“Do you have any nicknames?” A woman wearing feather wings was walking around asking people. Sunny, Baby, Pickle, and Chicken Sandwich emerged, connecting instantly over the fact that people refused to call them by their given names. Ayanna felt certain no one was nicknamed Chicken Sandwich and that this was a bid for attention, but walked on. Already Sunny and Pickle were holding hands and laughing. In the distance, Jane was having a tense conversation with two women in matching togas and with several cheap necklaces wrapped around their arms and foreheads.

“How do you know Jane?” Ayanna asked a woman wearing a domino mask and a Burger King crown by the coolers.

“I don’t know her. I know Stephen.” The woman pointed to a crowd of men who were all laughing over something on one of their cell phones. “He deals corn.”

“Corn?” Ayanna made a show of looking through the cooler, trying not to acknowledge how uncool she was being. I’m twenty years old, she thought, and I don’t even know what the good drugs are.

“Acre.” She laughed and took a sip of a very uncool wine cooler. “If you’re a cop, you have to tell me.”

“I’m a cop.”

The woman laughed harder, but Ayanna knew she was overdoing it to be kind. She took a canned cocktail and walked toward the group. Seeing a bunch of guys together looking at a cell phone always made Ayanna cautious. There was a good chance they were all laughing at a dumb Naruto meme, but there was just as good a chance they were looking at some exploitative porn thing or something that might make it clear that oh, these are hateful people.

Ayanna didn’t have to ask or do anything. The one wearing a velvet suit jacket and no shirt handed her two small packets and asked for seventy-five. A first-timers discount.

“I only have fifty on me.”

“Take me to coffee and I’ll agree to that.”

“Whoa,” one of the guys in the group said, “someone is smooth.”

“It was fine,” Ayanna said, “not that smooth.”

Despite what he was wearing, Stephen didn’t look stupid. A beautiful jacket with a nice pair of black jeans, black Sambas, short black socks. Annoyingly, his chest looked like it was worth showing off, but Ayanna was trying not to give him the attention he so clearly wanted. He smelled good. If he were rich like some of the kids in her classes—heirs to different food- and Earth-killing businesses, and some celebrity’s kids—he would have smelled far worse. Every kid someone whispered to her about always smelled like they had taken a solemn vow to work out every morning for three hours, eat an everything bagel, then rub themselves with cumin and lemon. There was a hint of what perfumers called “musk,” maybe pepper? Pepper in a good way. Although, Ayanna realized, all those kids she knew were white. Black rich people might actually enjoy having money instead of pretending they didn’t.