“You have to come tonight,” Juliana tells Nicola the next day. “Youhave to.It’s going to be the best party of all of them. Who cares if Jack isn’t here.”Nicola has said no: some of the people from the Institute are going to a house party off Lakeside Drive. She’s promised that she’ll go. But then Vanessa, one of the interns, who was going to drive her, comes down with food poisoning, and Ricky, another intern, decides to go visit a friend in Newport, and suddenly nobody she knows is going to the house party after all. So against her better judgment Nicola puts on a new dress she bought on sale at one of the shops on Water Street (she should have ordered from LookBook, she realizes too late), gathers her resolve and her phone, and makes her way across the grass, a moth, as always, drawn to the lights.
But she won’t stay long! She’ll stay half an hour, or maybe forty-five minutes. Her eyes feel scratchy from not enough sleep the night before. She’ll have one drink, and then she’ll leave.
On the face of it, the party feels like the first party. The DJ is there, giant headphones, black T-shirt, dance moves. The influencers are there. There are photos galore, and people bent over their phones, tagging and posting and reposting. Word is there’s a yacht down from Camden and a party of six in from the Vineyard. Four young women are artfully arranging themselves on the patio furniture and photographing each other in different configurations.
But something is different.Something feels different.Nicola can’t put her finger on what the difference is. But it’s there.
The signature cocktail is a twist on a highball. Nicola’s never had an actual highball so she’s not sure where the twist comes in. She sips hers slowly, not wanting a hangover the next day, wanting, for some reason she can’t exactly name, to keep her wits about her. She scans the scene. A couple is having a massive fight near one of the outsidegas fireplaces. Two girls who look underage, and commensurately excited to be there, are drinking too fast and laughing too hard. People are dancing, then not dancing, then dancing again. There’s too much food. There’s too much of everything.
It isn’t until later—much later, maybe even the final days of summer—that Nicola puts her finger on it. They’re still in July, albeit late July, but the party has the feeling of an end-of-summer bash. The first party she went to was pure jubilance; this one is tempered with some sort of gravity, diluted, like a whiskey on the rocks whose ice has begun to melt.
She texts Jack. Maybe he came back early; maybe he’ll stop by. Jack’s travel plans are always fluid. Is this a desperate move? Is she showing her hand? (Whatisher hand?) He doesn’t text back. She wanders into the house, pokes her head into the library, where she first met Juliana—empty. She takes a spot in the bathroom line, more for something to do than because she really needs to go. The woman in front of her—red streaks in her hair, dangly gold earrings—asks if Nicola has a tampon. “I can’t believe my luck!” she says. “Of all the nights.”
Nicola doesn’t, but says she can run and get one from her house because she only lives next door. The woman says, “Oh, don’t do that! I’m sure I can find one here. Maybe I’ll sneak around, see what Jade is hiding.”
Nicola asks, “Who’s Jade?” and the woman claps her hand to her mouth, spreads her fingers out to talk through them, and says, “You didn’t hear me say that.”
“Okay.” Nicola doesn’t wonder for too long because someone comes up to the woman and squeals, “Shelly!Girl!You will not. Believe. Who I just saw...” and Shelly says, “Who?” She turns away from Nicola and Nicola busies herself with her phone, looking to see if Jack texted back. Negative.
It doesn’t matter! She doesn’t care. Anyway, this party feels weird. The vibe of the night isweird.She finishes her highball inthe bathroom line. Maybe she’ll limit herself to two. Two is very reasonable.
Nicola powers her phone all the way off so she won’t be tempted to look any longer. That little fucker, she thinks; he has her falling for him; he has her joining the long line of women who, from the beginning of time, have sat by the phone (or in this case held a phone), waiting for a man to call.
Anyway, who cares. She and Jack aren’t exclusive. She can sleep with anyone at the party that night—any night! Any party!—without a speck of guilt.
After the bathroom, she joins the line at the outside bar. It’s then, just as the bartender hands her a second drink, that she figures it out, why the night feels so unsteady, its potential chaos just beneath the surface. She spots Taylor’s golden hair, and David beside her, coming from the wide-open patio doors.
Oh boy,thinks Nicola. This night could go any number of ways from here, and none of them are good. Just as Nicola sees David and Taylor, she sees that Juliana does too. She takes a healthy sip of her drink and follows behind as Juliana emerges from a small clump of people at the edge of the patio.
“You’rehere!” Juliana says, looking from one to the other. “David, hello.” She puts out her hand and they shake, formally and absurdly. “Taylor, how nice to see you again so soon.”
David turns to Taylor and says, “So soon?”
Taylor smiles an icy smile at David. “Didn’t I tell you? I stopped in here the other day. I was out on the mopeds with Mo and Michael. They’d heard about Juliana being here, you know how Mo is about clothes.” She rolls her eyes. “And she wanted to see if she could meet Queen LookBook here.”
“I was so happy they came by,” says Juliana, looking the opposite. “Are Mo and Michael here too?”
“They couldn’t stay after all.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.” Juliana doesn’t sound like it’s too bad at all.
“But they’ll be back in a few weeks.”
Right, thinks Nicola. Johnny O’Neill’s boat. Nicola feels disengaged from her own body, like her mind is a balloon, bobbing high above the party on a string. “Well,” Juliana goes on. “I’d love to show you both around.” She may as well have been saying,I’d love to slice my tongue in two and throw half of it in the ocean.
“That,” says Taylor, “would be spectacular.” She takes David’s hand. The result of this is that to move through patio crowds, Juliana can’t walk beside them; she has to lead, tossing her words awkwardly over her shoulder as David and Taylor follow behind.
Nicola stays where she is. She has the feeling that if she stood overhere,in one place, the ground might be solid enough, but if she goes overthere, to that other place, maybe the ground will move beneath her feet. Is it a full moon? She looks up but can see no moon whatsoever. It’s hiding from her. She tries not to take it personally. She powers her phone back on, ostensibly to pull up a lunar calendar, but maybe also to see if Jack has texted back.
Not far from her, a girl says to her friend, “Youalways do this,Harriet, and you never say why. I’m seriously so fucking sick of it!” See? Things are so off-kilter tonight!
Jack hasn’t texted. And the moon doesn’t even have the courtesy to be full; the full moon, she sees, was the week before. She takes a lap. Takes another lap. Talks to someone whose niece works at the Institute with her. She’s itching to leave; she’s so tired. She checks her phone. Nothing. She should just go home, right? She should go home. Nobody will miss her.
It’s after some time that she hears her name, an urgent whisper from the shadows at the edge of the patio. Taylor. She’s sitting on one of the many outdoor couches—who can keep track? There are so many places to sit out here.
“Taylor!”
“I lost David.”
