Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

At school, Lily skipped more and more of her classes. All the rumors about study abroad were true, it turned out—you really only had to show up for the tests. At Fuego, she was learning how to be more authoritative in her movements and more efficient with the dishware. Her Spanish vocabulary relating to food and beverages was expanding exponentially. She started jutting out her hip while taking orders, and she began taking smoke breaks with the kitchen staff, for which occasions (and these occasions only) she purchased her first pack of cigarettes. On these breaks, everyone stood around sounding very, very bored with Fuego, and Lily tried to sound bored, too. Feigning this boredom was one of the many minor thrills that, in aggregate, made the job one of the top thrills of Lily’s life.

In bed, on nights when she bailed on Sebastien, Lily found herself making mental lists of all the things that she would do when she got home. She would eat all the American brands that she barely ever actually ate but suddenly acutely missed: banana-flavored Laffy Taffy, Skippy peanut butter, Coffee-mate creamer in decadent seasonal flavors. She would follow the news more carefully so that she could talk about it with Andrew. Most important, she would go outside more. The hills around Middlebury were so lovely—purple in the fall, apple green in the summers—and they seemed so close that you could walk up one. And maybe you could—she had never tried! Why had she never tried? She would do that when she got back. She would walk in the woods with the faintly heaving shadows. She would call her friends—especially the ones from high school, the ones who’d disappeared into a seemingly endless array of second-tier liberal arts colleges in upstate New York—and ask them about their lives. She would be a better sister to Anna. Instead of text messages, she’d send her care packages, full of items responsive to the needs of a long-distance runner. She’d think later about what those might be. And, maybe most important, Lily would reconnect with her parents. She imagined going to long languorous brunches with her mother, long sunset walks with her dad—why was there somehow never any time or appeal for these things when they were actually available? She blamed the Internet, somehow. But no matter. Buenos Aires was making her a better and wiser person. She would be twenty-one in a few days. And when she got back, things would be different. She would go camping. She would walk through slow-moving autumns. She would get up early and watch frosty New England sunrises.

The night of her birthday, Lily pre-gamed with Katy in the bedroom. They traded sips from a bottle of vodka that—along with a plastic water gun shaped like a shark, a pretty rainbow-colored Buenos Aires shot glass, and an enormous and yolky chorizo egg sandwich that was still warm when unwrapped—had been Katy’s birthday present to Lily. For a moment, staring at the sandwich, Lily had felt a flicker of suspicion—Was Katy trying to suck up? Was she trying to beg forgiveness? Was she trying to be funny?—before she told herself to quit it.

“Thanks so much!” she said, waving the sandwich. “You know I love these.”

“Yay!” said Katy, giving Lily a hug. “This is going to be such a fun night!”

Lily boisterously agreed that it was going to be a fun night. At Katy’s urging, Lily had asked Javier about celebrating her birthday at the club and, to Lily’s surprise, he had agreed. Now Lily watched as Katy dressed—in tight jeans that Lily had never seen before and a shiny black shirt that looked wet and metallic in the light—while listening to Beyoncé. Katy bopped and bounced and shook her finger, acting out the dance from the video.

“I think this song has really changed gender relations in our generation,” said Katy, still bouncing. She was already a little drunk. Lily cocked her head. Normally she was the one to make grand pronouncements, espouse sweeping theories. But tonight she didn’t really feel like speculating on anything bigger than her own life. “Don’t you think so?” said Katy.

“I guess,” said Lily. Katy’s high spirits were making her edgy; she would have liked Katy to be in a somewhat less good mood. “Did you bring those from home?”

“What?”

“The jeans.”

“Oh. No. I bought them here.” Katy switched to “Alejandro” by Lady Gaga, then spun around and tried to check out her own derriere, which was so much smaller and shapelier than Lily’s as to be unrecognizable as the same body part. “They’re so tight I think they’re going to give me a urinary tract infection.”

Lily nodded but didn’t laugh.

Katy put on her best Gaga face. “I know that we are young and I know that you may love me …” She giggled. “Ugh. I shouldn’t have eaten so much cake.”

Lily nodded again and took a swig from the bottle. Beatriz had indeed made a homemade cake—pink frosting, a swirling and calligraphic Feliz cumpleaños!, the works—but Lily hadn’t been able to enjoy it. She still felt bad about the incident with the phone call, as well as preemptively guilty for however she would be getting in trouble tonight. Somehow, Lily knew, Katy and Lily would both come home late and drunk, but Lily would be the one to get a lecture from Beatriz tomorrow—Lily would cough, or trip, or break something coming in the door, or leave a telltale receipt behind somewhere. And Beatriz would wind up yelling at Lily while Katy slept, or highlighted her economics textbook, or watched the whole scene, innocent and mute. Lily was fairly resigned to this sequence of events, but she was not exactly looking forward to them.

“This song is just that Ace of Base song,” said Katy. “ ‘Don’t Turn Around’? It’s the same tune. Don’t you think?”

“I did in 2009,” said Lily. She walked to the mirror and leaned toward it, mouth wide open, to apply some eyeliner.

“Is Sebastien coming tonight?” said Katy.

Lily turned to do the other eye. This time her jaw cracked when she opened it. “No,” she said. She could feel the shot she had taken; she was enjoying the sense of life opening up. In the mirror, she dusted her freckles into oblivion; she made her expression hawkish and sharp. What did Sebastien know? He didn’t know anything about her. He didn’t even know it was her birthday. This thought gave Lily such a delicious stab of privacy that she started chanting it in her head as a kind of incantation while she did the rest of her face: He doesn’t know it’s my birthday, he doesn’t know it’s my birthday . In the mirror, Lily painted her cheeks mauve, her eyes purple, her lips a severe and sexual red. She was becostumed, she was bewitching. She hiccupped. She was buzzed.

“Why not?” Katy said, and Lily could tell she’d already said it once.

“I didn’t invite him.”

“You didn’t invite him?”

Lily shrugged. She liked the disturbing concavity of her clavicle when she shrugged; it was the only time she really looked skinny. “I just don’t think he’d have a very good time,” she said, in a voice that was higher than her own.

This was true—Lily did not think that Sebastien would have a very good time, but that was because she planned to have the kind of night he would not have a good time witnessing. If Sebastien liked Katy more than Lily—still or originally—then fine. That was only reasonable. That was, in fact, only right! But Lily was a modern woman, and men at the club hit on her sometimes, and tonight it was her birthday. Once she made out with someone else, everything would be even again between Katy and Sebastien and her: They’d all be equally progressive people with an equal number of fantastic possibilities before them. There were no hard feelings. All was fair in love and war, and this was neither.