Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

“How much do you think he wants for it?” Jonas said.

Clubs were over, there weren’t any good ones anymore, and anyway a key component of the usual club high — getting in when you weren’t supposed to, when it was technically illegal for them to serve you, but they would serve you anyway and for free because of how you looked and because they knew who you were — was gone now that April was of age. Yet at a certain point the night always took a certain turn and the next thing you knew you were sitting in some VIP room with a bunch of people who said they were with you, paying five hundred bucks for a bottle of Ketel One while the bass throb reached you through the walls. The reason this was a bad development was that the disgust and contempt it engendered in her, directed at those around her but at herself too, left her open to longing for stronger intoxicants. And little men, older men, would pop up in her field of vision at the very moment this desire started making itself felt in her mind — as if she were tripping already, as if the world itself were some sort of Second Life dreamscape programmed to tempt her with her own wants — and once you reached that point, bitch, you were finished.

When the speed kicked in, the music dropped out of the mix for a moment and she heard as clear as a bell the voice of her friend Katie, her best friend Katie whose last name April couldn’t remember but whom she’d known and hung out with when they were in middle school. Katie went to Spence. The two girls made eye contact and screamed. “You went to Spence!” April shouted over the music, which was loud again, as if Katie might have forgotten. “Yes!” Katie said. “Yes! Six years ago!” Her math seemed wrong, but her eyes were like pinpricks and she was so happy to see April that she was crying. Where had she come from? The world got so small when you were out at night. In the shadows over Katie’s shoulder, as they hugged again, April could make out two very sketchy-looking guys sitting on the arms of Katie’s vacated chair, older guys, though they were hard to reckon in the way of shaven-headed men. The world was full of these guys, who were waiting, always waiting. Waiting for what? Well, she wasn’t an idiot, they were waiting to fuck Katie, Katie and her; they were pathetic and old and degenerate but April liked having them around for a couple of reasons, one being that the nauseating prospect of one of them being there to catch you when you fell was the only thing that kept you vigilant, and the other was that their gaze reminded you where you were, which was basically at the exact center of the fucking universe, young, hot women of privilege at the very peak of everything that was desirable, the very apex of all in life that was worth coveting. And who the hell wanted to sleep through that?

“Katie,” she said to Katie, who was talking at the same time, “that guy over there, his head looks like a fucking turtle. Who is that guy?”

“I don’t know,” Katie said. “He’s not American, though. He wants to fuck me.”

“Well we cannot let that happen!”

“I know.” Katie turned and looked right at him. “He has the best drugs, though. He likes my tattoos. He has his uses.”

The guy’s stare was reptilian. He would sit there for thirty years if he had to. “Look,” April said. “Look look look. He is a goblin. I was sent here to earth to save you from him, you fucking stoned bitch.” They hugged again. “How are we going to throw these guys off the trail?”

The answer was to pile into April’s car and have the driver take them to Scores. She called ahead for a room and set them up with lap dance after lap dance. While this one completely amazing Amazon was rubbing her tits on the turtle’s head, April and Katie motioned that they were going to the bathroom, and once they were out of there they ran stumbling out the door and piled back into April’s limo and told the driver to hit it.

They laughed and got up on their knees in the back seat to look out the rear window but then it was just the two of them in the car, and they realized they didn’t know each other particularly well and the speed was wearing off. The driver hadn’t even asked them where they were going, because he was waiting for them to figure it out. Waiting while driving. April couldn’t remember his name, but he was the best. Katie said she knew where she could get some Adder-all; probably from her own bathroom cabinet, April thought, and anyway, Adderall seemed a little low-stakes right now. “I know a guy we can call,” she said. “And he owes me a favor.” If you made a lot of friends when you went out then there was always somebody who owed you a favor. The guy’s name was Dmitri and when he called back he was, where else, in a club, so she told the nice driver to take Canal almost all the way over to the highway, and he nodded without turning around.

That was where they started in on the meth. Then it was some time later and they were on the sidewalk in the hostile sunlight and “they” no longer included Katie, whom April hadn’t seen in a while. Dmitri was there, and three other sketchy guys with accents, and two women whose job, it seemed, was to make out with each other once an hour or so to keep the others from losing interest in everything. That may not have been a joke; it wouldn’t be unlike Dmitri to have actually paid them to do it. They found a diner and ate without tasting anything, while the sketchy guys glared menacingly, to zero effect, at the disgusted cashier. April felt ashamed to be with these people she didn’t know, but they were like vampires, she was one of them now, she couldn’t just go back to the living. She looked out the window and there at the curb, unbelievably, was her driver, leaning against the side of his car, looking exhausted. She had to let him go. She wanted to tip him a few hundred bucks, but when she looked in her bag she saw that she had like thirty dollars in there, which was fucked up but true. So she called him on her cell, watching his angry face through the window, and sent him home.

Her cell had a bunch of voice mails on it but she didn’t bother with them. Some were from her mother, but she was out of town herself, so there was no stress there. Everyone was arguing over the check like a bunch of losers, not because they particularly cared but just as a symptom of their panic over coming down. “Where can we go, my love?” Dmitri said to her. One of the chicks was trying to reapply her makeup.

“Your place?” April said. “I mean, you must live somewhere, right?”

He shook his head. “Not with these pigs,” he said. “If we go there, it is just you and me. Is that what you want?”

No, it was not. “I want the festivities to go on,” she said.

“Brava. Well, in that case we need someplace big. Big and empty. Private.”

And then April had what she knew right away was a terrible idea.

“Hey,” she said loudly to the group. They were like rats, red-eyed and squabbling. “Does one of you lowlifes have a car?”

One of the lowlifes did indeed have a car; it was in Queens, though, so he and Dmitri went to get it. The others went somewhere to steal cigarettes and take a shower. April waited more than an hour for them in a Starbucks on Varick Street. Dmitri texted her every few minutes. She didn’t know what time it was, or what day it was, but the Starbucks was packed. And the strange thing, even though she wasn’t high anymore, was that the people in this fake space exhibited the most terrible intimacies — yelling into their cell phones, popping zits, putting on makeup, talking to themselves like maniacs — six inches from your face. Their conviction that you could not see or hear them was so strong that, in fact, you usually did not see or hear them. Sitting across the tiny table from April, picking at some kind of muffin, was a woman about April’s mother’s age who had unmistakably, some time in the last day or two, been punched in the eye.