Ken just smiled. “Same difference,” he said, cuffing Corey lightly on the shoulder. “But listen”—his eyes found hers again, then Fitz’s—“the important thing to remember is we’ve got a party to get started here, so where are your bags? And, oh yeah, as far as Spanish is concerned, the most significant term you’re going to need to know in about, oh”—he checked his watch—“fifteen minutes, is ‘margarita.’ Can you say margarita?”

The hotel sat on a cliff above a crescent of beach and had been built in three rising tiers like a theater with balconies, so that all the rooms shared a view of the coconut palms and the thatched roofs of the beach huts and of the Pacific itself, which rolled on all the way to China in a blaze of roiling light. There was a pool, a bar, a courtyard of saltillo tile and a cable car down to the beach if you didn’t want to negotiate the steps carved out of the dark volcanic rock—and you didn’t, you definitely didn’t, especially when you were tripping, the view from the cable car a whole trip in itself, as Charlie would say.

It was late in the afternoon when they arrived, the sun still fixed overhead because this was the tropics where it was hot year-round and the houseplants she’d known only as sickly stalks back in Boston could run riot, which was what amazed her most in those first few moments as they pulled up to the hotel: banana fronds broad as shields, the jagged fingers of the palms, flowers sprouting everywhere, and the smells, the smells. No sewage here, no airplane fuel, just a kind of saturate perfume that changed brands and scents every ten steps you took. Ken, her suitcase in one hand, Fitz’s in the other, turned to her after he’d led them into the lobby and said, “Well, what do you think? No worries about set and setting here, huh?”

She didn’t know what to say. She was overwhelmed.

Behind her, one of the hotel staff, a teenager who didn’t look to be much older than Tommy Eggers, was helping Fitz and Corey with the rest of their things, the light fracturing around them so it was as if they were onstage in some fantastic play and she was here, in the audience, trying to find the words to describe what she was feeling. And then the words didn’t matter because here came Fanchon in her bikini, her skin glistening from the pool, to wrap her in her arms.