I just stood beside their table, ours once, my face quite white and large and hard. Said, “I’m new to New York and probably a big hick—but the guidebooks all claim this here is where the very best sluts hang out. That right?”

“You should know,” she said. “You taught us all gave us … lessons, or … oh, honey, come to Momma.” She sputtered, her girl voice. Then Angie rose, ran around the table, grabbed me, flung me back against the tile mural of a fountain’s too-blue edgy zigzags. She pinned me there, front bumping mine so hard, and almost hurt me with her force. It was like she pressed the water and the bile clear out of every hole of me, and we just leaned there, she sort of pounding her body against mine, to show me something. Some old velocity, some tomboy tie that held us, no matter who we each fucked, even him.

When she flopped back to sitting, she kept her hands circling my either wrist, and I made fists so tight, facing her but not daring to meet her eyes, my head hanging and hers hanging and our scalps meeting, a little touching comfort right on top, one warm spot of that.

It was Marco who slid a chair under me. Robert looked my way, and it seemed almost funny but not quite, because big Robbie was like some water god, these tears like jets down either cheek, like some classical fountain that is built of composition stone to shoot musical water into your very own garden. “Wouldn’t hurt you for anything, Air,” he said. Marco had settled me between them, but I was facing down, mostly facing the green-gray marble tabletop, like someone very ashamed of something he had done.

Marco, who knew what’d happened, now acted so upset that we were doing this to each other. And after all we had endured together and won—he rose and (darling darling shaggy boy) moved without asking, returned with my usual cafe con leche. “On Ossorio. But Ossie says you owe him for what you haven’t been spending in here lately.”

For six weeks, it was creaky. Stiff. Like mountain climbers who’ve returned to flat land safe, but are so sore from the heights, they cannot walk to the store to get bread. They risk starving on flatland for their overexcellence at cliffs.

And we never mentioned it—we, who’d told each other everything! Or so I’d believed.

I remember when she’d blacked her own eye. Now I somehow wondered even about that, who? And had the others in our group always known what was happening? How could I save my friends if, so far, I still seemed to understand so little about them. About people.

She’d once told me people are far worse than I ever guessed, plus some better, but new ways stretched in each direction. People were usually mean about something, but good because they found sometimes they truly could be; and soon the virtue felt narcotic. Its buzz lasted longer than mere wear-off bad. She told me I expected people to do right, but me? I waited in the wrong places. (How to argue with that?)