She moans in the affirmative, so I accelerate and zip through neighborhoods until we reach ours, and maybe I did take those corners too hard, because Elizabeth really does look like she’s about to vomit all over my leather interior. She stumbles out of the car, exits the garage, and heads directly to the hosta leading to our side yard. She leans over it in full yack position, but the sensation must have passed quickly, because she swats at my ankles when I try to hold her hair. By the time she stands again, she is reasonably composed.

“After you.” She gestures hard toward the house.

I take her hand and lead her through the garage, up the steps, and into the kitchen. Once inside, she keeps on walking—through the kitchen and den, unlocking the sliding glass door and leaving it all the way open. I follow. She kicks off her shoes and drops her shawl thing on the ground, but she’s still wearing her dress when she steps onto the diving board and walks out to the end.

“Elizabeth?”

She looks at me—a slow, seductive meeting of the eyes, a coy invitation to a secret we haven’t yet shared—and she hooks me, and she knows it, so she leaves me to my longing and sends her gaze back down to her feet, forehead aimed toward gold-polished toes hanging over the edge of our board. Underwater lights project auroras on her legs. A full moon christens her head with drops of silver. I sit in a lawn chair, slip off my shoes, peel off my socks, and Elizabeth dives.

18.

Hungover doesn’t cut it. Lobotomized and beat the hell up is more like it. Every muscle aches from that goddamn rowing machine. Every brain cell throbs from overindulgence. My mind is mush, my senses dull, and I wasn’t half as drunk as Elizabeth last night, so I don’t know how she’s functioning. To be fair, she’s barely functioning. I feed her acetaminophen and go outside to fish her underwear from the pool filter. She doesn’t know how it got there. She doesn’t remember what we did out there, so I remind her that we did everything. Elizabeth probably doesn’t remember telling candlelit stories at Lemongrass, either, and maybe that’s for the best. All of that talk of Shae and vacuum filters was a little unhinged, and I’d just as soon forget it, so we shampoo our heads and face Monday, even though I happen to like Mondays. They’re instilled with the power to reset. There are days like that, specific times like that. Midnight on New Year’s Eve. September of a school year. Every single Monday morning. Some people dread them. I relish the clean slate, the scrubbed record, the fresh start—although, to be fair, this start is brutal.