Trying to be social

She paid him the two-fifty—watching the numbers drop in her banking app with a physical ache—and drove her resurrected Corolla back toward the outskirts of town, where the college's influence gave way to strip malls and then to the kind of rural decay that predated the town's brief boom as a wellness retreat destination in the 1920s.

The Motor Pines Lodge sat at the end of a cracked asphalt drive, a U-shaped motor court that had been a gateway to the wilderness in the fifties, a no-tell motel in the seventies, converted into "efficiency apartments" sometime during the Reagan administration in the '80s, then in the '90s was bought by Harry Midwell just as he was starting to lose his mind. Her unit was 4B, upstairs, overlooking the parking lot where a man in his late forties was currently inspecting his lawn with the intensity of a forensic accountant. Jerry. She'd met him twice. Both times he'd mentioned HOAs and "property values" while staring at her rusted Corolla like it was a personal insult.

Delilah climbed the exterior stairs, avoiding the rotting third step, and let herself into her apartment. It was one room plus a bathroom so small she could touch both walls simultaneously. The kitchen-less kitchenette consisted of a hot plate, a microwave, and a mini-fridge that hummed like it was plotting insidious deeds. Her bed was a mattress on the floor, pushed into the corner farthest from the window; she'd dragged it from a curb on bulk trash day when she moved in. It was exactly what you'd expect from a motel room converted into "affordable housing"—carpet that smelled like decades of other people's depression and bad life decisions. She made what she called sad girl dumplings, her meal of choice when that particular feeling hit her—canned chicken mixed with a lot of hot sauce and desperation, folded into white bread and microwaved until they were warm and vaguely chewy. It technically counted as flavor enough to keep her from giving up on eating altogether for a few more nights. She ate two standing at the counter, then wrapped the rest in foil for tomorrow. The chicken patties went into the freezer, stacked on top of a bag of peas she'd been using as an ice pack for her jaw—wisdom teeth needing to come out, no insurance to get them removed.

She sat on her mattress and looked at the window. It was the kind that cranked outward, old metal frame, probably original to the building. She'd measured it once. Fourteen feet to the asphalt below. Not enough to guarantee anything except pain and hospital bills she couldn't pay. She'd done the research. The survival rate from that height was depressingly high if you didn't land on your head.

Jump, she thought. Just open it and jump. It's not that far. It's not that hard.

She didn't move. She sat there until the sun finished setting and the room went dark except for the sodium glow from the parking lot lights outside. Then she stood, walked to the window, closed the blinds, and lay down fully clothed on top of her blankets.

Her phone buzzed. Sebastian.

Party at Greek Row tonight. Open bar. No ID checks. Come be miserable with company instead of alone.

Delilah stared at the message. She thought about the window. She thought about the sad girl dumplings sitting in her stomach like wet cement. She thought about Warren's cousin and residential schools and the way he'd looked at her like she was a machine that needed maintenance.

Okay, she typed back. Pick me up?

Ubering, Sebastian replied. See you there. Wear something that says "I have not given up entirely."

She changed into jeans that fit better than the leggings, a black Green Day t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up to show the faded tattoos on her shoulders—lyrics from songs she'd loved at sixteen, meaning she'd murdered at twenty-five. She pulled on boots with heels that made her feel like she was playing a character, someone who had her life together, someone whose birthday hadn't passed unnoticed in a converted motel room.

The Uber was driven by a woman with purple hair who talked about crystal healing the entire way. Delilah nodded in the right places and tipped three dollars she couldn't afford. Things were going to be tight.

Greek Row was a street of Victorian monstrosities that had been converted into fraternity and sorority houses sometime in the 1950s, each one painted a different shade of institutional despair. The party was at Sigma Fi Kappa or maybe it was Delta Tau Delta—she couldn't tell, the letters kept swimming. The lawn was already littered with red cups, the bass thumping through the floorboards loud enough to rattle her teeth.

Sebastian found her at the door. He was wearing a blazer over his favorite t-shirt, hair perfectly styled in that French way that managed to look both effortless and calculated. Basically looked like he'd stepped out of a 2002 issue of GQ. He'd been raised on a farm in Gévaudan, of all places, that corner of France famous for wolf attacks in the 1700s, by his old school grandparents. He said it explained his interest in American pop culture—the whole place was a beast that ate its young, a tourist trap focused on the past with no future, even if the new things he got were at least forty years old.

"Delilah," he said, kissing both her cheeks. "You look like a funeral procession. Perfect. Come, drink. Try and pretend to enjoy your birthday."

"How did you know it was my birthday?"

"I didn't. But it's always someone's birthday, and everyone at these parties comes unloved and leaves loved. Come on."

The bar was indeed open—kegs in the kitchen, bottles of cheap liquor on the counter, mixers that were mostly ice. Delilah made herself a vodka cranberry that was mostly vodka and drank it while standing in a corner near a bookshelf that held textbooks arranged by color rather than subject.

She saw Dominique across the room. The Spanish transfer student was wearing a corporate goth aesthetic that should have been ridiculous but wasn't—a structured blazer, pencil skirt, combat boots, hair dyed so black it had blue highlights under the party lights. She was holding court near the fireplace, Riley beside her, the two of them looking like they'd been cut from the same dark cloth. Riley caught Delilah staring and smiled, that knowing smile that made everyone think she was psychic. As far as Delilah knew she wasn't, just hyper-observant and obsessive, but there was a spooky quality to her that Dominique found attractive.

Delilah looked away. She'd tried to talk to Dominique once, in the finance building hallway. She'd managed "I like your boots" and Dominique had said "Thank you, they're Prada," and that had been the end of the conversation. Delilah didn't know what Prada was, exactly, except that it meant not for you.

She drank another vodka cranberry. Then another. The room began to soften at the edges, the anxiety that lived in her chest like a trapped bird finally quieting, wings folded, head down. She wandered the house, looking for Sebastian, finding instead a hallway that led to bathrooms and bedrooms and, inexplicably, a large cactus in a ceramic pot.

She sat down next to the cactus. It was a saguaro, fake probably, but well-made. She stroked its plastic spines.

"I'm lonely," she told the cactus. "I'm so fucking lonely I can taste it. It tastes like metal. Like blood. Like the inside of a mouth that's been closed too long."

The cactus said nothing. That was okay. She hadn't expected it to.

"Twenty-five," she continued. "Quarter-life crisis. Except I don't think I'm going to make it to a hundred. I don't think I'm going to make it to thirty. I'm going to die in that apartment. They're going to find me when the smell gets bad. And my parents will say we told her and my ex will say she was always unstable and nobody will—"

"Hey." A voice from above. Bradley Niles, the weed dealer for the rich kids, was looking down at her with eyes that were probably kind when he wasn't calculating profit margins. "You need a ride? You look like you need a ride." It was a sales pitch and right now Delilah was a very desperate customer.

"I need," Delilah said carefully, "to not be here. I need to be in my bed. I need to not exist for approximately eight hours."

"I can do the bed part. The other part's on you." He extended a hand. "But it's gonna cost. I'm not running a charity."

Delilah looked up at him. She knew the currency. Everyone knew the currency. She'd gone down on John for less—for affection, for attention, for the lie of love.

"Halfway home," she said. "Just to the edge of town. I'll walk from there."

"Deal."

They went to his car, the one his parents bought him, a BMW that smelled like weed and expensive cologne. She performed the transaction in the backseat while he kept the engine running, mechanical and efficient, her mind somewhere else entirely—back in her apartment, back at the window, back at sixteen when she'd still believed in the romance of sadness. But there were tasks to handle. He undid his belt and lowered his boxers and jeans, letting his dick free from its fabric confines.

She took his cock in her hand, and it twitched. To get it up she gave it a few tugs. She lowered herself and wrapped her lips around his head. She sucked just the tip for a moment and popped it out like a sucker. She licked the sensitive underside in one long stroke all the way up to his frenulum. She pushed his cock into her mouth and let it hit the side of her cheek. His penis was bigger than her ex's but not by much.

She pushed his cock down her throat as far as it would go and let it go past the point of resistance. As she pulled it back out, she created suction with her tongue and lips. Every second she pumped it back into her mouth, and her tongue stroked the bottom with every thrust. She formed a consistent rhythmic pattern with the strokes. His eyes were still glued to the darkness scanning for cops, but he was breathing heavily now, catching his breath. She waited for his breathing to slow and resumed. This time she started at his taint; her tongue licked that spot over and over as she wrapped her hand around his penis and stroked it. She felt his body tense again and, like before, she tried to stop right before she hit the edge of his climax. She was too late; his cock went rigid, jabbing the back of her throat. Seed filled her mouth, leaving her no option but to swallow and groan loudly, decidedly not in the erotic way. Bradley felt she was making too much noise, and he covered her mouth with the hand not clutching her hair. "Shh, you're making too much noise. You have to be quiet," he whispered. She shook her head, and he removed his hand from her mouth. She glared, letting the rest of his cum slide down her throat. When it was done, he handed her a bottle of water and started driving.

They made it to the edge of town, past the Walmart and the Home Depot, before the flashing lights appeared in the distance. It was a college town where drunk driving checkpoints were as common as Dollar Generals, just part of the fabric of life. Except in Bradley's case he was carrying a drunk girl and enough weed to make a small town cop the celebrity of the night back at the station.

"Shit," Bradley said. "Shit, shit, hold on."

He pulled over. Delilah, still drunk, still disconnected from her body, watched as the cop cars stopped cars and ran the same check with each car in the line. Bradley rolled down his window. She heard voices, the murmur of explanations, the word "sobriety test" repeating every ten minutes or so.

"Get out," Bradley hissed at her. "Walk. Now. Before they get to the car. Go."

"Bradley, it's freezing—"

"Out!"

The BMW peeled away, tires squealing on ice, leaving her alone on the dark street three blocks from The Motor Pines Lodge. Delilah walked. She didn't look back. She didn't feel the cold anymore. She felt the tequila and the humiliation and the strange, hollow victory of having traded something of herself for almost nothing, which seemed fitting. She didn't see the flash.

She was looking down at her boots, watching her breath fog in the streetlight, when the world went white. Not bright—white. Like someone had erased the color from reality for just a moment, a single frame of existence where everything paused. The universe itself was clearing the page and looking for a new outline to start with. Then it was gone. She blinked, swayed, kept walking. Probably the alcohol. Probably a car's high beams.

She climbed the stairs to Room 4B and passed out on her curb mattress without removing the bedsheet.The headache was biblical. Delilah came back to consciousness with the sensation of someone driving railroad spikes through her temples, her mouth tasting like something had died in it and been resurrected only to die again. Sunlight was screaming through the blinds. Delilah woke up warm.

This was wrong. Her radiator didn't work properly. She slept in hoodies and fingerless gloves, burrowed under three dollar-store blankets, still waking with numb toes. But now—now she was actually warm, nestled in something soft that cradled her body like a promise.

She opened her eyes.

The ceiling was wrong. Her ceiling had water stains shaped like Florida and a crack that ran from the light fixture to the corner. This ceiling was smooth, off-white, with a fixture that looked like actual brushed nickel.

She sat up.

The bed was real. Not a curb mattress on a floor—a bed, with a headboard and a frame and sheets that smelled like lavender and apple detergent. Her body sank into a mattress that had support, actual springs, memory foam. Then there was her laptop glowing faintly like it had been shot up with cosmic space magic or something. To her horror and confusion the screen was open to every indecent story she’d written while under the influence of cheap wine stolen from CVS. There were the soft ones first, romances built on hidden glances and delayed gratification, lovers playing long games with her self-insert's heart. Then the file names grew sharper, darker: Here were the stories her ex wouldn't touch, the leashes and the protocols, the transformations, the caretaking that bordered on undoing, the wet alien press of things that weren't human. Her own private taxonomy of shame and want. Things John had called "weird" when she tested the waters, things that made her close the laptop fast and shower with the lights on.

"What the fuck," she whispered.