I WOKE IN the passenger seat of Jake’s Land Rover. My chest was thick, tight. I touched it, felt ace bandage, a mummy’s protective swaddle. We were driving down Wilshire, the radio singing, Dick so big it’s like a foot is in your mouth. I opened my mouth. It was an undusted room. I swallowed. Outside, streetlights and headlights and neon lights blurred, a twisted color wheel.

“What if men could get penis implants?” I mumbled.

“They’d all do it,” Jake said.

“One hundred percent.” It hurt to talk. I closed my eyes.

When I woke again, we were parked. Jake was on my phone.

“She can’t right now,” he said.

On the other end, a voice was yelling. I heard the word daughter, then the sound of my own name. There was a light and I climbed toward it. I had somehow moved again, now to Jake’s bed, the covers tucked around me, his hand on my blanketed thigh.

“Babe,” he said, “wake up.”

My nipples pulsed. I pictured Dr. Holle peeling them off like petals, sewing them back on.

“I need a pill,” I said and drifted inside where everything still turned, tumbled me, a plastic figurine like the princess toys I played with in the bathtub as a girl: Ariel and Aurora, Jasmine and Belle. My mother kept them in a basket under the sink. They were immobile, their arms and legs bent in stiff postures, their feet covered by skirts and molded to thick pedestals. But I had loved them, had gifted them stories beyond true love’s kiss and happily ever after, stories of adventure, journeys of their own. And when danger befell them, when bad men threatened harm, I had given my princesses the power to fight.

I opened my eyes. Jake was shaking my shoulder.

“I talked to your mom,” he said, too loud. “There’s something important we need to discuss.”

9.

Downstairs at the Princess Hotel, the lobby is dead, no music even. I flip-flop to the bar, still wearing the robe from my room, nothing underneath. The outfit seemed acceptable before and now feels borderline unhinged, a flasher’s trench. But the bar is almost empty and I’m flying high anyway, not anxious, just warm, washed in the soft mania of my drugs. A man at the far end watches a muted big screen. A young bartender unloads a steaming dishwasher.

“Be right with you,” she says.

“I need a minute anyway,” I say and prop up on the stool closest to the door, peruse a menu.

Down-bar, the man’s gaze shifts. I feel it find me, and realize as I do that he’s the same guy I saw poolside earlier, watching. I cross my legs and arrange the robe. The bartender slides me a finger bowl of pretzels. It’s been sitting out, getting breathed on, but I start in anyway.

“We’re out of buns,” she says.