“Where are you?” Tai says, and she sounds out of breath but still sparkly, always like a song you want to play on repeat. “Something huge happened.”

“Meeting some friends at a bar,” I reply.

“Oh, fuck off.” She laughs shakily. She’s walking somewhere—I hear the clacking of her heels. Tai is always in heels, dagger-sharp. “You’re watching a movie at the IFC alone—don’t lie.”

My jaw would set if I let it, but we’ve played too many rounds of this game for that. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Paris, influencing?”

Tai is the one with beautiful gemstones of stories that she’s sharpened to points, to use on people like weapons, to convince them of her specialness in jabs and prickling scores. I’ve seen them all on her social media accounts: how Scorsese pulled her knotty hair into pigtails on the forest patio; how Tilda Swinton wrapped her in a towel and told her, between bloody plates of barbecued beets, that she detested the Harry Potter films (the ones Tai wasn’t allowed to watch, at age six) because they romanticized the cruel, lonely setting of boarding school.

But Tai doesn’t need our parents’ shine or those old stories to convince people she’s special anymore. Everyone just sees her precious gleam for what it is: something you brush up against once in a lifetime, something you want to bottle up and keep close.

“I leave tomorrow,” she says. “I told Marion I left tonight so she would get off my case. Listen, where are you?”

When the Kells asked me to come, they also asked if Tai was free. I said she was gone.

“Come on. Tell me. It’s important,” Tai adds, as if I’m the younger sibling, stubborn and silly.

“Corner of Hudson and Tenth.” I lower my voice, with a sidelong glance at the bouncer, rubbing his hands together. “I’m, uh, I’m in line at the door.”

“See you soon,” she says, hanging up before I can wonder why she didn’t snipe back, In line? Something really huge must have happened.

I settle on a stoop down the block, the December chill nipping at me, burrowing under my clothes. Trembling a little—from nerves or embarrassment or what, I don’t know. The bouncer has forgotten about me. He welcomes in a leggy couple—in softly rumpled leather and denim—like royalty. And less than three minutes later, Tai clacks toward me, creepy-shadow tall, in a floor-skimming midnight sleeveless coat, her arms covered in whisper-thin cashmere, her hair a signature curtain of jet black.

Her blue eyes sparkle like crushed ice when she smiles.

I stand and brush the stoop dirt off my jeans, but she strides past me, swooping into the arms of the bouncer, who beams at her and laughs disarmingly.