Christina gave an anguished cry and started up the ladder.
“We should get a GoPro for stuff like this,” Daniel said.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Melissa tightened her grip on his arm and dragged him to the base of the ladder.
“Ow, Fabes! Don’t worry, he’s fine. He’s William.”
“How is this fine, Daniel? How is this okay with you? What if he—”
“Come on in, everybody, the water’s great!”
Melissa craned her neck, but all she could see was Christina, scrambling up with surprising speed. She stepped back, Daniel by her side, until she had a clear line of sight to the top of the tower. Now William was perched at the top of the ladder. He waved.
Christina stopped climbing. “Would you just get down?!”
“It’s super easy!” he called back, as if she’d asked about the logistics of swimming in a water tower. “The ladder curves right down inside, so you can just climb back out! I think there might be some dead birds in there!”
“See?” Daniel said. “He’s William.”
“So what?!” Melissa said, taken aback by her own anger. “What does that mean? He’s William. He could have died just now, Daniel. And then what? Then what would you do?”
Daniel reached out a tentative hand. “Fabes, calm down, he’s fine.”
She stepped out of his reach. “I hate it when you tell me to calm down. And you know what else? He doesn’t seem very fine to me.”
She turned her back and left them there, all three frozen as she’d last glimpsed them: Daniel twisting his face into frightened contortions, the dark mantislike shapes of Christina and William playing out their own private drama high above the rooftop. Her eyes sought the lighted apartment across the avenue, desperate for another dose of that sublime New York City existence, but the light had gone off. She held her phone with two hands and tried to pull up Ash’s words, but Epheme had deleted the conversation as soon as she closed the app, and now there was nothing left.
Christina had been nine years old the last time she stayed in a hotel, a seedy place in Lake George during the summer after fourth grade. She remembered the full-throated roar of Harleys cruising the main drag of the village, rows of arcades and shops that leaked incense, a bench painted to look like a cow. Back then, her mother had opened the door to their hotel with an old-fashioned iron key like a castle jailer might have used.
At the door of her room in the Ruby Soho, Christina waved a little plastic fob imprinted with a gold RS emblem in front of a brass panel above the latch. An LED flashed from red to green. How nice for the hotel to be able to track its guests’ movements, she thought as the lock clicked. She pushed open the door and stepped inside. The suite was small, and yet, she suspected, very pricey. An ornate rolltop desk that looked like a piece of furniture stolen from an eccentric villain’s lair held a gleaming espresso machine and a docking halo for devices and computers. The oversize bed faced a wall-mounted 3-D smart TV. Totally hackable, if somebody in, say, Dubai felt like kicking back and watching the intimate happenings inside Ruby Soho room 238.
William brushed past her, lumbering triumphantly inside. Christina wrinkled her nose.
“You smell like dysentery.”
He grinned and flopped his arms out wide—a king in his mead hall, addressing his subjects. “Look where we are!” He went to the bed, patting the pale lavender comforter, caressing the hem of a tightly tucked sheet with the exaggerated tenderness of a drunk person trying to disguise motor-control issues. “Did you ever think we’d be in a place like this?”
“What, together?”
He shrugged. “Beats the Best Western in Fremont Hills.”
As she was wondering if he’d ever really been inside the Best Western in Fremont Hills, and when, and for what purpose, and with whom, he put his arms out again and began to tilt slowly forward. Christina grabbed his wrist and leaned back, keeping him from face-planting onto the bed. Eighty ounces of malt liquor had Jell-O-ized his limbs and turned him into deadweight. She struggled to hold him up.
“You gotta take a shower before you get dead-bird residue all over our bed.” The words our bed seemed to linger in the air between them. How strange to say that out loud! But it was true, at least on a basic logistical level. They were sharing this hotel room. There was only one bed.
“My hair’s barely even wet!” he protested.
She pulled him toward the bathroom. “It’s a little disconcerting that your first impulse wasn’t to scrub yourself down and incinerate your clothes.”
William let himself be dragged, feet shuffling along the plush carpet. “No way, I love this shirt.” Christina flicked on the bathroom light. “Whoa,” William said at the sight of them in the mirror.
At some point during their five-second stagger into the bathroom, her hand had apparently slid down his wrist, and now their fingers were intertwined. Their eyes met in the mirror and she thought of Doubles: fingertips pressed together, lips closing the gap. Behind them, the reflection of the bedroom beckoned softly.
“You scared the shit out of me up there,” she said, watching his eyes travel down her arm to their clasped hands.
“I was fine,” he said. Maybe it was just the malt liquor, but it sounded to Christina like he simply did not understand why his dive into a pitch-black water tower might have left her slightly rattled.
She dropped her eyes. Flecks of mica embedded in the countertop caught the bathroom light. Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy smiled up from William’s toothbrush.
“You’re a dick,” she said.
He grinned. “You were moving up that ladder, huh?” He freed his hand and pulled the shower curtain aside. “Um, this thing has Jacuzzi jets!” He turned to Christina. “I might be a while.”
“Wash your hair,” she said. “Rinse and repeat.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He turned the knob, and water splashed into
