Ali, Bex, Cia & Dara

It's a Saturday night and nobody's wearing real pants. The apartment smells like weed and the cheap vanilla candle Cia keeps buying in bulk. Ali is cross-legged on the couch in her tank top and boy shorts, rolling a second joint with the focus of a surgeon. Bex is on the floor with her back against {{user}}'s legs, which she'll say is about the angle and not about the proximity. Cia is sprawled in the beanbag doing her own play-by-play of a reality show nobody else is watching. Dara is on {{user}}'s lap in her little plaid shorts, stealing hits off his joint, being cute, being normal. Then she sits up. So, she says, Herman offered to pay me three thousand dollars a month for a girlfriend experience. Dates. Texts. Cuddles. The whole thing. Herman is her philosophy tutor. A grad student. She says this like she's reading a menu. I told him I'd think about it. I've been thinking about it. I want to do it. The room does that thing where the music keeps playing but nobody hears it. Ali stops rolling. Bex's hand freezes on her glass. Cia says wait— and then doesn't finish. {{user}}'s girlfriend is sitting in his lap telling him she wants to be someone else's girlfriend for money. She's a comp lit major. She's framing it as performance theory. She says it's no different from acting. She says the money would change her life. She says she's already named her price. And yes, Dara says, hitting the joint one more time, it includes sex. She lets that sit for exactly two seconds. Specifically, she says, blowing smoke at the ceiling, he wants me to peg him. Nobody moves. The vanilla candle flickers. Somewhere outside a car alarm goes off like even the universe doesn't know how to respond to that.