Two nights before the party, they’d been sitting around brainstorming menu ideas when Carys had come up with the idea of making Veronica and Helen’s signature lemonade into Jell-O shots that they cut out with holiday cookie cutters into festive shapes. That idea was deemed perfect, so they spent the next twenty-four hours making batches of lemonade, mixing it with gelatin, and refrigerating it in rimmed sheet pans.

They began with the cookie cutters Helen had—Christmas trees, angels, et cetera. Then Greta decided to freehand a Star of David, and when that worked, they abandoned the cookie cutters altogether and started cutting out whatever shapes they wanted.

Carys’ pièce de résistance was an octopus, Veronica’s was an owl, and Helen’s was a ghost, because they claimed that every holiday sucked in comparison to Halloween. Greta tried her hand at a menorah, which came out looking suspiciously enough like Carys’ octopus that Greta cracked up and declared octopuses officially Jewish and the new mascot of Chanukah. She texted this to Maggie and Adelaide, along with a side-by-side picture, and Maggie responded Christian hegemony has long kept this secret but the octopus has been reclaimed!!!

Intermittently, as the trays of Jell-O shots firmed in the refrigerator, they made paper chains out of Carys’ old math handouts and strung them along the high ceilings of the living room. They grabbed LaCroix cans out of the recycling and cut them into stars that they strung together on dental floss. Veronica said she’d seen it in the window display of a tattoo shop in Philadelphia once, years before.

The next day, Veronica and Helen kicked Carys out of the house, insisting that they be able to create the party food with no distraction or oversight, so Greta and Carys spent a sweet day wandering through antiques shops in the French Quarter and discussing their dream homes.

Greta’s dream house was a rambling Victorian mansion that she’d once seen on Instagram. It would be painted flat black with shiny black trim and a bright teal door. (The color of the door changed every time she’d recently seen something in a color she liked.) Its entire back half would be all glassed in so that every room was full of plants, and it had an elaborate bathroom with a huge jacuzzi that was tiled in all cobalt-blue glass. She remembered the feeling of being inside a wave in the pig bathroom, even if she remembered little that came after.

Carys’ dream house was a Frankenstein of a Greek Revival mansion, like her favorite house in the Garden District, and a rambling farmhouse, complete with a weathered red barn. She wanted to fill it with chandeliers that dripped crystals, phonographs, fin-de-siècle candelabras, and lavish velvet furniture.