She was booked for an 8 a.m. I checked her in the way Emily had showed me, slowly moving through the series of clicks and keys, trying to pass off my hesitation as intentional—the measured, calm way someone who worked in a spa should move, should speak. “Yes, Mrs. Greer, we have you with Brittany today for your Brazilian bikini wax. Follow me, please.” The spa offered four types of waxes. According to Deidre, one finger-width in from the crease of your thighs was a touch-up. Two fingers in was a standard bikini wax. Three fingers in was a Brazilian, and they were doing something new now, she said, called an hourglass, which was two fingers down from the top of the bikini area. It helped elongate your stomach and make you look slimmer. I led Ellen Greer to the locker room and tried not to think of Deidre holding up six fingers side by side. I couldn’t imagine starting my day by paying almost $100 to have a stranger rip off all my pubic hair. It was the kind of thing I would have loved to talk to Ramona about—how violent beauty could be, how misogynistic, how cruel. Mrs. Greer was petite, muscles toned with expensive barre and pilates classes, fat edited away by five-day cleanses, green juice, kale. A woman who was constantly negotiating with her body, thinking of it as something to be punished or tamed.

While Mrs. Greer was in for her service, the man who had cleaned up the mud—Luis—came back to the front desk.

I tried to start on a new foot. “Hi,” I said. “Good morning.” Again, he didn’t even look at me. I understood. I would hate someone like me, too. He must have thought I was tremendously careless, someone who made messes and left them for other people to clean.

I wanted to look busy but wasn’t sure what else I could do. The phone rang twice, both times people calling from their rooms to ask what time the buffet opened. Deidre said that the casino had programmed them incorrectly and so the button that was supposed to connect callers to other places within the hotel was accidentally routed to the spa, and so most of the calls we got were actually meant for other facilities. The company required a very specific greeting, which I garbled with my cottony, hungover tongue: “Thank you for calling the spa. This is Lily, how may I assist you?”

In front of me, Luis wiped down the brushed steel table in the magazine area, pausing to pick up an issue of Glamour and squint at the cover.