1125 PM Sasha
Theo wanted to leave the party.
He leaned over and whispered to Sasha, “Seriously, I’m sort of ready to go home.”
His lips brushed her ear—she smelled a waft of cedar. Earlier he had taken one of the cologne samples from Mia’s bedroom—an Hermès scent that Mia said retailed for something like a hundred dollars for a little over three ounces. Sasha didn’t love it. It smelled like hairspray and mothballs.
“You’re going to leave before midnight?” she said, kissing his cheek. “It’s New Year’s Eve.”
Theo wrapped his arms around her waist. Over his shoulder, she saw a group of people they knew from college lighting cigarettes by the window.
One of them leaned over to say something to another one, a cloud of smoke seeping from her mouth.
The Black Eyed Peas played from a speaker next to the television. She could feel will.i.am in her feet.
“No, I know,” Theo said. “I just think I’m starting to come down with whatever Mia has.”
“You know that Mia isn’t actually sick.”
“She sounded sick when I was over a few days ago. And now my throat’s scratchy and my forehead’s a little warm. Here, feel it.”
He took one of Sasha’s hands and pressed it against his forehead. Then he made a sad face.
Sasha squinted. His forehead was, in fact, very warm.
“Okay,” she said, and removed her hand. “We can leave.”
“You seem annoyed.”
“I’m not annoyed.” She was annoyed. “Who said I was annoyed?”
“You’re doing that thing with your nose.”
“That’s just my face, Theo.”
He made another overly sad expression, pouting his lower lip. Sasha kissed him on the cheek again.
She said, “Here, let me get my coat and we can go.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” He grabbed her wrist. “Why don’t you stay? There’s no reason for you to leave if you don’t want to.”
Sasha looked at him—his broad shoulders, his auburn hair, his blue eyes.
She knew that he meant it. He would never ask her to leave a party if she didn’t want to, and it had been that way since they started dating at the beginning of sophomore year.
Theo was accommodating and trusting and understanding.
He always let her pick what kind of takeout they were going to order; he never came before she did; and he always nodded thoughtfully and took her side when she complained about her mother.
She loved him, and she knew she could consider herself lucky, especially when she saw all the assholes her friends dated.
She also wished they could occasionally get into disagreements and have public fights at group dinners that made her friends uncomfortable.
She wished sometimes he would wait awhile to text her back, or even not text her back at all, and that when they fucked he would pull her hair hard—like, very hard—without being prompted to.
She was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with her.
“Okay, then,” she said. “I’ll stay.”
“I can stay too if you really want me to.”
“You just said you wanted to leave.”
“I know, but I can tell you want to stay. I’ll just take some Airborne when I get home.”
“That shit doesn’t work.”
He crouched down a little so he could press his nose against her neck, and then worked his hands up her spine. She kissed the top of his head, feeling repulsed. Gently, she pushed him away.
“You should leave now, if you’re going to. It’ll be insane after midnight.”
“You’re sure you don’t mind?”
“I’m sure I don’t mind.”
“I love you, baby.”
“I love you too.”
He walked through the living room, saying good-bye to Alison Liu and Courtney Paulson and Mitch Reynolds as he passed them. When he got to the front door, he turned around and blew her a kiss.
Adam said, “Where’s he going?”
He held two beer bottles by their necks. A thin sheen of sweat clung to his forehead.
“Back to his apartment. He said he feels like he’s getting sick.”
“Poor guy.”
“Yeah. Poor guy.” Sasha took a beer. “Do you want to play quarters?”
“Like, the game?”
“Yes, the game.”
Adam shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”
They went to the other side of the living room, where there was a small, expandable dining table from Ikea, along with a pair of wooden chairs the color of straw.
They were the same table and chairs that Adam and Sasha had in their apartment.
Actually, they were the same table and chairs that she had seen in at least three other apartments since she had moved to New York.
Someone put on MGMT’s “Time to Pretend.” Sasha tied her hair back into a ponytail and placed her hands on her hips. She surveyed the table.
She said, “I wonder if there are any clean cups.”
They picked up cups one by one, bringing them to their noses. Some were still filled with combinations of vodka and tequila and flat, caramel-colored soda. Adam found one that was mostly empty, dumped what was left in it into another cup, and held it up for Sasha to see.
“This one looks all right,” he said.
“Yeah, sure, that’ll work.”
She took the cup from him and filled it with beer from her bottle. Then she pulled a quarter from her pocket and, without stopping for too long to think about it, bounced it off the table and into the cup, where it landed with a soft kerplunk.
“That’s how you do it, motherfucker,” she said. “Drink.”
Adam finished what was in the cup, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Sasha refilled it with beer. When it was Adam’s turn, the quarter hit the side of the cup, spun, and fell to the floor.
“That’s okay.” Sasha crouched down. “You’ll get the next one.”
For ten minutes they played, Sasha getting most of her shots, and Adam missing most of his, which resulted in him getting very drunk, very quickly.
Sasha knew the moment it happened, because whenever Adam got drunk, he did this thing where he tucked his chin against his chest when he spoke, like he was about to tell you where Jimmy Hoffa was buried, or something that would start the next world war.
This time he said, “I heard Annie again on Wednesday.”
Sasha glanced at him. She poured a few fingers of beer into her cup and finished it with one swallow.
“Really?” she said. “What did you hear, exactly?”
Adam’s chin lowered again. “Footsteps, mostly. And then maybe a door opening? I don’t know—the radiator was being really loud.”
Annie was the ghost that Adam, Mia, and Sasha had decided haunted the apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street.
A few months earlier, Sasha had told Adam that she heard a young girl’s voice singing “Tomorrow” when she got up in the middle of the night to pee, so they both figured that Annie must be her name.
Annie was also the name of Sasha’s childhood cat.
“Did you hear anything else?” she asked.
“No.” Adam shook his head. “I was going to go check, but you know me—I’m such a pussy about these things.”
Sasha shrugged. She said, “Your words—not mine.”
She had come up with the idea of Annie a month ago, right as fall was growing its winter teeth.
For the third time in as many weekends she had overheard Mia and Adam talking about weird sounds they kept hearing in the night, and Sasha decided she had better start thinking up an explanation.
A ghost was ridiculous—they were twenty-four years old, and more important, what sort of ghost would be lame enough to haunt Midtown East?
At the same time, Sasha was desperate. She couldn’t tell Adam and Mia that what they had actually heard was her, Sasha, sneaking out into the city alone on a weeknight, and she figured a ghost was farfetched enough that it might, paradoxically, stick.
She was right. While she didn’t think that any of them actually believed that Annie existed, the idea of her gave them all something to deflect to on apartment-related matters they couldn’t otherwise explain.
For example: when the dishwasher stopped working, it was Annie who had clogged its drain.
Annie let a mouse in through a hole in the living room wall, and Annie was smoking cigarettes on the fire escape when they had all had a conversation about not doing that, and Annie forgot to change the lightbulb in the bathroom after being asked to do it six times.
Annie put on a pair of heels and sneaked into somewhere she didn’t belong.
The first time she did it was on a Saturday in September, when she slipped beneath a velvet rope at the Four Seasons on Fifty-Seventh Street.
She hadn’t meant to end up there—it just sort of happened.
Earlier in the day, she had been at her job at the Roebling Gallery on West Twenty-Eighth Street, helping her boss, Wally Roebling, set up a new show.
The Roebling Gallery specialized in photography.
Occasionally Wally would take on a sculptor, but his bread and butter was photography.
The show that they were taking down comprised a series of close-up portraits of dogs’ faces while they were taking shits on city sidewalks.
A beagle, straining to defecate in Brooklyn; an Italian greyhound, humiliated as it did its business on Seventy-Fourth and Park.
The artist was a twenty-eight-year-old Argentine who’d grown up in London and lived in a large loft next to a chocolate factory in Red Hook.
He’d won a MacArthur “genius grant” before he was twenty-five.
The new show—the one that Sasha had helped with that Saturday—consisted of high-res shots of garbage dumps in Indiana. Each time Wally pointed to one, he compared it to Sasha’s brain.
“You see that?” he said, gesturing to a used condom hanging limply off a Styrofoam cooler.
“I see it.”
“That’s your entire generation, right there. About as worthless as a used condom.”
“I’ll make sure to let them all know.”