on an ankle, or some bird, any bird, on a wrist. The kind of tentative adornment that they hoped lovers would remember, even fetishize, so that even if they were one body in a lifetime of many, he might say, years later, Oh yes! The girl with the star on her wrist. As if there weren’t galaxies of them.
The light was fading and the color of the sky began to find its way into her—the whole gathering night, unknowable, mushrooming in indigo and violet. Limbs gleamed with sweat all around her; the laughter seemed louder and her anxiety rose. This city, this time, this massive stupid gift of a free apartment, demanded something of her: a grandness, an expansiveness, some kind of vision, bold acts. And she was already failing with thoughts like these; dropping all the basketballs, butterfingered, dribbling apologies.
She’d made it up the three flights of stairs and had closed a series of doors behind her when she heard an obscene rupturing of sound, a noise splitting the air. The cat was crouched under the kitchen table, and Kate lurched toward it, but it yowled—a horrible, unheimlich noise—and shot away, seeking refuge without her. And now she was just a human cowering under a stranger’s table. Within the panic there was a small space for one thought, a sickly little pocket in which she was able to realize that if she survived, she’d be able to say the words “I arrived in New York the night of a terrorist attack.” A grim little tale to treasure forever. Where were you? people would ask, and she’d never not remember.
But now the sound of sky breaking had rumbled down quieter, like sonic rubble, and she crawled to the window to see signs of panic. There were none. She lifted the window with fumbling, frightened fingers. First an inch, then two, then all the way, and the heat rushed in, bringing the smell of cordite. On a rooftop, blocks away, she could see figures moving, ecstatically, looping wands of light in the air that left trails and sparks like tiny comets. She stared, stupefied. And then the word for those things came to her: sparklers. And then this knowledge, slow and steady: that people don’t dance on rooftops in the middle of a terrorist attack. Through the sputtering light trails, she began to see the words the girl had shouted to her in the bodega, forming sense in the spaces.
Happy Fourth.
She’d arrived in a city celebrating its independence from her nation. Fireworks sound the same as bombs. Or as imagined bombs. On the bed, weak and ridiculous, foolish with tears, she let relief claim her.
2
Inez was photographing the mirror and Dana was watching. This was often how it was: she did things, and Dana watched.
“No one’s going to buy it,” Dana was saying, softly, to the ceiling.
She’d sat on the end of Inez’s bed, then flopped backward, so that her feet were still planted, and her palms were upturned by her sides. Her body seemed to announce, with a certain fatalism, that it would never move from this position.
“I wished this girl in the bodega a happy Fourth,” Inez said, tossing her the cigarettes, “and she looked like I was about to shoot her.”
The cigarettes lay where they landed, on her friend’s belly.
“Well,” Dana said dully. “Sometimes you have that effect on people.”
“You saying I’m scary?”
“Can’t you just put it out on the street?” Dana said. “I don’t know why you can’t just put it out on the street.”
Inez could put the mirror out on the street, sure. She could also—and this would be much more spectacular—toss it out one of the windows of the loft’s main space and watch it cartwheel down to smash on Broadway. But there was something far more appealing about selling off a piece of childhood, about having the object taken off your hands and out of your life for cash. Her plan to sell the mirror was, to her mind, both hygienic
and ruthless.
Around the mirror’s corners were the scarified white patches of stickers stuck there in clusters, then scraped away at a later date. She hadn’t noticed these patches until now, the gummy blight of them, and she scratched at them ineffectually, feeling Dana’s gaze on her all the while. The real blight, of course, was the mirror itself. It hung low on the wall in its cheap molded plastic pink frame, at a height right for a seven-year-old, the one she’d been twelve years ago. As she stood in front of it now in her bare feet, her reflection was neatly guillotined.
How to photograph a mirror? With her phone raised at her hip she took another picture and studied the image. There they were, her skinny hips cocked, and her head cropped out, a small blare of flash around the top of her phone and her fingers. She scowled at this image of the object, then at the object itself, looking between the two, and at herself, looking. You could see the white patches in the photo. Maybe someone would consider the thing “distressed.”
“Why,” Dana said, “now?”
Inez began half humming, half singing, as she typed “Craigslist” in the screen’s search bar.
“Are you singing the Bee Gees?” Dana asked, apparently amused.
“Aaliyah!” Inez said. “Fucking sacrilege! Bee Gees.”
She resumed the tune but as she clicked into the blurry photographs and banality of for sale > furniture, the humming lost its will. Ugly furniture was all the same. All the cheap Billy bookcases. All the bland dorm-room desks. People, though, that was a whole other thing. She strayed within seconds to personals > miscellaneous romance. The pink mirror faded and was forgotten.
“Miscellaneous romance.” That phrase was funny: romantic like the posts in > m4w, with their anxious, explicit wondering over anatomical parts? “Do you have cute feet?” they asked the ether. “Do you have big labia?” Or romantic like the messages posted beneath lewd requests that rang with something more plaintive than filthy—with need, rather than desire? “Will you spit in my mouth?” “Will you spoon me?” One message ended with the question “Does that make sense to you?”
She clicked and read and clicked and read, wound out of herself so thoroughly that when Dana spoke again Inez jumped slightly, just slightly, probably not enough for her to notice.
“Did you post it? Can we finally go now? We’ll miss the fireworks.”
“You know the fireworks will be lame, Gabe firing off one pathetic little rocket or something. Okay, listen to this,” she said, and she began to read aloud in a goofy voice, gulping each word: “‘Let’s play Doctor! I’ve got all the equipment for your erotic sensual exam. About me: open-minded, kicked out of medical school—wonder why, lol?—semi-sane and lots of fun in the exam room.’”
With reluctance, Dana sat up, dislodging the cigarette packet.
“Wonder why, lol!” Inez crowed.
“We’re never going to get to this party,” Dana said.
Charged with glee now, bent over the laptop balanced on her crossed legs, Inez said, “He calls himself a regular guy.”
“Maybe he is,” Dana said.
“‘Seeking young woman, slim, attractive, to be locked in closet for an hour, maybe more. Generous financial donation. Regular guy, nothing funny.’”
A small silence grew in the room. Like an oily bubble blown for a child, it suggested wonder as much as absurdity, the two states overlaid and glistening. The bubble swelled, wobbled, popped. Inez looked up. Dana’s expression was heavy with warning.
“I’d totally do that,” Inez mouthed.
“You wouldn’t.”
“I would. I’m going to.”
“You’re not.”
“I am. Dare me.”
“Absolutely not. No.”
“Hey, Dana, am I slim?”
“Shut up.”
“Attractive?”
“I