by Anna Dorn
“Shiny AF is over,” I’d said when she called. This was the first time we’d talked since she tried to hand me that sweaty pill at the Kingdom a few weeks ago. But I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about her. Those freckles are cemented in my mind, probably forever. I know she’s more than clusters of concentrated melaninized cells, but I was very fucked up during most of our interactions, and I’ve learned from therapy that I have a tendency to flatten what I’m looking at to make it easier to digest. In other words, I’m shallow. I remember Andy Warhol called himself “a deeply superficial person,” so I don’t worry too much.
“Yeah,” Nina had responded awkwardly, “that’s kind of what I want to talk about.”
“Ah,” I’d said. It was nice to hear her voice. I wanted to say that, but instead I said, “‘The Rise and Fall of Shiny AF.’”
I agreed to the interview. My Shiny AF money is dwindling so I need to get a job soon. Maybe I hope Nina will have some leads, or maybe I just want closure.
Closure isn’t real, Jake Perez texted me. And you need to stop giving chances to people who are clearly using you.
I didn’t respond.
It’s weird being back in Nina’s Prius, watching her put her foot up on her seat as I get in.
“Hey,” she says more warmly than I expected. This is maybe the first time I’ve been sober around Nina. Maybe she was warm all along, but that seems unlikely. I was on Adderall, not acid.
“I’m not your freak anymore?” I ask.
She grins but doesn’t answer. “Do you have a place in mind?” she asks.
“Hmm,” I say. “It’s nice out.” It’s pretty much always nice out in LA, so I always feel silly when I say this, but today it’s particularly true. Not too hot. There’s a breeze. “We could sit outside somewhere.”
“That sounds nice,” she says. We’re saying “nice” a lot and I’m suddenly hyperaware of my breath. The issue with being around people so lucid is that I can never figure out when to breathe or swallow.
“Barnsdall Park?” she asks.
“Perfect,” I say.
We don’t say much on the drive. I watch the passing palms out the window and try not to think about whether Nina is judging me or if she thinks I look pretty. My therapist keeps telling me to find validation from within, but she obviously hasn’t met this cunt inside my head.
The park is fairly empty since it’s a weekday. We pick a spot shaded by an olive tree and with views of buildings in the distance, maybe West Hollywood or maybe Koreatown. I squint and try to look for the Kingdom, but it’s too far.
Nina lays out an oversized flannel shirt for us to sit on, then pulls out her iPhone. “Is it cool if I record this?” She opens her voice memo app.
“No Moleskine?” I ask.
She smiles. “Not today.”
“Record away,” I say, then I look toward the city below us, feeling like an Old Hollywood starlet. I wonder if Mrs. Barnsdall was ever interviewed here. I looked her up on Wikipedia that morning. She was an oil heiress with an experimental theater company in Chicago. She decided she “liked Los Angeles” and then commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build her a residence/ theater compound. I don’t know why I don’t share this with Nina. She might find it interesting. Or maybe she’d think I’m vapid for caring so much about an heiress.
“So,” Nina says, and I’m snatched from my thoughts. “What can you tell me about Shiny AF’s decision to break up?”
“Are you interviewing Jax and Pilar?” I ask. “Yumiko?” This feels important. I don’t want to betray them.
“I spoke to Jax last night,” she says.
I picture Jax and Nina in the Kingdom’s cobalt glow: Jax on his couch, legs crossed, thrilled for the audience, ecstasy in his eyes, pontificating with abandon; Nina sitting on the floor, disappearing into open-ended questions and rolling new joints as Jax’s sermon unfolds.
Nina looks down at her lap. “He seems to have a nice setup there.”
I swallow. I had forgotten that Jax is still at the facility. I haven’t visited him yet. I’ve driven halfway to Malibu three times. But each time I merge onto the 1, I remember him trying to baptize me on the beach that day and my throat starts to close up and I have to pull over. I turn around, and to assuage my guilt, I blast Yeezus on the way home in his honor.
“You visited him?” I ask.
She nods. “How is your relationship with Jax?”
“Copacetic,” I say. “I’m sure we’ll see Dead Stars next time they perform in LA.”
Nina picks up a blade of grass and starts tearing its edges, like Jake Perez hates when I do. “Jax really adores you.” She gives the blade another tiny tear. “He couldn’t stop gloating yesterday. He thinks you’re, like, magical.”
I feel sad and happy and annoyed at the same time. “Jax would hype up a rock,” I say, just as I feel a tear rising up.
Nina bursts out laughing. Her lip quivers and I have another stirring.
“I’ve actually seen him do it!” I lie, just to play up the bit. “We were smoking a cigarette outside the Mirror Box, and he picked up this dirty rock on the ground and was all, ‘Yassssss, queen, slayyyy.’ And he held up the rock and showed it to everyone around us and was like, ‘Isn’t she so chic? So petite! Ugh, I just want to dress this angelic goddess.’ Then he got all frantic, like, ‘Give this queen a mic, ASAP!’”
Nina is laughing so hard tears are streaming down her face, and I feel calm for the first time since I got in her car.
“What about your relationship with Pilar?” Nina asks when she finally stops laughing, and my muscles tense again.
“Same,” I say. “She has a show next month in some warehouse downtown. I plan on going.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m going too,” says Nina. “I talk to her tomorrow.”
I’m relieved she changed the subject from Jax, about whom I still have many conflicting feelings. At this point, I think he’s best experienced from afar, both of us rapping Yeezus at the same time on separate sides of the city.
“Cool,” I say. I imagine Pilar in a dramatic blue coat, smoking thin cigarettes and acting distant and forlorn. At the least appropriate time, she’ll sing her answer, then giggle softly to herself. Her skin will glow like a Glossier ad.
“So,” Nina says to her lap. “The breakup?”
“Our breakup was organic,” I say. “What we had wasn’t sustainable.” I realize it sounds like I’m talking about farming, but it’s best to be vague. If there’s one thing I learned from my mother, it’s that you never need to explain yourself.
“Expand?” Nina says.
I grin. “Remember that article you wrote?… FADER, I think it was?”
Nina bites her lip. “Fair enough.” She touches her neck and I suddenly remember we’ve been intimate, that she isn’t just a journalist interviewing me. Her neck is pale and delicate, sprinkled with freckles, a painting that belongs in the Met. I turn my head away, not wanting to objectify her. But also wishing she would objectify me.
“Yumiko?”
“I’m going to dance class with her later,” I say. “We go every week.”
We actually go every day. Sometimes twice. I even tried to use Wicked Ice money to pay Crystal to come to my apartment and give Yumiko and me a private class. She came over but she didn’t take my money. Afterward, we sat in plastic chairs on my balcony taking puffs of my vape pen and bitching about capitalism, then zoning out and looking at the leaves.
“I’m grateful for dance right now,” I say. “It centers me.”
I worry I sound New Agey and corny, a California transplant cliché, but Nina just nods. She really seems nicer today.
“Speaking of Yumiko,” Nina asks, “what happened with her case? Has it been resolved?”
This question gives me pause. My instinct is to withhold, but I also have nothing to lose. “It hasn’t,” I say. “The California judicial system is slow as hell.” I pause. “Imagine the pharmacy section of Walgreens.”
“Are you still practicing law?” she asks.
A breeze hits my face. “No.” I look down at the city wistfully again, twirl a blade of grass in my fingers. “I’m looking for a new job. Yumiko’s ‘man’… “
Nina laughs when I put up air quotes and I relax again.
I tell her about how he works at the LA Spotify office and got me an interview to be a curator, and at a certain point the conversation starts to flow, becomes less of a question-and-answer situation. I tell her I still vape cannabis a few times a week, which I call “cannabis” now because I’m in my thirties, and I take my Celexa, but I’m not drinking alcohol or doing other drugs at the moment. She tells me she is taking a break from weed because it was making her “distant” and “abrupt.” I get very silent and she says, “Which you know.” Then she laughs and so do I.
When the sky starts to turn a darker blue and I see the faint hint of the moon in the distance, Nina asks me about Ellie.
“Done,” I say. The nicest thing I can do for Ellie right now, I’ve decided—and my therapist agrees—is to leave her alone.
“One last question,” Nina says.
I pray it’s not about Beau.
“Are you making new music?”
A day after the breakup was announced, Wyatt Walcott sent me an Instagram DM saying how sad she was. The industry is garbage, she wrote, but you should put out a solo project. I’ve since been writing and recording raps over other musicians’ beats on GarageBand in my bedroom, just like in the old days. But I haven’t had the urge to share anything yet.
Instead of answering, I just put a finger to my lips. I hope she adds this gesture in the article.
“Understood,” she says. She starts to stand up and I follow. It’s jarring, being plucked from the safety of our conversation, with its clear purpose, and being ejected back into the randomness of the day.
“Thanks for your time.”
“So business.” I laugh. “That’s all we are, right? Just two girl bosses.”
Nina bites her lip; her tooth pierces a freckle. “We aren’t girl bosses,” she says. “Neither of us has AC.”
I breathe in sharply, feigning indignation. “How dare you?” For a second I miss being onstage, then remember that it almost killed me.
Nina picks up the flannel and waves it in the air, allowing bits of debris to fly into the olive grove, then starts walking toward the car. Once we’re both looking ahead, she says, “I feel pretty awkward around you.”
“Same,” I say. It’s true, and it comes out easily. Maybe the subconscious can unleash itself without chemical assistance.
We’re now walking through the olive grove, our black boots marching in unison. She trips on her shoelace and I accidentally laugh, but she seems okay and she laughs too. She sits on a concrete ledge to tie her shoe and I sit down beside her. I accidentally plop down a little too close, so that our legs are touching, and I can feel her pulse in her thigh, or maybe it’s mine.
Suddenly I’m speaking without thinking. “I can’t believe you hooked up with Beau,” I say, the words coming out quick. I look up right into the sun, which burns in a good way. “You knew how much he triggered me. And I never said anything, but he took nude photos of me without my consent.” I’m deciding to weaponize this fact despite that it really never bothered me.
“Wait, what?”
I remove my hands from my face and Nina is looking right in my eyes and it’s intense and uncomfortable.
“I mean,” I say, “it’s not exactly, um, confirmed, but I’m pretty sure he took advantage of me in Palm Springs. Jake Perez found the photos online.”
“Wait,” Nina says. “The photos of you by the pool?”
I nod, confused.
“Prue,” she says. “You don’t remember?”
I shrug and mumble something about “light addiction issues” under my breath.
“Oh my god.” She looks down at her boots. “I’m a predator.”
“You’re not a predator,” I say. “Wait, you took them?” I feel relief, then something approaching delight.
She shakes her head. “I feel awful.”
“Honestly, I’m thrilled.” I feel silly for not realizing. The photos were too tasteful to have been taken by Beau. Knowing the truth makes me feel better than I felt before, despite that I was keeping myself in the dark to avoid feeling bad. I don’t say any of this out loud.
Nina laughs, then puts her hands on her face. When she removes them, her cheeks are splotchy and her eyes are red. She opens and closes her mouth, then says, “I took advantage of you.”
“It’s fine, honestly,” I say. I try to take stock of how I feel, like my therapist has been teaching me. I can’t detect any feeling, but I do notice the breeze hitting my skin, which reminds me I have arms. “We’re all taking advantage of each other all the time. Isn’t that, like, the human condition?”
Nina kicks some dust with her boot. “That’s pretty depressing.”
“Welcome to me,” I say, then put my hand under my chin like I’m on a billboard, trying to make my face all cute, like I used to do with Ellie. “Maybe catch me when my Celexa kicks back in.”
Nina tugs on a curl by her temple, then releases it, and it bounces up toward her crown. “You seemed so into it.” Her expression is tense, different from the unflappable Nina I remember from the Kingdom. “You were writhing around on the concrete, your body was making these amazing shapes… “
My cheeks heat.
Nina stares at the ground, then looks up. “But I didn’t put the photos online.”
“Oh,” I say. “My friend Jake Perez found them on a Tumblr called ‘Island Princessa,’ with x’s instead of s’s and c’s…”
Nina rolls her eyes, then her entire upper body. “Fucking Beau,” she says. “He borrowed my laptop right after Palm Springs. He’s so shady I could kill him.” She kicks some dirt with her boot—aggressively—and I remember having sex with her.
I take stock of how I feel: turned on, but also jealous. “Do you feel homicidal about everyone you hook up with?” I ask. “Should I be concerned?”
She looks right into my eyes again. “I really did like you.”
My stomach does a little flip.
“I guess I wanted to make you jealous.” She looks down at her boots and I look down at mine.
I laugh. “You bitch,” I say, even though I want to kiss her.
“I know,” she says. “I’m not even poly… “
I want to yell or hit her. Instead I laugh. “Poly folly,” I say in my seductive alien voice, like I’m being autotuned on the spot. Then I say, “I’m not even queer.” The word is too embarrassing to me now. Lesbian is more glamorous.
Nina smiles, then tugs another curl. “You promise you aren’t upset with me?” she asks. “About the photos?”
“Yes!” My voice is spastic and it echoes. A woman on the other edge of the grove glares. I remind myself I don’t care what she thinks. “I was born to be photographed in an alcoholic blackout.”
Nina laughs.
My cheeks heat again, then a welcome breeze rushes through the grove. “Do you feel better now?” I ask.
“A little.”
She grins, then stands up. I follow her lead. We’re facing each other, and my gaze floats to the pale section of skin between the top of her jeans and the bottom of her crop top. For reasons unclear to me, I reach out to shake her hand. It’s so dorky, but she rolls with it, and so do I. Our handshake is cool and damp, and I can’t tell whether her palms are sweating or mine.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my agent, Sarah Phair, for believing in me when no one else did. To Olivia Taylor Smith and Unnamed Press for bringing my dreams to life. And Jaya Nicely for this absolutely perfect cover.
Thanks to my early and insightful readers: Catie Disabato, Rachel Dempsey, Lauren Strasnick, Becca Wild, Mary Bowers, Lauren Kinney, Ana R
eyes, and Chelsea Hodson. To my incredible writing group, Shitty First Drafts—KK, Maggie, and Robin. And to my most impactful writing teachers: Francesca Lia Block and Claire Pettengill.
Thanks to Eric Fulcher, the hype man of my dreams.
To Catie Disabato, for her unparalleled kindness.
To my mom, Palmer, for her eternal elegance, for listening to all my dumb ideas, and for loving me even though I never became an accountant.
To my sister, Maimai, for forcing me to smoke weed and being my best friend. To my granny, the original icon. To my brother, Joe, for being very cool for a boy. To my dad, for not cutting me off.
To Abby Kohlman, for being friends with me since before I waxed my eyebrows.
To Aaron Alexander, Nicola Fumo, Harrison Jobe, Aubrey Bellamy, Kenzy El-Mohandes, Mary Russ, Alana Kopke, Kentaro Ikegami, Chris Martin, Alex Rose, Lindsay O’Brien, Andrew Extein, Alex Kreger, Molly Coyne, Nat Shelness, Ria Fulton, Cassie Spodak, Liz Constantinou, and Christie Bahna, for being the most inspiring friends and for dealing with moi.
To my muses: Mary-Kate Olsen, Lana Del Rey, Maria Wyeth, Little Edie Beale, Sonja Morgan, Azealia Banks, the Red Scare ladies, and Kanye West.
And to you for reading. Thank you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna Dorn is a writer living in Los Angeles. A former criminal defense attorney, she regularly writes about legal issues for Justia and Medium. She has written about culture for Los Angeles Review of Books, The Hairpin, and Vice Magazine. Anna has a JD from UC Berkeley Law School, an MFA from Antioch University-Los Angeles, and a BA from UNC-Chapel Hill.