“No. She was in a girl group, and the group danced, in videos. But she wasn’t, like, a dancer. She wasn’t an artist, or something. She was just following orders.”
Layne brushed her pink hair aside and stared at Hwa hard through the veil of way too many brandy Alexanders. “Go Jung-hwa.” She pointed. “You hate your mother.”
Hwa shrugged. “So? The feeling’s mutual.”
“What did she do when you moved out?”
“Nothing,” Hwa said. “I mostly moved out three years ago, anyway. She was probably just glad to get the last little bit over with. She’ll have another closet, now. That’s why I had to share a room, growing up. Because she needed a whole other bedroom just for all her sexy shit.”
Layne nodded to herself knowingly, like she’d just solved some big mystery. She wagged a finger. “I get it.”
“Get what?”
“No, I get it. I finally get it. You’re worried that if you let any part of yourself be pretty, you’ll turn into your mom.”
Hwa drained her bourbon. As she did, she felt the world turn gently on its axis. This was the moment she had been waiting for. The perfect and complete awareness of her own fucked-up-ness. The moment at which her body finally hinted that maybe, just maybe, she should have a drink of water.
She rapped the bar with her knuckles, and turned to Layne. “No,” she said. “I don’t try because trying would be stupid. I have the kind of face that people edit out of their vision. It’s not going to look any better with makeup, or a subscription, or augments, or whatever. So I don’t bother.”
Layne frowned. Because she was drunk, it looked as though she were trying to thread her whole face through the eye of a needle. Hwa frowned. “Are you okay?”
Layne was not okay. She was clutching her throat. She was turning blue. She was falling off her bar stool.
“Layne!”
Hwa fell with her. Layne slid down her body to the floor. Hwa felt the music thrumming up through the tile and slicing through the air. Drums and trumpets and sharp, shimmering piano. Layne wriggled on the floor. Was this how Hwa looked when she had a seizure? All around her, people were laughing. People laughed when she seized, too. It had happened at school once, when she was in grade four. She peed herself and Sunny didn’t come and so she had to wear clothes from the Lost & Found and everyone called her Diaper Baby and Retard after that.
Funny, the things you remembered, as your friend lay dying in your arms.
It happened faster than Hwa thought possible. A couple of minutes at most. But those minutes stretched out, became unbearable, like a note held too long or a terrible, damning silence. One minute Layne’s eyes were roving around the room, as if she were trying to remember every detail all at once, and her heels were driving into the floor, squeaking and leaving black streaks. And the next minute she was gone. Not still, but absent. Vanished. Like someone had done a magic trick with her body, and replaced the real Layne with a warm, limp dummy.
“Oh, shit,” Hwa heard herself say. “Oh, Jesus. Layne. I’m sorry.”
The music had stopped. Layne stared straight ahead. Pink foam dribbled from one corner of her mouth.
“Come on, baby.” Someone’s arms were around her. Lifting her up under her shoulders. Rivaudais. She knew his cologne. The rings on his hands. “Come on, now. Up you get.”
“She’s dead.” Hwa’s knees went out from under her, and Rivaudais pulled her up. “She’s dead.”
“I know, baby girl. You just come on back.”
“We should cover her up—”
“Someone else can do that. Let’s get you some coffee, right now.”
Hwa untangled herself from his grasp. She stood herself up. “We were just talking.” She pointed. “We were just talking, just a minute ago.”
*
The police took her statement at the bar. Rivaudais’s coffee helped. He made it light and sweet with a lot of sugar and real cream. It tasted like a headache. Hwa felt that headache spiking somewhere deep in her skull as she drank it, but she drank it anyway, and then had some more, a fresh cup every time she told the story of the evening. The cops asked her about Layne. How they knew each other. What Layne did for a living. If she’d been sick. If she’d caught anything. If she and Hwa had an arrangement. If this was off-book.
Then Hwa said the words bodyguard, and Joel Lynch, and they focused on something in their eyes, and suddenly they were very nice and said that of course she could leave, this was just a statement, and if she thought of anything else she could contact them any time, day or night, no problem.
It was drizzling by the time she made it to the train platform. More wind than rain. Colder than she remembered. Her shirt stuck to her skin where Layne’s bloody foam had soaked it. It would look a sight on the train, she realized. But there was nothing for it. She pushed forward.
In a pool of orange exit light, Síofra sat waiting for her on a bench outside the station. His hair was soaked black. Even his eyelashes were wet.