It’s the day before Halloween, and I’ve agreed to go to a concert at a venue by the name of Afterlife with Bunny and this insufferable guy she’s been dating. They go inside to get us drinks, and I stay back for some air at a picnic table on the floodlit concrete terrace where people smoke and drink on scattered classroom chairs and yard furniture. I’ve never been here but I know what kind of place it is since there are no classic costumes in sight—too cool for me to feel at ease. No bloody brides, no celebrity couples, no Scream masks. In fact, it’s possible most people aren’t wearing costumes, but who knows? It’s as though aliens came down to Earth and were asked to dress a crowd of trendy youths. It’s all sheepskin coats, flood-leg denim, latex bra tops, safety vests, gym shorts, shellacked hair, candy-stink vapes. I’ve perched atop a picnic table, and a girl comes over in a floor-length Lakers jersey, with impressive greenscale eye makeup and neon kitten heels. She crouches to look under the tables and asks if I’ve seen a phone. I haven’t, but since this girl is clutching actual cigarettes, I ask for one. She hands one over—a menthol slim—without making eye contact and anxiously continues to search.
“Is it gauche and geriatric of me to ask if you’re wearing a costume?” I say as somehow, by grace, I find matches in my jacket.
“Sorry?” She snaps to attention and gives an inscrutable once-over to my black pants and nondescript black leather trench.
“Is that a costume?” I try again, gesturing toward the jersey dress. She leaves without answering as I fail to light the first match.
Inside the venue—a windowless black box with a two-foot-tall stage and a back bar—is an all-male free jazz trio called Digital Seizing. They are shirtless. I find Bunny and her new “situation,” Chris, across the crowd. He bobs to the beat in deep concentration. Bunny’s sister Nicole and I call Chris “Crust” because he owns a Cybertruck and works in the “explosive intersection of crypto and AI.” At Afterlife, in his pristine white collar and Rolex, he looks like a stockbroker who got lost but refuses to admit the mistake. Bunny catches me laughing to myself, intuitively knows it’s at Crust’s expense, and gives me a look. It’s like she can read my mind. She turns, grabs his jaw, and kisses him, proving something like a point, and the sight makes my gut lurch. It makes me glad I don’t date.
That said, I admire Bunny because she’s nothing like me. I am withered by life’s blows, a hermit. She’s resilient and action oriented, despite any hardship she’s encountered. She was a colicky Colombian baby adopted by cold WASPs who loved her conditionally—entertainment lawyers who provided her with high-thread-count sheets and expensive extracurriculars but wouldn’t let her, for example, date, wear sportswear, or listen to Lauryn Hill. She joyfully rebelled instead of taking it personally. When Bunny was a freshman in high school she had a Lolita-esque relationship with an unhinged fifty-something female theater teacher. A few years ago, she had a lover die of a fentanyl overdose in her actual arms. Yet, she dates constantly and somewhat suspiciously or miraculously falls in love within six months of each previous longish-term relationship. She’s pansexual and an actress and doesn’t like to be alone in that way, she tells me, what’s the point? The little bits of people you get to learn about when you wake up with them, watch TV together, suck them off in a car. It’s too rich! And because she’s my best—leaning toward only—friend, I find myself enduring bits of all these people by proxy, much more than I’d like.
Projected in the background behind where Bunny and Crust stand is a scene from a French film—a pale young man is sucking a plump woman’s nipples as she holds him like a baby. I go to the corner water station, a little inlet in the wall that’s mosaiced in large, jagged pieces of broken mirror. Next to me is a wasted girl dressed up like a circus clown, red nose and all. I almost give thanks for her directness. I move aside and the two of us rapidly fill and refill our tiny triangular cups of cold water. Now that I’m defensively hydrated, I need a real shot.
I turn toward the bar and stop short. My skin becomes gooseflesh, my mind goes static.
No. But yes. There sits P.T. on a stool. Chatting with the bartender. I don’t have my glasses and it’s dark, so it’s possible my eyes are tricking me, maybe I’ve forgotten what he really looks like, maybe that water was doused with acid. It’s too on the nose that I see him today of all days.
But there he is, I swear to god. P.T. has his elbow on the bar, cheek in hand, and he’s flirting with a curly-red-haired, beautiful bartender. Nary a care has he. I go to therapy twice a week and have the sexual prowess of unleavened bread—he’s here, in my new city, flirting. A candle flickers below his face. He’s lost some weight; his hair is even longer, still bountiful, dark gold, and held back in part by invisible and poorly placed bobby pins. Still, those sunken, practically black eyes. He’s wearing a brown suede bomber jacket. I watch him talk to the woman. She puts her forearms down on the bar and leans in, her neck cranes up, her expression too wide open. Freckled and dare I say zaftig, in the process of being hypnotized by his bizarre charm. That’s me I’m looking at, in one way or another. It’s me and P.T., it’s P.T. and who knows how many more random women in bars and bodega lines. That’s P.T. and the woman who finally broke us. Lisa from Tinder. I get a sudden and obtrusive vision of P.T. giving all three of us orgasms at once: me on a hand, Lisa on his face, the bartender on, well.
This is not how I imagined a chance encounter. I imagined a lethal threat—he’d crawl in through my apartment window in one of the dresses I left at his place, or pop out of a trash can with an AK-47. Perhaps one day he would walk into my coffee place and stab me before stabbing himself. I should probably leave, that seems like the best possible idea, but I can’t move. As far as I know, he hasn’t seen me. He was never very perceptive, has poor vision himself. From the looks of things, he’s halfway through some dark liquor drink. Likely not his first.
I dig my nails into my palms, strain my eyes toward him, but P.T.—or P.T.’s simulacrum—is leaned away from me now, preventing a longer look at his face. I see him blow out the candle and pour the wax on his hand, and then a little on hers as she shrieks in laughter. It’s him. It has to be him.
Finally, I recoup enough wind to run over to Bunny and Crust. Bunny looks at my face, which must appear palsied, then snaps her fingers at me.
“Uh, babe? You good?”
I open then close my mouth. I’m not interested in having Bunny confront P.T. or explaining my dark past to Crust.
“Getting a migraine,” I say. “Very nauseous.”
“Oh god, you want some Advil? I have a ton . . .”
“No! I think I have some here!” I pretend to start searching in my purse but clumsily I spill the contents and out come my keys, sunglasses, a peppermint Lip Smacker, a parking ticket, prescription sleeping pills, and a pack of grape Hi-Chews.
“You want me to bring you home?” Crust asks when I pop back up from the floor, now overheating.
“I’ll do an Uber!” I weakly smile, give Bunny a kiss on the cheek, and slip out the side door. Not before taking another small peek in P.T.’s direction, my sunglasses on and the collar of my coat popped. But this time, he looks up. Directly at me. He smiles.
When I get back to my apartment, there’s an envelope taped to my door. It contains two used Q-tips. Immediate gag reflex. I saw it before I left and thought it was a note from the building manager. I’ve had bizarre things left at my door multiple times this month. A pair of dirty socks, a wet newspaper,
The Book of Miracles. Those seemed like potential mistakes. The people in this deteriorating art deco four-story are oddballs, East Hollywood is no man’s land. The guy who lives across the hall from me has never looked me in the eye, wears nightgowns, and has hair down to his ass. The woman next to him has nine snakes.
There’s a couple down the hall from me on the first floor I call the Screaming Birds, as they fight with disturbing constancy and have a nervous-sounding parakeet. I have borne witness to more than one 5150 in this building. I got the place when I moved out here pretty broke, having used the last of my money on a lawyer. I have a good job, but I’m still here nevertheless, comforted by the company of a white noise machine and a dead bolt. After tonight, after seeing P.T., I have a new theory about the origin of these seemingly disconnected items. He is an artist, after all, of the attempted avant-garde. He loves impossible symbolism.
Copyright © 2026 by Annakeara Stinson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
