He pushed me aside, rough enough for my body to crash into the sink, breaking the porcelain soap dispenser. When he opened the door he pushed Lonnie too, who let out a short howl. “Both of you! Crazy bitches!”

I heard him run into the wall in the hallway. He wasn’t walking straight. “Shit,” I heard him whisper. “Shit. Shit.”

I grasped around in the dark until Lonnie’s shaking arms met my own. “You said you wouldn’t leave me alone.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I droned into her wet hair. “It won’t ever happen again.”

In the kitchen, the waiters were picking up dirty glasses in the dark, washing them, drying them, putting them away. An assembly line of waiters, working, magically, without breaking anything. The glasses caught the light of Lonnie’s votive candles, glowed, left trails—lines of light from one set of hands to another. I caught sight of Robert again and pulled Lonnie into the next room. Lonnie’s hair was snakelike, still dripping. Water trickled down her face like tears, down her arms, down her chest, like her whole body was crying.

Every time I saw something I thought of something else. Was this what I was supposed to be feeling? Lonnie slipped a white taper candle from the dining room table into my hand. The wax warm and soft like lips.

We moved, stepping lightly, in sync, down a hallway to the library. Lonnie clutched my arm and wax dripped onto the back of my hand. The skin bubbled, rippled. I was a girl in a horror movie, the too many rooms, the wet dress turned transparent, the fragile flame in my hand, an angry patriarch right behind us.

The books were breathing, the pages rippled in the dark. Stray guests giggled around us. They felt more like props than real people. It was getting worse, weirder, darker. I didn’t feel ecstatic. I was not overcome with empathy, unless I considered the dissolving lines between myself and Lonnie a form of it. My heart raced in a way that made me feel dizzy. We moved along the windows, touching the cool glass. I put my face against a pane, expecting relief, but the glass pressed back into me, and I sputtered, trying to catch my breath before it swallowed me up.

Suddenly, I was overcome with the urge to find Sienna. I had an image of her in my mind as a teenager, with her friends at Coney Island, her greasy hair hanging flat over her ears and streaked with bleach—smiling but desperately unhappy, wanting out of the whole thing and perfectly willing to talk to strangers. That’s all that had to happen, really, to end up with someone like LeRoi. You just had to want out and not know where to go. What was going to happen to the poor little thing?