She spotted Sylvie on the other side of the room, on a couch draped over her girlfriend, Perrin, who was spindly and had a lot of facial piercings. When Marina shuffled over, the two disentangled and Sylvie gave her a brief hug, her hands only just touching Marina’s shoulders before drawing away. Perrin nodded and smiled at her.

“We have to talk,” Sylvie said to Marina, shouting to be heard. “I’m sure I’ll run into you. I want to give it a good chunk of time. Maybe outside.” With that, she kissed Perrin on the back of her neck and rose from the couch. After a moment, Perrin got up and followed her.

Marina took their spot and looked around. After a minute or two of feeling very outside of the scene, with everyone talking loudly and touching each other, Marina politely asked the boy next to her for a hit of the orange bong he was smoking. He wordlessly handed it to her. She inhaled too hard, coughed, and then couldn’t stop coughing. People looked over at her from their conversations.

“Water’s in the kitchen, babe,” the boy next to her said, looking sympathetically at her.

She got up and caught her breath in front of the sink, drank two glasses of water, then realized that she was already alarmingly high, to the point that talking to someone would be complicated. For a moment she sank into the pleasurable sensation, her whole body floating away from where she stood on the surface of the earth, then she felt the resignation, the muteness, come back. It faintly occurred to her that Sylviecould have introduced her to the rest of the circle. Maybe Sylvie had given up on her too.

She sat back down and tried to just let her mind rest neutrally on the scene in front of her. At least I’m here, she thought. And then: How hard can it be to just sit there and wait for something to happen?

She found that she could calm herself, prevent everything from floating away, by focusing on the body language of the people right in front of her: two gay-looking guys and one vaguely nonbinary-looking person with an undercut wearing a silver jumpsuit. She didn’t stare but let her eyes sort of drift over the trio as they moved their hands, drank from red plastic cups, adjusted their bodies.

“I said, what’s your name?”

She blinked. The silver jumpsuit person was looking at her.

“Marina.”

Silver Jumpsuit leaned in and widened their eyes. “Oh, you’re Sylvie’s friend! The writer.”

“Uh, yeah.”