Alice’s relief was short-lived. Charlie, she quickly saw, was making a scene in a different way. She wasn’t talking with Stan. She was hitting on him. Aggressively. At first he seemed pleased by the attention, delighted, in fact, but was fast growing uncomfortable. She was standing too close to him, trying to pull him onto the dance floor, though there was no music playing. (And it wasn’t lipstick that had darkened her lips, Alice realized, it was wine.) Alice even heard Charlie make a get leid joke about the flowered necklaces he was handing out. People were starting to look, not Maggie and Richard, who fortunately both had their backs to Charlie, but other people: Sasha and Bianca, tittering by the bar; Mrs. van Stratten over her son’s shoulder, her face as blank as always, but her eyes wide; and, most alarmingly of all, a middle-aged man with a hairline mustache and a clipboard, Stan’s boss. Alice was just about to go up to Charlie, try to lure her into coming outside—not out back, where Jude and Lucy were, but out front, where, she hoped, no one was—when Cybill did it for her, taking Charlie by the hand, dragging her off. Alice considered following to see if she could help, then rejected the idea: her presence might only rile Charlie up.

Alice was standing by the food station, stiffly casual, eyes flicking over to the front door every few seconds, waiting for Charlie and Cybill to return from wherever it was they’d disappeared to, when Tommy came up to her, though it didn’t look like that’s what he was doing. It looked like he was picking up a little plate of spicy mayonnaise for himself at the dipping-sauce table behind her. The way they were standing, she facing forward, he facing backward, reminded her of the way two police cruisers sometimes parked: next to each other but turned in opposite directions, driver’s-side windows lined up so that the officers inside could talk.

“Am I going to see you later tonight?” he said. His voice was low, intimate.

“Why not? I can sleep when I’m dead, right?” She winced before the words were even out of her mouth. “Sorry,” she said. “Yes, you will.”

He laughed. “Jesus, I don’t seem that sensitive, do I?”

“It’s probably me just being sensitive to you being sensitive. A whole vicious-circle thing.”

He laughed again, then leaned over her like he was reaching for the soy sauce, lightly tracing his index finger along her forearm, from the inside of her elbow all the way down to her wrist. She felt the tiny hairs on her arm rise.

“You having an okay time?” he said.

“It’s a little weird being in the same room with you and not being able to talk to you, but yeah, otherwise I’m having a fine time.”

“We’re talking now.”