Cliff felt his entire body stiffen. He did not want to hurt her, to be the kind of man who made promises he did not plan to keep. And so he said nothing.

Night of Indulgences

In the light of the hotel lobby, Ben admired his prostitute’s dress. It was short and simple, with eyelets along the bottom hem—the kind of dress a young girl might wear to church on Easter morning. Because it was the night before Easter, Ben couldn’t decide whether the dress paid homage to the holiday or spat in the face of it. He liked the dress and figured it must be expensive. Designer clothes were always this way—plain, boring, less about the effect than the craftsmanship. Ben knew this was how some people ended up spending a hundred dollars on a polo shirt. He had, in fact, just bought himself a coat of this caliber. Why there even existed a coat like this in Wichita, where people happily sported Nike tracksuits and terrycloth rompers, he had no idea—but Ben considered it an investment. Good things happened to men who wore coats like this one. It was made of Italian camel hair and had a row of horn buttons smooth as wishing stones. What sold him was the lining, a cream silk interrupted by stripes of ballet slipper pink. He would soon move to Virginia to start law school in the fall, and although he’d been told autumns in Charlottesville were mild, he couldn’t help but picture himself wearing the coat as a series of white-haired professors approached him after class, admiration twinkling in their eyes.

Earlier that night, Ben’s best friend, Freddy, had admired the coat. “That coat,” was all Freddy could find to say. “A coat of coats.”

They were having espressos at their usual starting place: a Parisian-themed coffee house where they had both, at different points, had sex with the blond barista who worked weekends. Like always, Freddy folded a twenty-dollar bill into a little origami butterfly and left it as the barista’s tip. True to tradition, she pretended not to see it.

They came to this café as they had every spring for the past five years, to caffeinate before spending a careless amount of money on food, alcohol, and cigars. Afterward, they would seek some form of physical or moral destruction: taking a chain saw to a pair of old Macintosh computers or dropping gallons of milk from the roof of a Hyatt parking garage, laughing as the jugs detonated around pass-ersby below. Once, they snuck into a frat party at Wichita State and posed as Bill Clinton’s nephews. They’d come prepared, with doctored photos of them and Bill fly-fishing in Arkansas. After racking up free booze, they’d stormed through the sleeping porch, pocketing whatever they could find: iPods, watches, half-crushed protein bars. They then urinated onto a row of boat shoes before running as fast as they could, both of them drenched in sweat and shaking from what had felt, at the time, like a nearly fatal combination of freedom and adrenaline.