The first thing you saw when going into that apartment was a large, beautiful circular mirror in a brass frame right next to the door. I watched my reflection as I let Ambrose take my coat off my bare shoulders. The mirror was so clean and polished it almost seemed to glow. Or maybe that was me glowing. Not to brag, but I looked really fucking good, and I was happy in a dumb unfeminist way to have a guy there to take my coat off at this fancy party.

Ambrose darted off, promising to get me a drink. I gradually came to understand that this apartment took up the entire first floor of the building and had the size and shape of a detached house in the suburbs. The different functions of an apartment weren’t all jammed on top of each other the way I was used to. The furniture was understated, and it all went together. Dub techno played from speakers on the floor. I automatically started comparing my taste to the taste of the hostesses. What would I have done differently, if I had this kind of money? This was usually a way I blunted my envy, but in this case it was hard to think of something I could improve on here. There was nothing yuppieish about it, nothing that suggested received ideas or clichés. I spent a while just standing in the entryway, swaying a bit as I carefully took in the scene.

The first people I saw, I knew pretty well, mostly from college. There were a few additions, partners and plus-ones. They had all mostly figured out how to turn their expensive degrees into careers that paid dividends in some way, be it money or clout or prestige. The guy in the brown shirt just got back from a year-long sojourn in Mexico, and the woman he was talking to was a semi-prominent cultural journalist who wrote about TikTok trends or something. There were a couple sad-faced people in the middle of law school or PhDs, and there were a few people who didn’t seem to do anything. I liked these people, despite myself. They bolstered my conviction that you can’t be all that interesting if you’re just another insider.

In the kitchen I ran into Yvette, one of the hostesses, an actually talented writer for whom this party was undoubtedly just a fun little distraction. She was leaning against the counter-top, disinterestedly watching a guy in a white t-shirt doing a line of coke off a mirrored tray with a pewter frame. I walked up to her.

“Hey,” I said.

Her face lit up. “Veronica, hi,” she said, hugging me.

The music was loud, and I missed a lot of what she said to me at first. We had to shout to be heard.