Although he needed to finish getting dressed, Samir couldn’t help but continue to watch her. She had sparkly ankle boots in one hand, and the other hand held Drama Queen’s leash. The opossum sniffed around enthusiastically, scratching at the ground, but when Pinky reached down to adjust her halter, she went limp and fell over in a dead faint. Samir chuckled as Pinky shook her head, heaved a sigh, and scooped up DQ. She glanced up as she walked back to the house, meeting his gaze. They stopped still, both of them staring at each other for a long moment, until Samir raised a hand. After a pause, she smiled a little, nodded, and headed back in.
Samir walked to the mirror, smiling a bit at his reflection. At least they weren’t fully at each other’s throats anymore. That was good. Maybe he’d even enjoy himself a bit tonight.
* * *
“Good goddess, how many more rounds?” Pinky groaned as she hung her head back. Her cheeks, dusted with what looked like soft gold shimmer, glowed classily in the dim lighting. Her hair, on the other hand, looked like iridescent fire atop her head, and it was drawing enough looks from the genteel country-club patrons around them as if it really were.
“Don’t be rude,” Ms. Kumar said, looking around at the others at their table to see if anyone had heard. Glancing at Samir, she said, “I’m sorry about her.” Apparently the olive branch he thought had been extended when they’d reminisced about the butterfly habitat had been snapped in half.
They’d entered the country-club restaurant through a gigantic stone-mansion-esque building, where Pinky’s parents were greeted like royalty by the woman at the reservations desk. Now they were seated at one of twelve circular tables in the restaurant of the country club, which was called, pretty uncreatively, Samir thought, the Restaurant. The country club, though, was called Silver Pines, not the Country Club.
All around them were tables filled with glittering, happy, mostly older white people who wore jewels the size of their eyeballs around their throats and fingers. Occasionally a swell of cultured laughter would fill the space, crowding out the steadier rumbling hum of thirty-two different simultaneous conversations about newly acquired Bugattis and golf and second and third homes on the Italian Riviera.
“Don’t apologize for me,” Pinky snapped at her mom, her eyes glinting under the soft lights.
Her mom gave her a steely look. “Don’t say things that lead to me having to apologize for you.”
Pinky rolled her eyes and looked at a passing waiter. “I’d love a red wine when you have a moment,” she said, and the man smiled at first, then caught Ms. Kumar’s murderous glare and hurried away.
Ms. Kumar turned the glare on Pinky, and Samir felt his own insides shrivel in response. The Shark, out in full Jaws mode. “That was completely inappropriate. And don’t tell me you’ve been drinking tonight.”
“Clearly not, or I’d be having a lot more fun,” Pinky retorted.
There was a prickly silence, and Dolly flagged down one of the circulating waiters and asked for another ginger ale, probably as a distraction.
Taking her cue, Samir said, “Hey, Pinky, why don’t we go for a walk? I’m really crap at pop culture anyway, so I doubt we’ll be much help, and I’d love to see the grounds.”
Ms. Kumar nodded—Samir suspected she couldn’t speak without totally losing it—and everyone at the table shot him a grateful look. He scraped his chair back, waited for Pinky, and then the two of them headed out of the main room of the restaurant.
Samir took off his suit jacket as they made their way out into the balmy, muggy summer night outside. “Remember when I said you antagonize your parents a lot?”
Pinky huffed a breath. “Has anyone ever told you your perception is probably warped from the fact that you’re afraid to antagonize anyone, probably because she breastfed you too long as a baby?”
Samir raised his eyebrows. “Wow, are your legs tired?”
“What?”
“They must be, because you’re jumping to a lot of conclusions there.”
Pinky’s confusion cleared. “Ha ha, hilarious. You should consider stand-up comedy.”
Samir smirked. “See, I can do stand-up because my legs aren’t tired.”
“That’s great. You’re on a roll—hey, check this out.” She pointed to a metal ladder that was screwed on to the back side of the building, near the staff entrance. She gave it a hard tug and it held. Tipping her head back so her multicolored curls brushed her mid-back, she said, “It looks like it leads to a little ledge up there.”
“Yeah, looks like it does,” Samir said. “Wanna keep walking?”
Pinky turned to him, a mischievous glint in her eye as she smiled. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of heights or something.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing. May I remind you that heights are actually dangerous? Like, you can actually break something or die if you fall off something tall.”
“That’s what the cowards always say.” Pinky kicked off her boots and stepped on the first rung of the ladder. “Come on, wuss,” she said over her shoulder. “Let’s go look at the stars.” And then she clambered up like it was the most natural thing in the world to scurry up a rickety ladder in the darkness without even knowing exactly where it led.
“If that’s your idea of a pickup line, I can probably tell you why you have a problem landing good boyfriends,” Samir said, but she only laughed scathingly and retorted, “Yeah, like I’m gonna waste the good ones on you!
“Wow,” she called down a minute later. “It’s so pretty up here! You can see the lake and the lights.…” Her head peeked over the ledge a moment later. “Come on, Sam!”
“Is there a railing up there?” he called, his voice high and squeaky. “Because if there isn’t, you shouldn’t peek over like that.” He felt his palms getting sweaty on her behalf.
“It’s not even that high!” she protested. “Come up; you’ll see.”
Muttering under his breath, Samir pulled on the ladder, a few flecks of rusty paint coming off on his palms. It held steady. Putting his suit jacket back on, he began a slow, methodical climb up, testing each rung, making sure it wasn’t going to give way under him. Finally, he reached the roof.
“Ledge” had definitely been a more accurate descriptor, though. It was tiny and rectangular and kind of alarmingly uneven, as if it were intent on tipping its residents off onto the concrete below.
Blithely unaware of all Samir’s misgivings, Pinky sat in one of two flimsy little chairs, her legs thrown over one of the arms. In the darkness, he could barely make out the white glow of her teeth as she smiled. “Hey, you made it!”
“You say that like you were doubtful.” He walked across the rust-stained concrete in a crouch, the way he always did when he was somewhere really high. Taking a seat in the chair next to Pinky’s, Samir looked out over the edge of the roof at the lake beyond. Glimmering lights from the houses clustered around the lake—one of them Pinky’s—reflected on the black water.
Samir took a deep breath and listened to the cicadas whir for a moment. If he held really still, he thought he could hear the lapping waves of the ocean in the distance.