I thought maybe he didn’t have good service. That could have been it. Still, whenever my phone buzzed, my heart dropped into my stomach, and I’d rush to see if it was him. It was never him, but it was often my boyfriend.
Are you at in-N-out? My phone says you are.
Are you really eating a cheeseburger?
Your passive aggression is not charming.
I ate the cheeseburger and ignored my boyfriend. I didn’t like him very much. I scrolled through my profile to a time-lapsed video I’d posted of him, digging a hole in the wet sand of the Venice Beach shoreline in front of the setting sun. I had no idea why I had posted it. Most of the people I followed—girls I’d gone to high school or college with, girls I’d met in the bathroom at parties—were engaged or having babies. Some were buying homes or fostering kittens. They posted photos of themselves with their fiancés beneath the fall foliage, of their babies in bathtubs, of the pinto-bean-sized diamonds on their fingers. I was jealous of how content they seemed in their lives, how everything seemed to be working out for them. In my stupid video of the sunset, my boyfriend had a stain on his shirt—a big, yellowish splotch that looked like old, dried urine. It was probably some kind of plant juice. Disgusting. I could not understand why he insisted on wearing the same old, stained t-shirts, as if he were making a statement against capitalist consumerism, the absurdity of appearances. I didn’t care about any of that. I wanted a boyfriend who had specific outfits for air travel. I watched the video a few more times and then deleted it.
Later that night my friend Jude invited me to a party. It wasn’t a potluck, it was a real party. Jude — who’d hosted the potluck, and whom I blamed for getting me into this whole mess with the vegan social worker — knew someone who knew the host. The party was at a luxury apartment complex in Hollywood that was known for housing beautiful people who hosted beautiful parties. It had a rooftop pool with a pool bar, a DJ, and cabanas all around the perimeter for people to post photos of themselves lounging on. I wore a tight black dress with long sleeves and heels. I wanted to look impressive, even though I was pretty sure Arlo Banks would not be there. I went straight to the open bar and ordered a vodka and water. Everyone at the party looked like a model, or like someone who hung around models in the hopes of soaking up glamour.
“It’s like a room full of glass giraffes,” Jude said, once I found her. She pointed to a blonde giraffe who was standing by the DJ, dancing with only the top half of her body, moving her arms in a little jig.
“That’s Ramona. I do spin with her,” she said. “She’s the hottest person I’ve ever seen.”
I suddenly felt defensive, like I had to prove that I belonged at this party with the world’s hottest people.
“Is she a model?”
“Influencer. She has like, four hundred thousand followers.”
“What does she post?”
“Herself, obviously.”
The hot girl turned and pointed at Jude, then dance-shuffled across the patio towards us.
“Do you guys want to dance?”
She hadn’t stopped dancing. I wondered if she was on some sort of drug. Her hairline was a little damp with sweat and she didn’t look capable of blinking. Still, she had the attitude of someone who had never been rejected by anyone or excluded from anything. Jude and I followed her out to the dance floor like obedient pets. She interlaced her fingers with mine, raised our arms in the air, and smiled at me like we were already close friends. I wanted to be close to her. Or maybe I wanted to be her. My boyfriend had once told me that I didn’t know the difference between being in love with someone and wanting to be them. I didn’t think I was in love with this girl. I didn’t want to sleep with her, although I wouldn’t have minded sleeping next to her, and waking up to the coconuty smell of her hair, watching her try on all the outfits she’d gotten for free.
“Do you want another drink,” I said, jerking my hips.
“I have to pee,” she said. She started walking and I followed her.
There was a line outside the bathroom, but the hot girl pranced past everyone and into the building’s interior. She led me down a long hallway and opened the door to an apartment. Inside looked like a stock photo of a luxury apartment, with floor-to-ceiling windows, grey wood floors, and a long, white leather couch. I followed the hot girl into the bathroom. She closed the door behind us then leaned over the toilet and threw up.
“Sorry,” she said to the toilet. She held back her own hair at the nape of her neck. I hovered above her, feeling useless and a little creepy for staring. She threw up again, then stood up, flushed the toilet, turned on the sink and stuck her mouth under the faucet. She spat the water down the drain.
“Are you okay?” It was a stupid thing to say. Obviously, she was fine. She would always be fine, no matter the circumstances.
“I’m good,” she said. She combed through her hair in the mirror. There was a men’s razor on the counter and a bottle of two-in-one shampoo on the ledge of the bathtub.
“Do you live here?”
“God, no,” she said. “Everyone who lives here is a try-hard. It’s like, I don’t need to shit where I eat, you know?”
“Totally.” I had no idea what she was talking about. She opened the medicine cabinet and took out the Vaseline, dabbed some on her lips and her cheeks. She made eye contact with me through the mirror.
“You have the best skin I’ve ever seen.” She turned around, touched my cheek with the greasy pads of her fingers. “Do you even wear makeup?”
“Not really.”
“You could be an influencer.” She pursed her lips, reached up and tousled my hair. “Give me your phone.”
I gave her my phone.
“Get in the tub.”
I climbed over the rim of the tub and sat down with my knees to my chest, waiting for more instructions.
“Not like that.” She held the phone up and tested the angle. “Put one leg over.”
I leaned back against the porcelain and put my leg over the rim in what felt like a birthing position. Maybe the alcohol had gone to my head, or the position of my legs in the tub had sparked some sense of new life in me, but I felt like something important was about to happen.
“No.” She shook her head. “Put the other foot up by the faucet. And don’t smile. And lift that arm over your head.”
I did everything she said and stared at the phone. It was difficult not to smile. My chest tingled and I fought back the urge to laugh. “This feels weird,” I said.
“I know, right?” She looked at the phone. “Got it. This is hot.”
I got out of the tub and stood beside her and looked at the photo. I could smell the alcohol on her breath and the coconut in her hair. She was right — I did look hot. A little uncomfortable, maybe, but definitely hot. I stared at my face in the photo and felt sad, suddenly, at the thought of my wasted potential. I could have been this person, but I wasn’t. I didn’t know what I was.
“You should post this,” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Why?” she looked almost offended, like not posting the photo would be an insult to her, specifically. She clicked out of the photo and opened the app. I felt my face get hot. The last thing I’d been looking at was my message to Arlo Banks. I watched her eyes scan the message, then I sat down on the rim of the tub, feeling defeated. She probably thought I was a stalker, that I had come to this party specifically to find her and hold her hand and smell her hair. I was too plagued with desperation to be her friend. She glanced at me, then back at the phone. She moved her thumbs around on the screen and then handed the phone back to me.
“I posted it.”
She had cut out the shampoo bottle on the corner ledge of the tub and enhanced the shadows, with the caption: scrub-a-dub in the tub.
“I don’t have that many followers,” I said.
She turned to the mirror to look at herself, wiped the black from the corner of her eye.
“I put my number in there, too.”
I placed the phone very carefully, as if it were now a precious gem, back into my purse. Ramona leaned over and kissed me on the lips — not in a sexual way. In the way you might kiss a baby. Her lips tasted like apple, not at all like puke. Then she grabbed my hand and led me back to the dance floor.
The next morning, I woke up to a text.
Brunch at jones on 3?
I jumped out of bed and put on the coolest outfit I owned – a sleeveless, mustard-colored jumpsuit with three wooden buttons down the front and cuffed ankles. I paired it with my white leather high-tops and stared at myself in the mirror. I looked like somebody, but I wasn’t sure who. I texted Ramona back and left for the restaurant.
I sat outside at the restaurant for almost twenty minutes, wondering if the whole thing had been a delusion. But for the first time in a while, I felt like anything was possible. I was about thirty seconds away from sending a pathetic follow-up text when Ramona seemed to appear out of nowhere in loose jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, towering above me like a supermodel.
“God, am I hungover,” she said. She sat down across from me and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. She didn’t look hungover or even tired. I suddenly felt embarrassed about my lack of hangover and also the skimpiness of my outfit.
“Did you order?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I was waiting.”
Ramona looked down at the menu then tossed it to the side. “All I want is, like, an entire confetti cake. You know?”
“That sounds great.” In the twenty minutes I’d been sitting alone, I’d scoured the menu in an effort to find the perfect brunch order. I’d been between the yogurt parfait – a cute food – and the kale salad with an added poached egg – a sophisticated food. Now I thought both of these were garbage orders and I’d probably just ask for whatever Ramona was having.
“Can I just have two brownies?” she said, when the server came over and asked for our orders. She giggled at herself. “And a black coffee.”
The server looked at me. “Me, too.”
“I have to show you something,” Ramona said, when the server walked away. She talked as though we’d been friends for years, and this was just another morning we were spending together, hungover and sharing secrets. She reached into her bag and pulled out a small, velvet box and put it on the table.
“Open it. I just got them.”
I reached across the table and opened the box. Inside was a set of diamond earrings. They caught the sunlight and shot it into my eyes.
“Woah,” I said. They must have cost thousands of dollars.
“Yeah, I know. But there’s one problem.” She pulled on her earlobes, which were conspicuously unpierced.
“Oh, that’s easy,” I said. And Ramona smiled, as if she’d discovered something new about me that she liked, or at least could make use of.
When our brownies arrived, Ramona pulled hers apart and stuck the pieces into her mouth one at a time, sucking the gooey bits off her fingers. If she had been anyone else, I would have thought her eating habits were gross. But somehow she made the whole thing look good – sexy, even.
“So you’ll come with me?” she said, her thumb in her mouth as she licked the chocolate off her nail. She pulled on her ear again with her clean hand.
“Yes,” I said, confidently.
She pulled a fifty from her wallet and tossed it on the table. “Let’s go now.”
Ramona quickly became my best friend. I had no idea if I was also her best friend, but based on the amount of time she spent on her phone, I assumed I wasn’t. Still, she brought me with her to parties at the apartment complex, introduced me to other hot people as if I were a gem she’d found while digging through a pile of garbage.
“This is Jane,” she’d say, nudging me forward to put me on display. “Isn’t she perfect?”
I felt good when I was around her, like as long as she was with me I was a successful person. I broke up with my boyfriend via text (Ramona’s words), and he’d sent me back a long paragraph criticizing my primordial horcrux, or whatever. Ramona laughed at it. She laughed like she was on camera: tossing her head back and opening her mouth to the sky, her hair dangling from her scalp like a shiny curtain. I learned to laugh like she laughed and talk the way she talked and throw my shoulders back the way she did when she walked into a room. Somehow, I even grew an inch taller. The parties she brought me to were packed with more perfect people: influencers, YouTube stars, reality TV contestants, but nobody I had seen before or recognized. Still, they were stars, famous for being themselves in virtual places. I met a guy who was known for eating all types of cake on camera, a couple who’d met on a reality show that stranded hot singles on an island. Now they were brand ambassadors for weight-loss tea and blackhead erasers. There were nutri-fluencers who posted photos of their broccoli and their abs, mom-fluencers who’d erased their stretch marks, ASMR curators who scratched their scalps into boom mics. I even met a girl who’d gotten her own show on E! after she filmed herself smashing loaves of sourdough bread with her face. Everyone had money and shimmery skin. Their eyelashes were surgically elongated, their clothes limited edition. But nobody compared to Ramona. She was the person everyone wanted to be: effortlessly mysterious, a geode among river stones. Being tied to her had turned me into a person people wanted to look at. She posted photos of us together at these parties, in swimming pools, on deep, plush couches. Before I met her, I had two-hundred followers. Now I had nearly two-thousand followers, and Ramona made sure I posted at least once a day. If I skipped a day, she’d text me, Where are you? Then she’d send me a photo of myself that she’d edited. This one.
The first time Ramona invited me to her house, she told me to pack a bag.
“You’re staying the weekend,” she said. “You don’t need a toothbrush or any of that stuff. I have it all. Just bring options. We’re having people over.”
I felt like I had been invited to the Met Gala. I packed two suitcases, the first with dresses, jumpers, leotards, crop-tops, flare jeans, boyfriend jeans, leather leggings — all clothes I’d gotten from Ramona, or because of Ramona, or with Ramona since my life with her had begun. I loaded the second suitcase with shoes. Ramona texted me her address: 68 Paradise Cove Road, which sounded exactly right. I couldn’t imagine her living somewhere other than paradise. She would look out of place anywhere else. I hadn’t dared invite her to my stupid little studio, which was just a converted garage that belonged to the house in front of me. It was a sad, soggy room, paid for by my equally sad receptionist job, both of which I had come to believe I was too good for.
When I plugged the directions to Ramona’s into my phone, I saw the house was in Malibu. I knew a lot of her posts were sponsored by various skincare lines and clothing brands, but I had no idea she made enough money to live in Malibu. Arlo Banks lived in Malibu. At least, I assumed he did. In strapping myself to Ramona, I had all but forgotten about my original dream to date Arlo Banks, travel the world with him and move into his home. I opened the message I’d sent him, months ago, which had gone unseen and unanswered. It looked even more pathetic now. I felt the urge to laugh at it, as if someone else had written it. I clicked out of the message and opened up my map and drove to Malibu, where my new life was waiting for me.
Ramona’s bungalow was small but spacious, with one open wall that revealed a backyard with a pool, plush patio furniture, and a small, outdoor bar. The view from the yard overlooked the houses below, and further out, the ocean — all of it decorated with palm trees and flowering cacti, yellow dirt and smooth rocks. Inside, the living room couch looked lived in, a little worn, but in a soft, homey way, and Ramona had hung up all these technicolor tapestries on the walls. I thought the house must have been worth a couple million dollars, which, even though I had no sponsors and only a few thousand followers, now felt attainable. I wanted to take a picture of the whole thing and send it to the social worker as proof that my way had been the right way. My way had landed me here, while he was still cooking plant-based slop in his dishwasher-less kitchen. I was proud of myself. Even though none of this belonged to me, I felt like I had a right to it.
In the kitchen, Ramona had set out wine glasses and a few bottles of red wine. She uncorked one and poured a glass for herself and one for me.
“Tonight is going to be special,” she said. She held her glass in the air to meet mine. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
“Who?”
“Just a friend of my boyfriend’s.”
“You have a boyfriend?”
I had never seen or heard Ramona talk about her boyfriend. He hadn’t been to any of the parties she’d taken me to, and he wasn’t in any of her photos. I felt disappointed at the thought of all of Ramona’s magnificent energy being channeled into a stupid boy. It didn’t seem right that someone so perfect still had to put up with the mundane rituals a relationship. I couldn’t picture her cleaning the shaven hair off the rim of the bathroom sink, or burying her head into a pillow to muffle the sound of snoring. She was too good for all of that.
“Sort of,” she said.
I thought her boyfriend must have been someone high-profile, someone who didn’t like his photos taken and didn’t want to stand out in a crowd. Suddenly I couldn’t think about anything other than who he might be, and who his friend might be, and who I might become as a result of meeting them.
“Let’s get dressed,” Ramona said. She helped me carry my suitcases to her bedroom, then opened them and dumped all the clothes on the floor.
“Not this,” she said, flinging a pair of jeans into the corner. She held up a silver slip dress and shook it out. “Can I wear this? It looks better on you, but I love it so much.” She held the dress to her chest like it was a romantic gift.
“Of course.” I would have let her wear my skin, if she asked for it. I watched her undress in front of her mirror. She kicked off her sweatpants and threw her shirt and bra to the floor and stared at herself. Naked, I could see the blue veins that crept up her chest and the faint outline of her ribcage between her breasts. I had never noticed that space on my own body, but her breasts were so small and her ribs so prominent that I couldn’t look anywhere else.
Ramona met my eyes through the mirror and smiled. I wasn’t even embarrassed. She was so used to people staring at her this way, and despite my new image, I wasn’t any different from everyone else. Ramona slid the dress over her head and smoothed it out along her stomach.
“I’m a little nervous,” she said. “I don’t have my boyfriend over very much. Usually we go to his place.”
I got up from her bed and walked to the mirror and put my arms around her waist, stuffed my face into her hair and breathed in. I couldn’t help myself. I felt so comfortable, so at home, there in her expensive house amongst her shimmery belongings. Everything smelled like her — sweet and raw, like something new to earth. I wanted to smell like that, too.
“I love you,” I said. The words slipped out easy, almost by mistake.
Ramona reached back and pet my head. “I love you, too,” she said, but it sounded too sweet, too light, as if she were talking to a puppy she’d just met. This was how Ramona talked to everyone, no matter the circumstances. Her voice was cute and high, always curling up at the ends of her sentences. I wanted her to know that I loved her loved her, in a way that I was pretty sure was unconditional. I slipped my hand under her dress and rested it against her hip. I felt the tiny hairs on her skin prick up. She placed her hand on top of mine and slowly pulled it off her body, then turned around and pressed her forehead against mine.
“You should wear the sequin dress. It makes your ass look huge.”
She walked over to her closet and sifted through the clothes and pulled out a short sequin dress with spaghetti straps and a pair of black stiletto boots and tossed them at me. I didn’t ask questions. I got undressed and put them on. Ramona didn’t watch me. Instead, she walked into to her bathroom and sat at the vanity and glued on fake eyelashes. I wondered who else had loved her the way that I did, if her boyfriend felt something similar to what I felt. From Ramona’s bed I held my phone up and captured her through the door frame, leaning in toward the mirror and fixing a false eyelash to her eye with a pair of tweezers. Her lips were tucked into her mouth and her hair fell long down her back. I adjusted the photo’s brightness, applied a hazy filter that made it look as though it were from another time. I captioned it, my best friend, with a twinkly star, then posted it. Ramona came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, her face done, her hair full and parted down the middle. The doorbell rang. She reached for my hands and squeezed them.
“You’re going to do great,” she said. She fluffed up my hair, flicked my cheeks to give them some color. I felt like I was being prepped for an audition. An audition for what? I had no idea, but I guessed she wanted this mystery man to fall in love with me so that we could both be dating celebrities, which would really heighten our platform and look great in photos.
We walked out of the bedroom and through the kitchen and dining rooms, where I stopped and poured myself more wine. Ramona went through the living room and opened the front door.
“I missed you,” I heard her say in a tone I didn’t recognize. It was low, breathy — the way you might sound when you’ve just woken up. She closed the door and I heard sets of footsteps on their way toward me. I took a big gulp of wine and wiped my mouth with my arm. I felt on the cusp of something huge. Everything I’d done until now — my stint with the social worker, that first night with Ramona in the bathroom, even my stupid message to Arlo Banks — was merely preparation for this moment.
Ramona entered the room followed by two men in suits. I immediately noticed their feet: their leather shoes, the way the hems of their pants sagged and brushed the ground as they walked. Both of their suits looked a size too big, as were their fat ties, knotted tightly at their necks. And they were old. One man was entirely bald, with a neck that looked like a rooster’s wattle and puffy cheeks, pink with rosacea. He reached out his fat hand and tucked Ramona’s hair behind her ear, revealing one glistening diamond, and whispered something into her neck. She giggled and playfully smacked his hand away. The other man was just as old, maybe sixty-five or one-hundred-and-fifty, with white, wispy hair. One of his ears was pierced with a gold stud and he was holding a bouquet of dyed roses. He held the roses out in my direction.
“I brought these for you,” he said. His voice was croaky and used up. “Although they are not nearly as beautiful as you are.”
I took the roses. Ramona was smiling at me like whatever was happening was exactly right. I jerked my head in the direction of her bedroom and blinked in an effort to send some kind of telepathic message.
“We’ll be right back,” she said. She kissed the bald man on the cheek. “Pour yourselves some wine.”
I followed Ramona to her bedroom and closed the door behind us. She paced across the room, her eyes wide with anger, like I’d already ruined the night.
“What is going on,” I said. I put the flowers on her dresser. “Is that your boyfriend?”
“You’re blowing it,” she said. “You haven’t smiled once.”
I felt dizzy and sat down on her bed. “What are you talking about?”
“Bill is a really nice guy.” She sat down beside me. “He’ll buy you whatever you want, take you wherever you want to go. Do you want to go to Bali? He’ll take you there. Do you want a new apartment, nice things?”
“I don’t want to go to Bali with him,” I said. “He’s like, one hundred years old. Who even is he?”
“He does something with insurance, or computers. Who cares? He’s rich and he wants to spend his money on you. You don’t even have to have sex with him.”
I felt my face get hot. My armpits were beginning to itch. “Do you have sex with that man?”
“That’s not really any of your business.” Ramona got up and straightened her dress in the mirror. I stared at her reflection and wanted to cry. My chest ached, like a wire had been twisted around my heart.
“I can’t believe you’re being so judgmental,” she said. “A rich guy wants to buy you things and take you places. A lot of people would kill for that. And I picked him out specifically for you. He’s vetted. He’s not a creep. He’s just lonely. His wife is dead and he, like, collects trains or something.”
“Trains?”
“Yeah, like toy trains.”
“Oh, great. That makes me feel better.”
“Fine, whatever. I’ll send him home.”
She walked toward the door and I began to panic. I was upset, maybe even angry at her, but I couldn’t stand the thought of her leaving me.
“I’m afraid,” was the only thing I could think to say. It was true. I was afraid of the men standing in her dining room, afraid of what they might do to us. I wanted to scoop Ramona up in my arms and carry her out of the house, somewhere safe where we could live without consequences. But I was afraid of her, too. She had tricked me, or was in the process of tricking me — I could feel it all over my body, a million needles pricking my skin alert.
Ramona let go of the doorknob and walked over to me. She knelt between my legs. “I’m not trying to scare you.” She rested her hands on my knees. “I thought this was what you wanted.”
She looked so small and harmless. I didn’t want to disappoint her, to blow up some idea she’d had of our future.
“Just give me a minute.”
Ramona kissed my knee and stood up. “Oh, and your name is Sasha. And don’t call me Ramona, okay? Call me Randy.”
She looked, suddenly, like an entirely different person. I wanted to put her in the bathtub and scrub everything off her — the fake eyelashes, fake name, the smoky scent of that man’s cologne on her neck — until she was recognizable again. I didn’t know how to say any of this to her. She reached for my hand and I grabbed onto her, let her pull me to my feet and lead me out of the room.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the old men. “I didn’t feel well.”
“You look well, now,” Bill said. He was beaming at me. He looked like a retired talk show host. He handed me a new glass of wine and we followed Ramona and the bald man out to the patio. Bill put his hand on my lower back as we walked, gently nudging me forward.
“Watch your step there,” he said, like a grandpa.
We sat down on the patio furniture — a deep, soft L-shaped couch with a matching ottoman — and Ramona put her hand on the bald man’s thigh and said, “Isn’t this furniture beautiful? It’s new. Pigskin suede. Wendel has the best sense of style. I always say he should have been an interior decorator.”
The bald man stroked the couch with one hand and Ramona’s shoulder with the other. “Randy has expensive taste,” he said. “We had it handmade in Italy.”
Wendel? Ramona and Wendel? Randy and Wendel? Together they sounded like cartoon zoo animals who danced the alphabet: The Great Adventures of Randy and Wendel! I hated it. They kissed — Ramona’s glossed lips pursed far from her face in a way that suggested she didn’t want to make too much contact. Wendel’s lips were pale and thin, a little dry. I couldn’t look at them. I turned toward Bill.
“So you like trains.”
“Oh sure, sure. There’s just something so romantic about them. The old ones, anyway.”
I nodded. Bill nodded.
“I suppose we should discuss…” He wagged his hand in between his body and mine.
“Oh, um.” I had no idea what to say, or how a typical arrangement like this worked. Ramona stood up and led Wendel toward the pool, where she slipped the straps of my dress off her shoulders and let it fall to the pavement. She stepped out of it and dove into the water. Wendel unbuckled his belt. I didn’t want to watch him undress, but I heard the heavy plop of his body as it hit the water, the light splashing as she made her way to him, the giggling as he wrapped his fat body around hers.
“One thousand dollars a week,” I said.
Bill laughed. His laugh sounded like an old elf’s.
“Okay, sure, but I was thinking more about gifts. Clothing. Isn’t there something you want?”
“What do you want?” The words came out harsh and snipped.
“Just some company,” he said, his eyes glassy. “My wife died five years ago. We used to go to this steakhouse downtown. It’s decorated like the dining cart of an old train. Velvet curtains, brass luggage rails. It’s really something. Romantic, too. Maybe I could take you there.”
I imagined him and his wife — a curly-haired woman with hot pink lipstick and silvery eye-shadow — sitting at a candlelit table, spooning cottage cheese out of cantaloupe halves into each other’s mouths.
“I want to go to the Amazon,” I said. “I want to fly first class.”
He reached out and patted me on the head. “I admire a girl with ambition. Well, why not? The sky is the limit.”
He began to talk about his favorite train cars, and I curled up against the cushions and listened to the sound of swishing water.
Later, Ramona poured us shots, and the bald man told some story about John Travolta, how he’d ripped him off over a real estate investment out in the Mojave Desert and blah blah, and Ramona laughed like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. I drank a bottle and a half of wine while Bill talked to me about his favorite airline — American, he said, had the best executive lounge — then I passed out on the handmade Italian couch. A few hours later I woke up to find Bill asleep on the opposite side of the couch, still in his suit, his tie undone, his hand clinging to my left foot. I tried to shake him off but his grip was too tight. I sat up and pried his hand away, one finger at a time, so as not to wake him. Then I stood up and walked into the house.
Ramona and Wendel weren’t in the living room. They weren’t in the kitchen or the dining room, either. I walked down the hallway toward Ramon’s bedroom door and held my ear to it. I stayed that way for a while, holding my breath, listening for a sign. But I didn’t hear anything. Eventually my head started to ache, and I turned around and left through the front door, with nothing but Ramona’s sequin dress.
I didn’t go to the Amazon with Bill. I didn’t fly anywhere first class or move to Malibu. I never even went back to Ramona’s to get my clothes. After that night, she stopped texting me. I didn’t wonder why. I saw her here and there for a while — at a party at the apartment complex, at a rooftop in West Hollywood. I’d wave and she’d wave back or nod, then carry on tossing her head back so her diamond earrings caught the light, laughing with whatever new person she’d become invested in. She posted more photos and videos, documenting her skincare routine, trying on shoes, floating on pink rafts in pools with girls I’d never seen before, girls who looked sort of like me. I still had her sequin dress, and sometimes I’d put it on and stare at myself in the mirror and wonder if I’d made a mistake — if I’d gone through with it, with Bill, maybe I could have had everything I ever wanted. But I didn’t think that was likely. I didn’t want to be a person who liked Bill, or whatever Bill had to offer. I didn’t care if that made me a bad person.
Whenever I wore Ramona’s sequin dress for too long, my skin began to itch. And I developed a small coconut allergy. The smell of coconut made my throat scratchy, like something was clawing at it, trying to escape.
One day, at work, I read online that Arlo Banks had grown tired of Hollywood. On a whim he’d picked up and moved to Ibiza or Tasmania, or some other fairytale land. He ordered a bowl of soup from a waitress at a cafe and fell in love with her. This was public knowledge, all over the internet. There was only one picture of the waitress online, in her black pants and black t-shirt, black shoes, black apron. She was smiling and holding her fingers in a peace sign, her eyes squinted so you couldn’t even see what color they were, a shadow creating a weird dark spot on her neck. Then, almost overnight, there were more pictures. Pictures of her and Arlo Banks on camels, beside waterfalls, smudged with desert dirt on ATVs. There were pictures of them in the Mediterranean Sea, his arms wrapped around her waist, fingers toying with her hair. She had long brown hair and green eyes and olive skin. She looked exactly like me. Other than that, there was nothing special about her.