She looked at herself in the mirror and made a satisfied little smirk.
“One look. That’s all it’ll take. A handful of lines. For me, it’ll be just a style exercise, but for them… it’ll be the end. Nothing will ever make sense again. Their friends won’t save them. They’ll lose their jobs. File for divorce. They’ll even give up PlayStation, Bea. The trauma will reset their brains.”
“Holy crap,” I said. “Maybe you should hand out fake phone numbers.”
“Numbers? Names?” she scoffed, as if I’d just suggested leaving fingerprints at a crime scene. “Don’t be absurd. No traces. In fact… maybe I should disguise myself. Huge sunglasses, hoodie, dark lipstick. I’ll be an ephemeral creature, like an elusive fragrance… yet deadly as a nuclear Armageddon.”
She stopped for a moment, gazing dreamily at her reflection.
“They’ll wander New York for years, trying to piece that night back together, convinced it was just a hallucination. They’ll start to think I never existed. That I was only ever… a projection.”
“Wow,” I muttered. “You really do plan on destroying them.”
“And without even pushing too hard,” she said with a half-smile. “I’ll try to go easy.”
We headed out around nine. I wore a faded hoodie, jeans that had seen better days, and my hair in a dysfunctional bun that screamed I’ve stopped trying.
Tess, meanwhile, looked like she’d just escaped a masquerade ball themed “glam witch meets EdgarAllan Poe after three Negronis.”
Plum corset. Black layered skirt that rustled like Victorian widow’s gift wrap. Gothic choker. Dramatic black-and-white-movie makeup. And above all:that look.That precise expression of “I know something you don’t, and the second I tell you, it’ll ruin your life.”
She descended the stairs with the grace of an actress in slow motion, while I tripped over the doormat.
Outside, we bumped into our neighbors from the second floor. Two people who saw us almost every day—yet didn’t even recognize her. They walked past with a vague nod, like “good evening, bat lady,” and kept going.
As soon as they were out of earshot, Tess grinned like a supervillain running a field test.
“Ninety percent of a person’s recognizability comes from body language,” she declared. “Change that, and no one recognizes you. It’s scientific.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that maybe—just maybe—the neighbors didn’t recognize her because she’d gone from jeans and a T-shirt to looking like Dracula’s resurrected wife with a Vogue subscription.
But even if I had, she would’ve waved me off like I was trying to sell her some boring concept. Like the importance of hydration. Or objective reality.
She dragged me to Spice, one of those trendybars where even the air felt curated by a minimalist DJ from Berlin. The walls were lined with brushed silver panels that reflected the soft lighting like some kind of galactic nightclub, and everywhere you looked there were shiny surfaces, mirrored details, and vaguely unsettling art installations. The ceiling was dotted with pendant lamps that looked like drops of mercury, and in the center of the room, a glossy black bar reigned like it had been designed by an architect addicted to ’70s sci-fi films.
The moment we stepped inside, Tess stopped at the entrance like a Golden Age Hollywood star making her big comeback. She lifted her chin slightly, letting the lights caress her face as if they’d rehearsed for this exact moment.
She took one step, then another, with the choreographed elegance of someone convinced the world was her personal red carpet. The black skirt swayed with lethal grace, the plum corset carved her body into pure confidence.
She scanned the room with the calm, implacable gaze of a queen entering her throne hall: unhurried, unhesitating, absolutely certain that everything and everyone there existed for her.
A few heads turned. Drinks paused midair. Half-finished sentences hung in the air. A pair of eyes lingered.
“See that, Bea?” she whispered, without evenglancing my way. “They all turned to look at me. They felt the energy I radiate.”
“Notall,” I said, clinging to honesty. “It seemed more like… a handful of guys.”
She gave me a tenderly condescending look. “My dear, naïve Bea,” she sighed. “Not all men announce themselves. Not everyone shouts at football games with a beer in hand. Some are more… discreet. Silent. They watch from the corner of their eye. Or, even better, they use reflective surfaces.”
“Reflective surfaces.”
“There’s the mirror behind the bar, the steel panel on the north wall, the golden statue at your eleven o’clock…”
“And you couldtellthey were looking at you through the reflective surfaces?”
“I don’t need to tell,” she said. “I just know.”
She was incorrigible.
