For a moment, I try to consider the words I might use to come forward, where I’d begin, which transformations I’d include, which traumas, where I’d say they end. I try not to imagine Jake or his lawyers, what they would do to shut me up, the story they could make of me, so easy to discredit. But the opioids have pulled a shade down in my brain anyway. Around me, the Princess Suite has dissolved. I scroll the @annawrey museum. Hunger rises up, stoked by every picture of my past: @anna holding up a grilled cheese sandwich at the grand opening of LA’s latest gastropub; @anna seated at a kitschy diner behind the highest stack of pancakes, sugar dusted; @anna dressed in silver at a Vegas steakhouse, cutting a massive ribeye, watching the juices pool; all meals I ordered, photographed, but didn’t eat. A waste. A familiar fantasy, that I might return to the girl I was and consume what she did not. I would eat it all now, shameless. I would start a foodie feed, the upside-down version of the identity I constructed when I was a teenage girl, the alternate story. I see both grids, both girls, when I see @annawrey. I see stardom, what I chose, what became of me, and everything I missed.

I put down my phone, pick up the landline, press a button and listen to it ring.

“Room service closes at eleven, hon.” The woman at the front desk has an awake voice. I tuck the pink receiver to my shoulder, check the time. I’m nine minutes late. “But the bar is probably still open,” she says, and something about a limited menu.

I hang up, stand up, find those flip-flops. Hunting for food makes me brave. Or the pills have peaked and I’m less paranoid than euphoric. I unbolt the door, face the hallway.

8.

The day after the sex party, Jake and I slept into the afternoon. When we woke, I offered to go home. I liked the idea of solitude, the shower I’d take, Cup O’ Noodles and Netflix, and no man there to judge what I consumed. But Jake said, “Stay,” so I did. I wore his sweats, ate the salad he ordered me. We spooned on the couch and drank cans of La Croix laced with molly. He knew about the comments my mother had left on my posts; I told him about her phone calls and texts.