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“Ghost?” Sara Tonin chimes in from atop the refrigerator.
“Is she hot?” Isaiah’s sister asks.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” August says, waving them off. She points to the phone sticking out of her front pocket. “And she’s not a ghost, she’s just on speaker.”
“Boo,” says Jane’s voice.
“She’s always wearing the exact same thing,” Wes says as he hauls the office chair back, one of the wheels listing pathetically. “That’s ghost behavior if you ask me.”
“If I’m ever a ghost, I hope I get a choice in what I’m cursed to wear for the rest of eternity,” Isaiah says. “Like, do you think it’s just whatever you’re wearing when you die? Or is there an afterlife greatest hits mood board where you get to assemble your own ghost drag?”
“If I get to pick, I want to be wearing, like…” Myla thinks about it for a long second. Her drink sloshes down her arm. “One of those jumpsuits from the end of Mamma Mia. I go to haunt people but it always turns into a musical number. That’s the energy I want to bring to the hereafter.”
“Brocade suit, open jacket, no shirt,” Niko says confidently.
“Wes,” Myla shouts at him as he climbs into the rolling chair, “what would your ghost wear?”
He straps on a pair of ski goggles. “A slanket covered in shrimp chip crumbs.”
“Very Tiny Tim,” Isaiah notes.
“Shut up and throw me across the room, you big bitch.”
Isaiah obliges, and the tournament continues, but he comes back three rounds later, smiling a broad smile, the gap between his two front teeth unfairly charming.
He points at August’s phone. “What’s her name?”
“Jane,” August says.
“Jane,” Isaiah repeats, leaning into August’s boobs to shout at the phone. “Jane! Why aren’t you here at my party?”
“Because she’s a blip in reality from the 1970s bound to the Q and she can’t leave,” Niko supplies.
“What he said,” Jane agrees.
Isaiah ignores them and continues to yell at August’s tits. “Jane! The party’s not over yet! You should come!”
“Man, I’d love to,” Jane says, “I haven’t been to a good party in forever. And I’m pretty sure my birthday is coming up.”
“Your birthday?” Isaiah says. “You’re having a party for that, right? I wanna come.”
“Probably not,” Jane tells him. “I’m sort of—well, my friends are kind of unavailable.”
“That’s such bullshit. Oh my God. You can’t have a birthday and not celebrate it.” Isaiah leans back and addresses the party. “Hey! Hey everybody! Since this is my party, I get to decide what kind of party it is, and I am deciding it’s Jane’s birthday party!”
“I don’t know who Jane is, but okay!” someone yells.
“How soon can you get here, Jane?”
“I—”
And maybe Isaiah remembers the séance, and maybe he believes what’s happening here, and maybe he sees the panicked look August and Niko exchange, or maybe he’s just drunk. But his grin spreads impossibly wider, and he says, “Actually. Hang on. Everybody, please transfer your drink to an unmarked container, we’re taking it to the subway!”
Isaiah’s friends are nothing if not game—and, in many cases, crossed—so they flow down the stairs and out onto the street like a dam breaking, drinks in the air, caftans and capes and aprons trailing behind them. August is between Lucie and Sara Tonin, carried by the current toward her usual station.
“Which one is he?” Sara is asking Lucie.
Lucie points at Winfield, who’s throwing his head back to laugh, glitter glinting in his beard, looking like the life of the party. She tamps down a smile and says, “That’s him,” and August laughs and wants so badly to know what it feels like to show off the person who’s yours from across the crowd.
