Peri rounded her car up the gated driveway, dropping it off with the valet in front of the lacquered front door, tendrils of hothouse ivy clinging to the Spanish colonial-revival facade. Odilie didn’t know these people. The house she had never set foot in, though she knew of it as a cavern.

It was dimly lit inside, a whole staff of uniformed servers handing out flutes of champagne immediately upon entry. In the center of the foyer table sat a vase with flowers of such exotic hues and so luscious, they seemed to have been plucked from the wilds of some foreign land, shipped overseas specifically for this event. And for all Odilie knew, they were.

This was someone’s birthday, Odilie realized. At the bar lining the right wall, in the beamed-ceiling room just past the entryway, a server was mixing a specialty drink, something called “The Birthday Bonanza,” essentially an Aperol spritz, just like the drink Peri had made her try the first night they became friends.

Odilie continued to follow Peri into the house, idling behind her, checking out the many artworks, the gilded finish on the banister leading up to the second floor. Odilie had grown used to, if not jaded by, this kind of opulence. But this was somehow more, richer, as if whoever owned the property had come into their wealth so hastily that they’d thrown a vast fortune into the house with no consideration for what was tasteful or en vogue.

There was zebra, cheetah, and tiger patterned rugs, an entire aquarium built into the middle of the bathroom Odilie ducked into, slippery, unusable scented soap the shape of seashells; an oil painting of the beach, oversize and engulfing, hung at the entrance to another room. So many rooms into which Odilie was trailing Peri.

Peri guided them outdoors toward a backyard, where more people were milling about around a giant aquamarine pool, miniature lanterns twinkling in the trees and on the pool’s surface. The flora bordering the lawn here was fantastic, too, oranges and pinks that Odilie had never even seen in a sunset. In the distance she swore she spotted large animals, ponies maybe, prancing about, their tails flicking. Their nocturnal presence just another showy display of economic supremacy.