I found Sebastian out on her wicker loveseat. I climbed over the partition and sat next to her. The smell of her in the moonlight. I smelled pee; late-night sour wine breath? I don’t know, something bitter—mixed with sweat. She was smoking a cigarette and said she came a long way not to talk to anybody the whole night. She said Niloo’s other college friends had been seated together, away from her. “They see each other anyway because they all live in Boston.” She had an elbow on her knee with the cigarette in that hand; it looked like she’d done this position most nights. She said the trip cost her a thousand dollars. Her lips jutted out stiffly when she tried to smoke. It wasn’t just the pee-pee smell that made talking to her so tricky. She was unsure and furious about the whole world around her. (On top of everything else, in my haste to get Phylida back to our room, we’d ditched Sebastian and I didn’t know how she’d gotten back.) I wanted to say to her, “What did you expect?” She looked at me, shaking her head with her mouth open, and ran out of gas. She tried again, “Do you think she intended for me not to come?” A steady drip fell from the balcony above us, from a wet bathing suit. I said no. The moonlight caught her eyelashes and from here she looked like a lonesome, long-nosed, greasy teenage boy. There was so little moonlight I couldn’t figure out what her face was doing. I said, “You don’t have to invite her to yours.”

Her arm that had been propped on her knee fell into her her lap, and her head went to that angle the librarian’s would go to when I stopped at the med school and asked if she’d seen Phylida. She said, “Invite her to my what?”

“What?”

She said, “You’re so fucking lucky you got somebody else. You’re so lucky.” She was waiting to take another puff.

What did I have to say about that?