No One Knows Us Here(8)

“Well, that’s the whole problem, right? If they’re so wonderful, why do they have to pay for it?”

“That’s not the question you should be asking,” Mira said. “The question you should be asking is, Why not get paid for it?”

Mira said it was all very simple. Nothing like what I was picturing. All her contacts were fully vetted. Classy guys, most of them businessmen from other towns, who wanted the girlfriend experience for the night. Oh, the “Girlfriend Experience” was a very common thing, Mira assured me. It had its own acronym: GFE. The Girlfriend Experience was even a movie starring Sasha Grey and a scripted TV show on Starz. This wasn’t some sleazy affair. This was a “dress up and eat for free in fancy restaurants with educated businessmen” kind of situation! And if Mira put out after a date, it was in a hotel with robes and room service and fluffy white towels folded into swans.

“That’s more than you can say for those Lookinglass dudes, right?” she asked me.

“It was Tinder—”

“Wasn’t one guy a freshman in college?” Mira laughed, recalling a story I barely remembered myself. I didn’t recollect telling her, though obviously I must have. “He took you to his dorm room and made his roommate get out of bed and sit out in the hall until you were done.”

“I didn’t know he lived in a dorm,” I protested.

“And you did that for free, you know?” Mira wasn’t looking at me when she said that. She directed her gaze up, behind my shoulder. Then she wet her lips and broke into a huge smile.

I turned around, but there was no one there. “Who were you looking at?” I asked her.

“No one.”

“You were smiling at someone.”

Mira pointed to a spot above my right shoulder, and I turned around again.

“It’s a Glasseye,” she said. “See? Just above that register area over there.”

I saw the podium with a small register on it—a little station for the rooftop servers to plug in their orders. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at.”

“Under the eaves. It’s like an eyeball.”

I saw it then. It looked exactly like its name implied, a glass eye, the size of a ping-pong ball.

“They’re just cameras,” Mira explained. “If you’re on Lookinglass, they recognize you.”

“I’m not on Lookinglass.”

“So don’t worry about it.”

“They can’t see me?”

“Anyone can see you, I guess, if they’re watching my feed, but they’ll have no clue who you are, so it doesn’t matter.”

“Great.”

“Someone is always standing around with their phone out, right? And then you walk by, and all of a sudden you’re a part of whatever they’re taking a picture of, whatever they happen to be recording at the time. It’s no different than that.”

It did seem different, though I couldn’t articulate why.

“It’s fun,” she said. “I don’t know. I’ll probably close my account once I move.”

I tried to busy myself with the food that had arrived on the table. I stirred wasabi into my soy sauce and grasped a maki roll with chopsticks. “Mira,” I said when I’d swallowed it and washed it down with an ungraceful glug of water. “Thank you for the phone. Thank you for thinking of me. I just—I just don’t think it will be necessary. I have a job. I have a place to live. I’m doing okay. Really.”

“What about Wendy?”

“What about her?”

“She told me you were supposed to have custody of her. You flaked out.”

“I was in college.”

“So?”

“So I was in no position to take care of a little kid. I’m in no position now.”

“But you could. If you tried.”

I stood up quickly. The cloth napkin I had crumpled up on my lap fell to the floor. “Thanks for this.” I waved my hand over the food, the drinks. No way was I paying for it. She was loaded. She was swimming in money. I was the one working retail and then getting lectured by a high-paid escort for not taking care of my little sister when I was still a kid myself. More or less.





CHAPTER 3


It was early October when I found out what Wendy had done. It was easy to remember because it was my birthday. All of us, all the housemates—Steele, Brooke and Melanie, and Margorie, who had moved in when Mira moved out a couple of weeks earlier—were gathered around our kitchen table for the occasion. Margorie’s boyfriend was there, too. He was new. A stocky, rockabilly type with oversize sideburns and a genuine vintage gas station attendant shirt with an embroidered name tag stitched to the breast. The name tag read LEROY, but that wasn’t his name. I didn’t remember his name. Skippy? Biff? Some other midcentury nickname that couldn’t have been real.

Margorie had produced some of those cone-shaped party hats and made us all wear them. We were drinking room-temperature prosecco and eating cake.

The cake was in the middle of the table, twenty-three candles flickering and sparking. They were singing the birthday song and I was sitting there, that stupid paper cone hat on my head, when my phone, resting right in front of me, lit up and began to vibrate. The bluish light of the screen took over the room, and the singing stopped. Janet Moseby’s name flashed on the screen. Wendy’s grandmother.