1132 PM Mia
On the way out of the kitchen, Mia ran into Courtney Paulson, standing next to the bathroom with Mitch Reynolds.
Courtney had, very obviously, recently snorted a not-insignificant quantity of cocaine.
Her pupils were dilated and she couldn’t stop grinding her jaw and she spoke like someone had pushed a fast-forward button on the back of her head, pausing only to take small, quick breaths and to say, with an earnestness that felt like an accusation, “DoyouknowwhatImean?” Also: there was a clump of cocaine hanging from her left nostril.
“Hello, hello, hello,” she said, and dug her nails into Mia’s wrist.
Mitch glanced down and nodded, almost imperceptibly. Then he looked out across the living room and yelled, “You’re a fucking cocksucker, Chase,” before bobbing his head along to the music. Courtney punched him in the arm. She flipped her head back and laughed.
Since they’d all graduated two years ago, the rumor was that Mitch had banked something like two million dollars.
He’d bought an orange Ducati motorcycle that he drove up and down the West Side Highway, and tonight when he showed up at the party, Mia saw him holding a half-empty bottle of Smirnoff.
Once, during junior year, they had kissed.
It was that weird semester when everyone else in their class went abroad.
Sasha to Rome, Adam to Paris, all the communications majors to Australia.
Soon they would come back with affected accents and secondhand velvet blazers bought at thrift stores in Dublin, but until then, Mitch and Mia and a smattering of other random people were left on campus, trying to figure out what to do with all the empty space.
The kiss happened at Smokey Joe’s on Fortieth Street.
Mia had been drinking White Russians since eight o’clock that night, and as she was dancing to a song by Dr. Dre, Mitch started grinding into her, then leaned down and pressed his lips to Mia’s.
Initially she stood perfectly still: here was the biggest douchebag in their year, eating her face.
But then she got hold of herself and kissed him back, standing on her highest tiptoes to get more leverage.
Because why not? She was drunk, and the idea of kissing someone who had always repulsed her suddenly struck Mia as funny and novel and something she could turn into a good story.
It was not a good kiss—his breath tasted like sour milk, and he kept biting her tongue, and she told herself to remember these things so she could describe them to Sasha and Adam when they got back.
When it was over, they both laughed, and Mitch patted Mia on the top of her head, like she had learned a new trick.
Then he said he was going to throw up and pushed his way toward the bathroom.
“What’s everyone’s resolutions?” Courtney said.
Her brown hair was flat-ironed straight and fell well past her shoulders.
She wore three David Yurman bracelets that clanked together when she shook her wrists, and a gold necklace made to look like braided rope.
Her father owned car dealerships out on Long Island.
She called him the Baron of Bayville. “This is going to be such a great year, like such a great year.”
Mitch drank from his beer. “No resolutions,” he said. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Courtney nodded with a ferocious intensity. She said, “Absolutely,” and then, “What about you, Mia?”
Mia glanced over her shoulder and into the kitchen. Marco was talking to Richie Fournier, their heads pressed together.
“I don’t know,” she said, “maybe I’ll start doing Pilates or something.”
“Pilates is amazing. I do it all the time. Like, five days a week, at least. Here, punch me in the stomach.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Courtney slapped her abdomen. “I said punch me in the motherfucking stomach.”
“Oh.” Mia looked up at Mitch, who was yelling something else into the living room. “No, thank you.”
It was strange talking to Courtney like this.
Not because she was asking Mia to assault her, or because she was high on coke, but because Mia had always assumed that there was a mutual understanding that they hated each other.
It wasn’t extreme or violent—they’d never gotten into an actual fight—so much as that Courtney always made sure Mia saw her roll her eyes whenever she walked into a room.
She made it a point to say hi to Sasha, and fawn over Adam, and then turn to Mia with a squished face and say something like “Wait, we’ve met, right?
” even though they had lived down the hall from each other freshman year and Courtney had asked to use her microwave, like, twenty-seven times.
It didn’t bother Mia—in fact, she found the reliability of it weirdly comforting, sort of in the way that geopolitics must have felt at the height of the Cold War.
She knew that Courtney was her enemy, like the U.S.
knew it had beef with Russia. It also helped that Courtney—like the Kremlin—was crooked and oppressive and mean.
“Fine, whatever, your loss.” Courtney hit her own stomach again. She wiped her nose. “Wait, oh my God, I heard Adam Parker turned gay.”
“Well, technically speaking, I don’t think he turned gay. But yeah, he came out in October.”
“I always knew it.”
“We all did, Courtney. Literally everyone knew Adam was gay.”
“Ever since he hooked up with Jessica Bartosz, I knew it.”
“What does Jessica Bartosz have to do with anything?”
“She looks like a man. No straight guy would ever sleep with someone who looks like that.” She turned, squaring her shoulders to Mia. “You must be so depressed about it.”
“I’m not depressed about it at all.”
“I mean, it’s just so obvious you’re in love with him.”
“Okay, yeah, I think that’s a common misperception.” In the kitchen, Mia saw Marco open and shut the freezer. He turned in her direction and she quickly looked away. “Like, are you in love with Nina Guzman?”
Courtney narrowed her eyes. She said, “Fuck you, Mia,” and ran her tongue across her teeth. “All I’m saying is that the good ones always end up being gay.”
Mia wasn’t sure what she thought about that—at Details she worked with some truly awful gay people.
But with Adam she supposed she could see what Courtney was saying.
He was good-looking in a soft, generic way that she had heard grandmothers refer to as “easy on the eyes.” He was excellent at listening to everyone’s problems and never talked about himself; he could make cinnamon rolls without looking at a recipe; and he was very handy with a wrench.
Some of these things Mia attributed to the fact that both of Adam’s parents had died when he was four (mountain roads, black ice), leaving him to be raised by what he described as a very Lutheran aunt named Patty who (Mia imagined) had instilled in Adam a sort of hardscrabble, Wagon Train style of selflessness and competence; some of them she attributed to Adam having simply been born a better and more capable person than she was.
In fact, since graduating from college, she had come to believe that most everyone she met had been born a better and more capable person than she was.
Mitch Reynolds said, “I have a gay cousin. He’s the shit.”
“Oh my God.” Courtney set her hand on Mitch’s chest. He glanced down at it, and then back up at Courtney. “You should set him up with Adam.”
“He’s, like, forty-two.”
“Oh.” Courtney withdrew her hand. “Gross.”
The apartment on East Fifty-Seventh that Mia shared with Adam and Sasha was on the second floor of a prewar building that had, since they moved in nearly two years ago, been entirely covered with scaffolding.
The total cost of rent was five thousand dollars, though it had been decided before they moved in that their individual portions would be prorated: Adam didn’t have a real bedroom and was in law school, so it seemed unfair to make him pay as much as the rest of them; Mia worked at a magazine, where she made practically no money (a fact that her corporate overlords tried to disguise with free perfume samples and an in-house cafeteria designed by Frank Gehry); and Sasha’s family was rich.
She wasn’t obnoxious about it, not like Courtney Paulson was, and without her father guaranteeing the lease, they wouldn’t have been able to rent the apartment in the first place.
Still, it did present some unavoidably weird power dynamics.
For example: Mia felt bad about telling Sasha to hurry up in the bathroom.
She felt bad about telling Sasha not to use her shampoo, and to please return her copy of the New Yorker without mysterious, greasy stains on the pages, and to stop playing *NSYNC so loud because what self-respecting twenty-four-year-old woman still listened to *NSYNC.
It also made Mia wonder what her contribution to the household was.
Sasha paid for things. Adam fixed leaky faucets, and cooked them dinner, and did their dishes, and remembered to buy toilet paper, and folded their pairs of underwear into tidy squares when they slipped them in with his laundry, and dusted all the surfaces in the apartment while they wandered around him hungover every Sunday morning.
Mia, on the other hand, was very good at operating the television.
“Oh, shit,” Courtney said. She was staring at her phone.
Mia asked, “What?”
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”
“What?”
Courtney didn’t answer her. She brought the phone to her ear, screamed, “Do not try to start something with me right now, Mom,” and pushed her way into the kitchen.
Mia glanced up at Mitch, and then out at the rest of the party.
Courtney’s best friend, Alison Liu, was sitting on the arm of a couch, talking to some guy in a sweater-vest; Adam and Sasha were playing quarters on a small table near the window.
Mia inspected the ends of her hair. Suddenly she felt very self-conscious about what to do with her hands.
“So,” she began, “I hear you’re a millio—”
“Later, Hoffmann.”
Mitch walked away. She watched him finish his beer, drop the bottle to the floor, then wrap his arm around a blonde in a black tube top.
Someone kicked the bottle, and it rolled up against the wall.
Mia drank from her vodka soda. She walked over to the table where Sasha and Adam were playing quarters.
“Where were you?” Sasha asked.
“In the kitchen getting a drink. And then I was talking to Mitch Reynolds and Courtney Paulson.”
Sasha looked at her sympathetically. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Adam threw a quarter. It bounced off the edge of a red Solo cup, then fell flat on the table.
Mia said, “Did you guys know that Richie Fournier has a new roommate?”
“Yeah.” Adam handed Sasha the quarter. “Marco Bernardi.”
“Did you know him in college?”
“I knew of him.”
Sasha held up the quarter with two fingers and closed one eye. “I think he used to hook up with Satya Patel,” she said.
“Oh.” Mia frowned. She felt a hollowing out of her stomach, a weird, anxious sensation that she pegged immediately as jealousy. “Really?”
“It was either him or Chris Gonzales—”
“Gonzolo,” Adam corrected.
“—I can’t remember.”
Sasha threw the quarter and it disappeared into the cup. Adam hung his head.
“I’m going outside,” Mia said.
“What?” Adam looked up. “Why?”
“To have a cigarette.”
“I thought you said you were quitting smoking.”
“I am.”
“When?”
“In five years. My gynecologist said that so long as I quit by thirty my lungs will totally regenerate themselves and it’ll be like I never smoked at all.”
Sasha said, “I think you should probably get a new gynecologist.”