The house is full of somebodies and wannabes, delirious from the tidal downpour that has drenched and inflated the heat wave that’s been pulsing outside for the last few days, ending twenty weeks straight of perfect weather. No one here has eaten a carb since 2019, but a bottle of champagne is popped every five minutes because drinking carbs is different.

In the kitchen, someone has produced a bottle of Sotol from some apparently magical town in Mexico and is talking about its aromatics.

On the couch, two people are getting the idea to write a script together, saying, Wait … are we doing this? over and over.

One girl keeps taking ostensibly subtle pictures of the goings-on, but I don’t get the feeling she’s planning to sell them. More likely she’s gotten here by some series of mistakes and is texting them to her mom or best friend with a lot of omgs and skull emojis.

It’s regular, run-of-the-mill Hollywood Hysteria.

I take an unopened Bollinger from an ice bucket, deciding to say fuck it to my caloric allocation and to the former service industry worker inside me who still thinks she needs to be the consummate host at all times.

I go upstairs to hide.

The noise from the party muffles when I close the bedroom door.

My eyes catch on something sparkling on the duvet. I go closer and find that it’s a diamond earring. Not mine.

I arch my eyebrow at the multi-thousand-dollar clue and consider throwing it off the balcony. But my formerly bank-account-always-in-the-negative heart can’t do it. I place it on Grayson’s nightstand.

Asshole.

My black Lab, Dido, stretches as she awakens from a deep sleep in her bed. I go over and collapse onto her, sighing deeply. It’s very melodramatic to say, but sometimes I feel like she’s the only real thing in my life. Dido, with her sad little backstory of abandonment that had been written up on the rescue website alongside several photos of her adolescent, spindly frame. Already not a puppy anymore by the time I found her.

She always follows me around the house like I’m the only real thing in her world too.

God, I really am being very tragic. I don’t even know why it’s hitting me so hard tonight.

Maybe it’s the insult of catching Grayson with Elsa. Maybe it’s the fact that Brilliance might end. Maybe it’s because it’s my birthday? I know some people get emotional on their birthdays, but that’s never been me. Though it is my thirtieth. That’s a pretty big deal.

I decide I’ll feel better, and perhaps less like a damsel in a Christopher Nolan movie, if I get out of this horrible dress that makes me look like Mermaid Batman.