“Starting our descent,” the pilot told the plane. I felt my guts move to one side, then lurch to the other. Girls adjusted their chairs. “Seatbelts,” the pilot said. I felt full, bloated. Something I ate, something I wanted and didn’t eat. I squeezed myself, imagined explosion. Small planes, prone to nosedives. Bodies, prone to betrayal. I shouldn’t have come. I should have stayed with my mother. The wheels came out with a troubled clunk. I was sweating. We sped up, touched down. The pilot hit the brakes, hard at first, then easier.

We rolled around the tarmac, stopped where a white Escalade was parked, every door open. I hustled for the jet’s bathroom, soft-lit with fancy soap and a built-in compartment filled with Magnum condoms, gold foil packets like complimentary sweets. I kneeled at the metal mixing bowl toilet. Footsteps from below made the floor shake. The plane lightened with every bag taken from its insides. I had to hurry, but the vomit I’d been sure was imminent wasn’t coming. I wanted it now and retched to cleanse. Only dry air came out. I made my fingers the shape of a gun, stuck them down my throat, deep where the bones were.

I had never been an effective purger. “A sensitive gag reflex,” Jake said once, and suggested I practice with a banana. Maybe he was right—his cock made me gag. But my hand never could. I removed it, wiped my palm on my pants. “Jesus,” I said to no one, and shut the lid.

I was last down the gang plank. Arid and altitude met me. And a man in wrap-around sunglasses who motioned me into the car. Inside, the other girls were buckled up, taking selfies, everyone awake now. The door slammed behind me. “You okay, hon?” someone asked. “Airsick,” I said, expecting sympathetic words, murmurs, something. But the car was quiet after. Out of the airfield, onto a two-lane road, through town, girls held phones to windowpanes, filming despite the tint: signs for aura photographs and crystals and chakra balancing. I lifted my phone to join them but felt sick again and pressed the screen between my palms instead.