“Hot Fox Vodka with agave syrup, two limes, and soda,” Shandra says, just as new guests spiral down, already wild-eyed, already shouting like seagulls for bread, “Can I get a—? Can I get a—?” Padgett slinks off, or stalks off—anyway, she’s across the room, trying not to cover her ears, and in no time things are in full swing. Martin’s face is flushed. Stanford is moving like a modern dancer, grabbing empties as the Vic’s songs segue, cross-fade, pause. The room is sweaty but maybe that’s just Padgett’s hands. Each cuff link is sarcastic, every hooded sweatshirt sincere. It’s not a lot of people, maybe thirty, with the men—boys, really, hardly anyone’s much older than Padgett—clapping each other, almost folk-dancy, on toned-up shoulders and arms and even faces, the women all dressed as if for a different scenario, set in a nightclub, their occasional bustiers all chainy like a comic book Amazon. Padgett thinks they could be girlfriends or maybe just in Human Resources. They certainly appear to be for hire. What they are all talking about Padgett does not know, due to not listening, due to not giving a fuck. Now and then, and now, Stanford hands her another fizzy drink and the pill continues to meander through her system like a tapeworm, hitting her neck, her shoulders, her teeth and eyes—and then she snaps to, facing the face of an unknown man.

“What about sports?” he has just finished saying, apparently.

“What about them?”

“Do you like them? It’s your turn to talk, I’ve been talking.”

Has he? “Have you?”

He leans in with a frown, over the music. “Do I what?”

“Like,” Padgett says, inventing a parlor game of starting a sentence not knowing how she’ll finish it up. “To. Drink. Beer. At the. Stadium.”

“And how,” the guy says. “I knew you were OK. You don’t work the same place the girls do.”

“What,” Padgett says. “Is. That. Place.”

“Exactly,” the man says. “They should all have robot voices like that. I’m glad I tried you. I mean, there must be thousands of people in the world, right? And you like baseball.”

Has she said that? “But I don’t,” she says, ready, eager even, to explain she should not be trusted, anything out of her mouth.

“Most women who like baseball are—” The man extends both hammy arms to her like he’s passing her a bowling ball, and then widens his hands away from her hips to describe the size of a woman unacceptable to him, about his build, actually. “What is it with fat women and baseball?”