“I am going to vomit on the porch.”
“I’ll be right next to you.” She giggles. “Two angels puking at the Hawthorne House. Should we do it?”
I laugh. “No. Definitely not.”
Lucy’s at the dining room table, arranging small black bowls of candy. She’s pouring fun-size Reese’s into a bowl.
Gianna’s voice comes loudly from the bedroom, “Mara, get off the ground, I need to pee, I swear to God.”
Mara says back, “I’m trying to get this right.”
“Two seconds.”
“I don’t care if I see your coochie.”
“I don’t want you to see my coochie.”
Lucy, Mila, and I look at each other across the kitchen, and we start laughing — me into the counter, Mila almost falling off the island, Lucy snorting into her bowl of Reese’s.
Penelope says without looking up from her thesis, “There’s another bathroom in my room.”
Silence.
Gianna’s voice from the bedroom. “There’s a what?”
Penelope, eyes on her laptop, says, “Bathroom in my bedroom. You have to walk through the closet to get to it.”
Gianna appears in the doorway. She looks at Lucy. Then at me.
“Have you been keeping a second bathroom secret from us?”
She disappears down the hall. I hear a door open, and then I hear her say, “Holy shit, Pen,” in the exact tone I had five days ago when I first walked into Penelope’s bedroom and understood that the rest of this apartment, beautiful as it is, is the staff quarters. Her room is the queen’s room. The bathroom alone is bigger than Mila’s dorm.
Mila looks at me with her eyebrows up.
I grin.
Mila hasn’t seen it yet. She opens a Jell-O shot with her teeth. “I love this apartment.”
The angel costumes come out at six. They’re sprawled across my bed in two rows.
The whites on one side — mine, Lucy’s, Penelope’s. The blacks on the other — Gianna’s, Mara’s, Mila’s. Matching costumes from the same Amazon link Penelope sent to the group chat on Monday. Bodysuits. Not bikini bottoms — shorts-style, fitted, with spaghetti straps. Wings that clip onto the back with elasticstraps under the arms. Nylons. White or black to match. A halo or a small set of horns.
They aren’t hoe-ish. It’s the cutest costume I have ever committed to for Halloween. I’m normally something funny — last year I was a pickle, the year before I was Carmen Sandiego, the year before that I was a roll of toilet paper, and I thought I was very clever. None of those costumes resulted in pictures I have looked at since.
We all start taking pictures of the costumes laid out. Mara takes a flat-lay. Gianna takes a wide shot. Penelope takes one careful close-up of the wings against the comforter that looks like it belongs in a magazine.
Then we start putting them on.
Mara picks up her black bodysuit. She kisses the air at it.
Gianna grabs hers.
We’re in our underwear, pulling the costumes on. The room smells like Penelope’s perfume and hairspray, and a small simmering thread of the Jell-O shot vodka.
Lucy zips Gianna. Penelope zips Lucy. I zip Mara. Mila zips me. Penelope is at the mirror in the corner, calm, finished, looking at herself with the small smile she does when she is pleased with her own work. “So good.”
We turn to look at ourselves in a row in the full-length mirror.
