Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

He ended up buying a fake pearl necklace (Willa seemed pearl-like in her luminescent roundness), a bottle of pink nail polish (he tried his hardest to match the same shade she wore), a yellow scarf with pink cupcakes on it (she, well, looked like a girl who liked cupcakes), and a giant box of diet granola bars (and, well, she looked like a girl who needed those). He didn’t have wrapping paper, so he put it all in a plastic bag and tied it with a red shoelace bow.

Asiya saw it all and shook her head at him, with pity in her eyes. “Zal, she doesn’t need this stuff. Just give her this”—the scarf—“and maybe this”—the necklace. Eventually she conceded to the nail polish, too, begrudgingly (“I’m the one who has to polish her nails!”), but took one look at the granola and said, “No way. Do you think she got like that because diet health bars are her favorite food? But whatever; Zach and I can eat them.”

Zal shrugged. He wanted to tell her it was the first time he had ever bought another human a gift, but he didn’t bother. She had to know; by then she had to.

The party was just Asiya, her siblings, and their triplet sixteen-year-old cousins, whom apparently only Willa was fond of. They were shy, wormy girls, as triplets and twins often are, Zal had noticed by then, as if they were each just a percentage of a person. None of them said much, but they were the only ones who wore the birthday party cone hats.

Willa just sat there, beaming in swirls of makeup Zal noted with some disappointment (she didn’t need it, he thought), in a pink lace dress, still on her bed, of course, but uncovered so one could see it all — all her very allness, Zal noted, a bit wistfully — topped on one end with white patent leather pumps and on the other end with a sparkling tiara that apparently had belonged to their grandmother.

“It’s all real,” Asiya whispered as she dimmed the lights. The whole living room was rigged with tea lights, it seemed.

Zal did not doubt the reality of it all.

Zachary wore a T-shirt that had an illustration of a tie, collar, and buttons on the torso, in lieu of dressing up. Everyone thought it was clever.

Mostly they sat in the living room around Willa’s bed and played music and ate food. Everyone except Asiya, that is, who prepared plate after plate for Willa but touched nothing herself.

It occurred to Zal that he had never really seen Asiya eat much of anything — perhaps only that one café soup on their first meal out, which she had barely slurped at. But usually she just handled food, picked at it, played with it, took it with her but left it completely untouched. He could have sworn she was getting skinnier by the day.

Zal pushed his plate full of potato chips, salsa, cupcakes, and brownies toward her.

She looked at him, confused.

“Eat,” he said.

“I have been!” she cried. “Really! Plus, there’s the real”—and she mouthed cake— “coming. I will definitely have that too!”

When it finally came — the cake — it was toward the end of the evening, and it was unveiled atop wheels, on the type of wheeled box you’d set a TV on, a three-layered double chocolate cake, enough to feed a wedding party, not just five normal eaters, including a possible anorexic canceled out by a monster overeater. The triplets applauded at its sight, and then again with everyone else after Willa made her wish, making a huge show of blowing out that one single candle, the type of candle that belonged by a bathtub, not on a cake. As the slices got passed around and destroyed by forks, Zal kept his eyes on Asiya. He saw her lick her clean fingers three times; he saw her cut the same slice again and again and again; he saw her rest the barren fork against her tongue twice; he saw her put her paper plate up and down, up and down, up and down, and up, up, up, and definitely down.

What could he do? He had no right. When he would have rights to her, or what that even meant, precisely, he did not know. At some point, he would — he believed that — but he was not there yet. For now, she was happy, it seemed — as happy as a girl like that could appear — and he tried to just keep an eye on her to memorize the fit of her skinny legs in her usual dark jeans, the sliver of concave skin that peeked out from under her clingy turtleneck sweater, the angle of her sharp cheekbones, the deep craters under her eyes.

She did not eat, but she did drink. And not just any drink — not the triplets’ soda floats — but alcohol, specifically the alcohol of choice that evening: pink champagne. All three McDonalds seemed fond of the stuff, and while she poured none for Zal initially, as the night wore on she seemed determined to get him involved.

“Oh, come on, Zal!” Asiya’s voice was, as ever, wrapped in gauze, tangled in netting, but this time pangs of excitement pealed through. “Just a bit! I swear, I was five when my mother let me have a sip, isn’t that right, Willie?”

“Well, our mother had a drinking problem,” giggled Willa, who got her very own bottle, and drank out of it like it was water from a thermos, somehow still with a delicate dignity, Zal noted. He wondered if she was drunk, if any of them were really and truly that thing, drunk .

He had learned about drunkenness. Long ago, when Zal had inquired about the homeless people sleeping in the streets, Hendricks had explained drugs and alcohol to him. He knew this much from that: they were poisons, they could kill you in large doses; often they did not, but they could lead to addiction, a state where you had to have more and more of the same stuff every day to keep your normal life going along, until more was never enough and then you’d lose things: people you loved, your job, your home, your possessions, and, worst of all, your mind. It could transform you, Zal recalled — even a small dose could make you feel unlike yourself. You could lose control. It was nothing to take lightly.

“I really can’t,” Zal said, and added the truth in lie’s clothing — or vice versa, hard to say, since it had never been put to the test — that Hendricks had told him to use for almost anything he didn’t want to do: “I have a lot of health issues. Who knows what can happen?”

“Who told you that? Your father?” Asiya glared.

Zal shrugged.

“How old is this dude?” Zach muttered, disgusted, motioning to his little glass for more. He was taking what he called “shots” of the champagne, apparently another way to drink.

“It’s really not bad, if you just have a little! Just a taste! It tastes almost like. . soda!” Asiya insisted.

“I’ve tasted it,” one of the triplets whispered, conspiratorially. “I wasn’t supposed to. But I did. I didn’t get drunk. But it did taste like soda.”

“You did?” another triplet gasped. The other one was sleeping on her lap.

“Look,” Asiya said, pushing a glass with about half an inch of golden bubbling liquid in it. “That’s barely anything. Trust me, Zal. I promise nothing will happen to you, and if it does — it won’t! — I will personally take you to the hospital and sit up all night and help you write your will and everything! Zal, I’m joking. . Zal, do it for Willa! It’s her fucking birthday!”

She had said the magic words — along with the one unmagic one, of course— do it for Willa. He wondered if she could tell. She must. But he had been so discreet. He looked at Willa, who was blushing a bit, smiling that almost farm-animal smile of hers, an oblivious-to-life’s-problems gentle easy smile.

Asiya, aware of his shift, went on: “It’s really rude not to partake on someone’s birthday. Look at silly Willie: she’s more than halfway through a bottle. And if you don’t think she has health issues, you must already be drunk!”