“Twelve-twenty-six North Lowry Boulevard, Springfield, Massachusetts 01129,” she said in a low monotone.

“I’ll take her to my place,” she said. “Hangovers are better together. And if either of us dies, everyone can just blame it on the other one.”

“That’s terrible,” Derek said. “Do you feel all right?”

“I feel the weight of the world. Right exactly on the tippy top of my head.”

“Huh. Have you heard from, uh, Morgan?”

“Honestly, no,” she said. She sighed heavily. “He’s … whatever. Life is long and full of terror. I don’t have time for this kind of thing right now.”

“I’m gonna read his book,” Derek said. “Which one’s shorter?”

“There’s so many people to mee-eet,” she sang, badly, to the melody of an Elvis Costello song that wasn’t playing. “They only slide you up with nothing when you think you’re havin’ fu-un.”

“I guess the only thing we could really read next is Proust. Then we could be in book group for the rest of our lives, basically.”

“You just wanna keep hanging out with mee-eee,” she kept singing. “But you don’t want to admit it ’cause you’re a little bi-it awk-ward.”

“In Illinoidiana, we keep our feelings deep inside and never tell anyone about them,” he said. “It’s how we protect ourselves from Yankee cruelty.”

She gently moved Kyla’s head from her shoulder to the window, and then leaned forward to the cab’s open partition.

“You’re really quite a goofball,” she said.

“Well, sure,” he said.

“I mean, really. Quite. Here’s good!” The car pulled to a stop. “Help me get Kyla upstairs?”

But Kyla managed to remove herself from the car under her own power, and Derek simply followed the two of them uselessly, like a third friend pretending to help move a couch. He’d been to Violet’s once before, when she’d hosted the group, and it was as he’d re-created it in his head—a long, bike-choked hallway giving way to a large, black-and-white-tiled kitchen, then emptying out into a well-appointed sitting room, complete with Cy Twombly and Christopher Wool exhibition posters and a large television. The bedroom, presumably, was behind one of those doors off the hallway. He would not see it tonight. There would come a time when they would be equals, he reminded himself.

Kyla somnambulated to the couch, stretched across it like a cat, and fell immediately unconscious. Violet threw herself into the giant armchair and curled her legs under her dress.

“You’ve been a lovely audience, and I hope we passed the audition,” she said. “We really will have to find a way to see each other without having to pretend to read books.”

“I read almost all of it,” Derek said. He actually felt indignant about it now, and he could feel the poutiness creeping into his voice. “Am I the only one who even tried?”