twenty-one and over.

Over mussels at Bar Americain in Mohegan Sun of all places Meg and Lisa decide that what I really need to do this summer is write the next 50 Shades of Grey and get rich enough to take us all on a cruise. “Also you can buy a mansion,” Lisa says. Earlier we were drinking Stoli Raz but now we are drinking something else Raz, which the waitress says is better. “The house that porn built.”

It’s Lisa’s birthday so we order chocolate cream pie and more cocktails and look out the window trying to guess which girls are hookers. There’s a bach party across the restaurant and everyone at it has bright blue hair. I’ve never been to Mohegan Sun before and I wonder if it’s a thing you do for fun in central Connecticut, just another Saturday night: downstairs a bull-riding event is breaking up and people start to wander in wearing plaid and cowboy hats, boots clicking across the marble floor. In the middle of the casino is a sculpture by Dale Chihuly. We get catcalled by two men wearing crowns made out of balloons. We share a cab back to the hotel with two wasted girls who turn out to have gone  to my high school; they drunkenly namedrop my eleventh-grade precalc teacher while the hulking neon complex recedes in the distance, everything gone suddenly dark.

“I’d need a pen name,” I say eventually, considering. I wonder who in the world I might be.