She likes to shower with the door open. She steps out of the bathroom, into her room and walks a slow circle, the graying vertical blinds straining to keep out the golden light of early evening and late spring. She didn’t wash her hair and she feels like it hangs better this way, a little tangled from last night. She walks back to the bathroom mirror and gets bored after applying a little concealer, thinking about girls with thick layers of eye shadow like cake fondant, and decides to pack a quick bowl. As she takes the first hit, she clicks the play button on her cd player with her toe. She sings one of the last songs on this album out loud; the words “you wanted a hit, [pause] well, this is how we do hits” come out with smoke as she walks back to the mirror.

“Why do I even fucken do this?” she asks herself, pulling a mascara wand through her lashes. She thinks about a possible title to a poem: Mascara Is Best Applied Sober. She decides it’s a bad title, grabs a safety pin lying on the corner of the sink, and starts to separate her lashes. Almost as an afterthought, she grabs some black eyeliner and smudges it along her lash line with her pinky. She thinks it makes her look a little tired. She takes another hit, this time in front of the mirror, watching herself pull in her cheeks, and blows smoke straight into her reflection, thinking what she’s been thinking lately.

“Who you tryin to be?” he says, looking me up and down, from my crisp white tank top and visible black bra straps, down to my ankles chocked in black skinny jeans, as I slide in a pair of my favorite big silver hoop earrings “Sad Girl? Lil Puppet? Fresno Loca?”

“Whatever Lil Puppet is a boy name, I think And who are you trying to be, the Mexican Carlton Banks?” I respond, pulling on his slim baby blue argyle sweater until I can almost feel the thick knit of his sweater through the thin fabric of my wifebeater and his lips move toward mine.

Her cell phone rings and she scoops up her keys and black sandals, trying to ignore the hoops sitting quietly on her vanity, stuffs a few dollars in her pocket, unplugs the cd player and heads out the door as she answers her phone, “I’m on my way out.”

Isaac’s car is parked out in the street, engine rumbling softly, and she drops down into the passenger seat. “Hey, yo.”

“‘Sup, chick?”

He pulls off from the curb while she stretches the seatbelt across her chest, not liking how it feels between her breasts.

“Who’s all gonna be there?” she asks, tossing her shoes down and leaning forward to slide her feet in them and buckle the ankle strap on her sandals.

“The usual suspects, some hipsters, of course, couple homeless dudes and their dogs…idk, man, you know how it is, whoever.”

“Whoever,” she repeats, tossing the word around the cavity of her skull. “Cool.”

After a few blocks they hit a red light and Isaac turns his limited edition Ray Bans on her.

“Where you been at?”

“Hibernation,” she says to her own reflection in his shades. She thinks she looks too small, smaller than she usually feels, sitting cradled in the car seat.

“You shoulda brought shades, your eyes are mad bloodshot. Stoner.” Green light and he turns his twin mirrors back on the road in front of him.

“I got eye drops,” she grumbles, reaching into her pocket.

“I gotta meet the guys at The Cafe. I’ll drop you off at The Studio.”

“Cool,” she says.

“What happened with whoever it is that you disappeared off the face of the earth for this winter? And I’m pretty sure I know who it is.”

“I.D.K.” she blurts out, not in the mood to hear his name. She doesn’t try to contest his dramatic statement. “We used to see each other everyday.”

“For real?”

“Every day.” She nodded her head and nodded her head. “Almost every day. Practically.”

“For how long?”

“Four months.”

His voice goes up an octave. “Four months?”

She nods. Shrugs.

“There were some rumors going around…” his voice stops in the air in front of his face.

“But no one knew. Not really. Neither one of us ever said anything. If anything, we straight up denied it.”

He’s quiet as he switches lanes. He turns left onto a street with sidewalks cracked by thick elm tree roots. Pulling up next to the curb, he says, “You know he’ll be here.”

“Not for sure.” Her shoulders twitch and she touches the door handle, clicks off her seat belt, and taps each foot on the clear plastic floor mat once.

“So, what is this, your triumphant return?”

“Possibly.” She runs her finger across the smooth, rounded edge of her cell phone.

“Dude, just come with us to The Cafe. He won’t be there tonight.”

“OMG. It ain’t like…you know…a big deal,” she says, prodding his side and laughing.

“Alright,” he nods his chin once, reaching over and grabbing a fistful of her hair and tugging lightly. “You gonna Bob Marley my car before I say peace out?”

“You know it,” she says, finally smiling big and honest.

After they’ve passed his pipe back and forth a few times, she jumps out of his car and waves goodbye as he pulls back from the curb. Walking past a few front yards with sun-faded toys, she imagines picking up the was-bright orange Dora the Explorer kid’s jeep and watching eyeless bugs drip from its tires, wriggling in confusion in the dying light. As she turns the corner, she looks down at her hands. They have turned a faint electric blue from the light of the sign above the liquor store across the street. The long shadows are gone now and night has fallen across Fresno Street.

She can feel the pulse behind her eyes as she walks into a familiar front yard that sits in front of a tall, crooked house with windows of all different sizes, some dark, some lit up in yellow, red, green, and blue light. She walks straight into a crew of what looks like eighteen year olds out on the front steps. They, all skinny boys in tight jeans and paper-thin V-necks, move out from under her blank stare, push up against each other to let her through and she never hesitates a step.

She reaches forward to pull open the front door. As her hand grips the door knob, it feels warm and as she pushes the door in, it feels heavier than usual.

The hair on her arm stands up like she’s looking over a too tall building, right over the edge, and gravity is pulling her down. At first she’s facing a red wall and the door frame is no longer a door frame but a rectangular hole in the floor and her eyeballs lean forward in her sockets and the skin of her cheeks is pulling away from the bones in her face and her right foot moves forward on its own and, like a roller coaster drop, she’s sucked into this breathing red wall that breaks into sharp, jagged pieces of noise noise noise, red light, moving bodies, the skin of drums roaring their throats raw. Her eyes jump to the hands reaching towards her. She looks up beyond the hands, up to the extended arms, across the open laughing mouths, some look familiar and she lets herself be pulled in, her hips already joining other hips in drum slap smooth movements. Beyond the moving bodies are drums in an outer circle and it is only boys with drums between their legs, big and small drums, somewhere a flute, a shakin’ tambourine, a stick being struck and scraped across the open, gleaming white jaw bone of a long-gone donkey. She sees only girl hip movements and the eyes of the outside circle sucking it all in. The noise is slowing down and the girls fall against each other, against her, in giggles that sound as loud as the breathing walls. Her eyes are on the open mouth smiles and she opens her mouth and smiles back, mimics their noises. The banging starts again, rolling closer like thunder and she keeps smiling smiling and meets eyes that are red at the corners and shies away from hands reaching for her waist. Pushing past bodies, more bodies and a familiar face floats up to hers.

“Some air,” she manages to blurt out like they are the only two words she knows.

The familiar face has a hand that grabs at her shoulder and a shot of panic hits her in the chest and exists through her back. She turns her shoulder out the hand’s grip and hurries around two girls with identically complicated-looking haircuts and matching bad postures that evil-eye her pale, sweaty face.

She bounces up stairs that are set against the back of the living room and walks through a small room painted green with a giant glassless window through which a single lemon tree branch reaches inside. She takes a deep calming breath as a gust of wind pushes her through to the next room that she has to edge into, her back and palms flat against the wall, feeling underneath her fingertips the old band posters, newspaper clippings with pictures of the ninth ward after the hurricane; the first plane lodged in the first tower; a child with a mouth twisted into a black hole of pain, running from her own burning clothes; the big brush strokes of cheap black paint slapped across it all. She can feel chunks of paint missing as she watches blackclothed limbs flail about, moshers pushing up against each other, pushing back, jumping up, lurching toward a three-piece band in the corner. She can’t see the band from the wall and the music sounds like waves crashing against obsidian stones and cymbals smash and a pitiful yell escapes from the seething pit.

She feels someone grab her left wrist firmly, gently pulling her forward into a group of tall boys, all with long limp hair under Fidel Castro black caps.

“Where’s your drink, lady?” He has greedy-for-trouble black elf eyes and the easiest grin she’s ever seen, seeming to run all the way down his long, lanky frame.

She shakes her head, holding up her empty hands and leaning closer to him. He holds the mouth of a beer bottle right up to her lips and she grabs the bottle neck, swings the bottom up to his devilish eyes. Hands with long, black nails filed to sharp points pull the bottle back and some suds dribble down her chin. As she wipes them off, she smiles sickly-sweet at the girl she hadn’t noticed standing next to him. The girl doesn’t smile back.

“They call me The Intoxicator,” his voice is so clear above the noise that she feels like his lips are right up next to her ear. The girl hands the bottle back. After Neli takes another long drink, she looks down at the glass bottle and notices it has no label. She tries and fails to remember what its insides tasted like. She looks at him with the question in her eyes.

“You have a good night,” he says in a voice that sounds like he’s saying “run along now, sweetie”, grinning wickedly with his entire body. She likes his voice and the sarcastic smile in his eyes and she hesitates to step away but the eyes of the girl, winged in inch-thick black eyeliner, push her into the next room.

In this other room thick candles drip in carved wooden candlesticks and bodies lay on lush Persian rugs. The bodies slurp up heaps of steaming pad thai noodles on porcelain dinner plates and she hears the sound of running river water but she can’t find the source. A hand reaches out and she falls into a lap. She turns to see Luis’s Buddha smile and she crawls onto the empty overstuffed pillow next to him, sinking into the glass of blood-red wine that comes floating up to her. A smattering of applause has just ended and Luis leans towards her.

“You know you’re up next, right? That’s what you get for falling off the face of the earth,” he whispers. She rolls her eyes at him, stands up and, with a strong voice recites to the golden walls:

He Freestyles
I’m glued to the floor
Like a mouth to a neck
Trying to empty my mind
Of his mic check mic check.

There is some clapping and grunts of approval around mouthfuls of pad thai.

She stays to hear a few more poets before feeling the rugs float a few inches off the floor. It makes her dizzy and she climbs off and walks through another door.

“The kitchen?” She’s so surprised to step into the yellow room that she says it out loud. The white cabinets, the bland beige linoleum, the pink-flowered hand towels hanging from the oven door handle, all calm.

“Yes, the kitchen!” a voice answers.

To her right stands Maggie, a big yellow mixing bowl cradled in her left arm, her right arm stirring a thick pink paste furiously.

“Hi Magpie,” she says, standing on her tiptoes to plant her lips on Maggie’s cheek. She looks around Maggie and waves to everyone sitting at the big white table. Everyone sits on a different pastel colored chair with a different pastel colored bowl in front of them.

“Been gone so long you don’t remember that this room is called a kitchen?” she asks, shaking out her long blonde hair.

“Baking party?”

“Baking party,” everyone choruses back. Something wooshes past her face and lands SPLAT on the window on the far wall. She turns to see a thick chocolate paste sliding down the glass.

“Hey, you almost hit me with that!” she accuses Josh with her finger and everyone laughs and keeps mixing.

“Next time,” Josh assures her, pointing back at her with a big, white, chocolate-dripping spoon.

She walks towards the paste and sticks a finger in it.

“Mmm,” she says to herself as she licks off the paste. The thick chocolate is a little grainy. A timer dings behind her and she turns around and watches Maggie open the oven and, with two of the pink-flowered towels she pulls out a tray of chocolate cupcakes.

“Mmm,” she says out loud.

“They’re too hot,” Maggie says. “Have one of these.”

She grabs a pink-frosted cupcake from the tray that was already laying on the counter, next to an ounce of herb ready to be cooked into cannabutter. Wrapped around it is a pink ribbon with tiny words at the end. She holds it up close to her face and sees that someone has used a typewriter to stamp on the words “eat me” in black ink.

“You got it,” she whispers to the cupcake and takes the biggest bite she can.

“What?” Maggie asks.

“Nufin,” she tries to say, spitting out a few crumbs. “Sowy,” she tries to say, spitting out a few more crumbs.

“Never mind,” Maggie says, looking grossed-out.

She chews the half of the cupcake and it tastes like chocolate and raspberry sherbet and something green.

“Theese-r-gooood,” she says without spitting anything out.

“We’re pros just in case you’ve forgotten,” Josh says from the table.

She stuffs the rest in her mouth and turns to grab another cupcake but Maggie catches her.

“No way, Jose. You shouldn’t have eaten that one so fast. They’re really strong.”

“Alright,” she says, wanting to pout.

Everyone at the table keeps mixing and they start talking about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She waits a split second as she makes sure everyone’s hands are busy in their different colored bowls and, like lightning, her arm reaches out in a flash and grabs a cupcake and walks out the door.

“Thanks so much,” she calls over her shoulder.

She turns down a narrow white hallway lined with portraits. Evan told her once that all of those people in black and white were found at yard sales and second-hand stores. Like adopted family, he said. She wondered what it must be like to sit in a stranger’s hallway in your best clothes, neatly set hair, pearls, bow ties, stiff smile, sharp chin, warm eyes, baby bonnet, being stared at by other strangers. The hall ends too quickly. She pushes open the door and finds herself back in the front room of the house. There is no air in this room and it smells like bodies sweating out alcohol and too much perfume and pheromones and hormones and suspect weed and so much Want that it drenches her skin in a fine mist. It’s too strong for her stomach to handle and she knows she’s gotta get out. Eyes and toxic blue cell phone lights swim out of the darkness. She’s hit with cold, dead looks from hipster chicks and their boyfriends in Urban-Outfitter-decided outfits as they upswing 32oz. bottles of Miller High Life. Her eyes go black with every blink and hands that were up are now down, face expressions change too quickly and she feels like she’s ten seconds behind. At this time of the night there is no more feigning politeness as bodies move around each other fluidly, as hands gently move her around, one on her shoulder, at her waist, high up on the middle of her back. There is the door, the door, finally. Down steps. She walks forward without much thought to where her feet are moving, she feels herself grow taller, her head has more space outside to fill up the sky. There are pointy black lace-up boots, wingtips, Hush Puppies, standing in green grass that she pushes aside and releases. Tastes like a pizza and orange juice smoothie. She feels their eyes, looks up, shrugs her shoulder, kicking dirt over her vomit. They join her and laugh. Someone passes a blunt and she inhales gratefully. The house behind her feels like a breathing person, huffing and puffing and creaking jealousy. So much so that it feels like the windows are watching them pass the Swisher back and forth like angry eyes.

“You boys keep it real,” she tells them.

They laugh, someone squeezes her arm in reassurance and the doorknob is so small and the door is so much taller than she is. It opens and in she goes.

Somehow, she finds the line for the bathroom and somehow, she’s in front of the sink, cupping water in her palms, swishing it around in her mouth, spit, repeat, spit, repeat. Opens cabinet below sink, “where where where…?” she asks the plumbing and finds the bottle, pour some in the top and swirls it around her mouth, feels good, likes the almost-clean burn of peppermint mouthwash, spits and smiles at herself, big. Gets up close to the mirror, her eyes squinting, face flushed, hair in her face, eyeliner smudged even more, like slept-in makeup. Pops in more eye drops that she digs out of her pocket, moves eyes beneath lids, mops up fake tears, bares her teeth at her reflection.

She’s in another room, walking against the wall. Everyone is dancing, grinding against each other, tightly packed into the small room. She recognizes the thumping Dr. Dre beat and slides down against the wall and crouches next to a skinny, sucked-in looking man wearing a dirty sports coat and missing chunks of grey hair.

“You came to look for him,” he says and nods his head.

“Did not.”

“Bullshit. I seen how you used to run around after him.” Shadow looks at her with his clear, blue eyes. “Left you high and dry, did he? That why you got that crazy look in your eye?”

“He was nice about it,” she admits.

“So, have you see him yet?”

“No.”

“You scared to?” he asks softly and she’s surprised she can hear him over the music. Her head is still swimming. She looks past the bumpand- grinding dancers and into her memory. She smells Joaquín’s cologne and feels the buttons of his jacket like he’s standing in front of her. She feels the corner of her lip twitch.

“Well, I’m all kinds of intoxicated, Shadow, but I’m not scared anymore.”

“Good girl. Now get outta this noise, your eyes look like they’re about to pop out of your head. The next room is quiet; if you don’t mind some dull conversation.”

She smiles and taps the leg of a guy standing nearby. When he turns around, she holds out her hands up to him. He reaches down and pulls her up to her feet. She thanks him, pulls out the dollars she had stuffed in her pocket and hands them to Shadow. He nods his thanks and she walks up two stairs into a room she has never seen before and climbs up, floating into an engulfing blue. The walls, ceiling and floor, are painted a brilliant royal blue. In the corner there is a group of people laying on their backs and lounging on orange velvet chairs craning their toward a small record player with noises splashing out like sounds of a forest in outer space and the voice of a short girl singing into a long corridor with no doors. Above Neli there is only sky, the floor sloping slowly downward into the drain in the middle of the room. She walks over to the corner and sits next to a vase of wild- flowers on the floor. She’s far enough of away from the group that she doesn’t have to talk to anyone but she can still hear their conversation. They are saying that the song really gets at the desperate, ancient struggle of man versus nature. She gets bored but doesn’t mind it because the flowers she’s sitting next to are so pretty. She picks the vase up and puts it in her lap.

She sees his plaid button-down shirt in the doorway first, the one with the thin red stripes and big grey squares and darker grey squares. He looks at her and their eyes bounce off of each other like ripples of water. And she remembers the last time she saw him.

“I do understand.” And I did.

“I didn’t really know how I felt until I got so close to her. I didn’t know. Even after I told you I didn’t want a girlfriend. I wasn’t lying to you, Neli.”

“You really don’t need to explain it,” I respond in a monotone.

We spend two hours sitting on my bed, twelve inches away from each other. I understand that the Heart can’t always be understood. I understand that I wasn’t good enough to be his girlfriend and she is. He’s sorry and I understand that too.

I walk him downstairs after we’ve said all that we could think to say. I hug him goodbye and he holds on too long. I look up at the tree behind him, a riot of green leaves, and white blossoms ready to fall. He finally lets go and a strand of my hair reaches out to touch him. I tuck it behind my ear. My eyes are screaming in big gospel voices. Howling heroin blues in tear-thick ranchera melodies. He says he’ll call me later. He didn’t and didn’t and didn’t.

He walks towards her as the last few weeks settle down on her shoulders. She feels weak and finally lets her mind just lay back and float on water.

“Joaquín,” she mouths his name and smiles in spite of herself. He sits down next to her.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” he responds quietly. “I’ve never been up here before.”

“Me either. I think only the enlightened ones hang out here.”

He laughs out loud and gets some dirty looks from the group in the corner.

They talk.

“How can you be vegan? Carne asada!”

“It was part of Mayan resurrection philosophy. The ability to conquer death.”

“I’ve been writing again. A story.”

“They have the best food. They Tweet their location, like a futuristic taco truck. They move around town.”

And somewhere in the middle of it he says, “Sofia and I called it quits a little ago.” It doesn’t stop the conversation. They talk about the woman who was just elected president of Brazil, about the new mural the Fresno Brown Berets are gonna put up. They talk about the Black Keys’s new album. Neli and Joaquín lean into each other when they laugh. Their legs feel comfortable stretched out next to each other.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” Joaquín asks.

“Just class in the morning.”

“Wanna hang out after?”

Out of the corner of her eye she sees the short stubble on his chin and cheeks. The curve of his nose. The hair on his knuckles. The window on the east side of the room begins to fill with soft light, splashes gold against the blue walls and Joaquín and Neli’s legs. The group in the corner is lying against each other, breathing as deeply and quietly as the record player She puts her face in the flowers in her lap, feeling the petals and leaves against her cheeks and says, so only he can hear, “Sure.”