Ginnie Simpson’s mother is throwing a cocktail party. Guests in shimmery dresses, immaculate tuxedos laugh, shout, drift in and out of patches of moonlight on the darkened lawn. Cologne overpowers the scents of grass and soil. Ginnie, twelve but more like twenty-two, makes sure no one’s watching, then scrabbles in the dirt to uncover a burrow containing a flask of whiskey, half a pack of menthol cigarettes, a magazine proclaiming the secret to mind-blowing orgasms, and seventeen dollars in ones and quarters. She tucks her Uncle Joe’s Rolex beneath the magazine, hoping she’ll be in bed by the time he notices it’s missing, and can’t be accused of stealing it. The watch is a burden but also a swirling, effervescent delight, as things are when you’re not supposed to have them. She sips whiskey, lights a cigarette, chokes then drifts in a minty, insensate haze, as if some distant universe has dipped close and swallowed her up. Maybe she’ll sell the watch at school because she wants to go to Fiji and drink kava with the nut-brown natives. But then she’ll no longer have something stolen. She’ll rob herself of this tiny transcendence. No, she’ll keep it here, in the damp, devouring soil. A monument, a promise. Maybe the best thing she’s done so far. She heads back inside and stumbles into one of her father’s prize rose bushes. Thorns etch painful hieroglyphics on her shins. The roses, lemon-yellow, intricate, symmetrical, seem to mock her pimples and stringy hair and dirty feet. She decapitates a flower, slips it into her jacket pocket. Inside she snatches a cream-cheese and olive pastry from a tray held aloft by a smiling maid. She isn’t supposed to eat the party food—it’s for guests—but her mother forgot dinner and her stomach is a sour, yawning cave. Across the room a pink velvet sofa sprouts white tubes, which end in dingy socks and ragged Converse. Severed from a body and face, they are sort of botanical, like an exotic, as-yet unnamed plant unfurling itself in a faraway rainforest. Hey, she hisses, yanking on a shoe. Hey, get up, Joey. They call her little brother Joey to distinguish him from Uncle Joe and also because their mother claims the pregnancy left her with a fleshy pouch she can’t get rid of. Joey slides out, sticks his tongue out at her. It’s fuschia from the spiked punch he’s been drinking all night. Joey is only nine but as their father says, he can drink like an old man staring death in the face. Their father thinks it’s funny and their mother mostly doesn’t notice because her attention is only captured by what’s rare, expensive. The living room rug, handwoven in Bangladesh. The antique satin dress she wears tonight, champagne with a cascade of silvery beads that catch and refract the lamplight. Ginnie and Joey aren’t like the dress. They’re more like the dandelions their father pays a man to get rid of. Thrusting themselves up in stupid, sunlit triumph, existing for no other reason than that they refuse to die. Dummy, says Joey. I was having an amazing dream. Sorry, kangaroo. What was the dream? Well I was in this house but it wasn’t a house. It was more like a fifth dimension. Angels sang to me and stars tumbled out of the sky into my hands and didn’t burn me at all and just before you woke me up I was going to find out what they were really made of, because it wasn’t atoms and molecules. It was something else. Something no one in the whole world knows about. Wow. Far out. Joey sighs. Need another drink. Quit with the drinking for tonight. You’re gonna get sick. Nah, I puked twice already and didn’t care one bit. Besides you can’t tell me what to do because you’re way worse than me. You steal and lie about it. Still, you should listen to me because I love you. Nah, says Joey, rising and stumbling through a cluster of bodies that includes her mother’s boss, a fat man in a white tux, and his wife, a diminutive redhead who gnaws furtively at her nails. Watching Ginnie feels sad, envious. She used to bite her nails too. It was so intimate, so feral, so satisfying. But her mother said it was disgusting so she had to stop and start stealing instead. She thinks maybe everyone has to do something wrong, even if it’s just a little. Otherwise wouldn’t you suffocate in the world’s bright happy surfaces. Blinded by light without darkness. Joey returns with a glass of punch. Yum, he says, want a taste? No. Enjoy. You don’t know what you’re missing. He drains the glass, spits a slippery lemon seed onto the handwoven rug. Mom’s gonna kill you for that. She won’t know it was me. There’s like a hundred fifty people here. Maybe. You want to know a secret? What? Bet I already know. You’re terrible at keeping secrets. You have the wrong kind of face. I stole Uncle Joe’s Rolex. I heard him tell mom it was worth thirteen thousand dollars. Buried it in my secret place. It’s not really a secret, Ginnie. I saw you put stuff there lots of times. Yeah but you drink too much for anybody to believe you. In vino veritas, says Joey, grinning. When he smiles he’s like a kid on a Christmas card but he still smells of sour sweat and vodka and dirty socks. Nothing ever resolves itself, Ginnie thinks. Nothing is ever pure or true or easy to understand. She twines her fingers through Joey’s. You two, says their mother, who has materialized in a cinnamon-scented cloud. She’s tall and fluid and has iridescent blue toenails and misty lipstick. She seems made of lace and moonbeams. Ginnie studies her and wonders why it is that love is just a wound that never heals, or a dog you can’t stop from running into traffic. Guess I ought to make you go to bed, says their mother. Always something isn’t it. We can go to bed, Ginnie tells her. If it’s easier. I’m going to bed anyways, says Joey. This party is dumb. Her mother spits out an irritated sigh. Really it’s all the same to me, kiddo. But don’t steal and don’t get into one of your arguments. Last party I had to personally apologize to seven different people. Okay. Promise. Good. Her mother drifts over to the fat man, who has for some reason put on sunglasses. Ginnie thinks of how the watch gleamed in the dark. How it ticked and ticked, relentless, better than music because it didn’t create holes, it filled them, and better than a heartbeat because all hearts stop eventually. She knows she should give it back but there’s something hissing, hungry, eternal inside her. It demands tribute. In school they learned that the Aztecs sacrificed people because they believed their gods lusted after bones and blood and skin. The teacher explained that the people to be sacrificed accepted their fate. As if that one bright, shivering moment, just before the knife fell, as the crowds roared and the sunlight blazed, was worth the oblivion that followed. And what is it, she wonders, that separates belief and desperation, love and need. Maybe it’s all the same. Blind and vicious. She tips her head up and sees the redhead is staring down at her. She has mean, colorless eyes and a thin, twisty mouth. How old are you, she says. Depends on who you ask, Ginnie says, flashing her best smile. I’d say you’re about ten. But you’re pretty scrawny so I could be off. Doesn’t she feed you? Sure. We order out mostly. Mom likes sushi and Joey and I like samosas with mint chutney. Disgraceful. She ought to feed you real meals. Green vegetables, protein. The mint chutney’s green. A woman like that. What do you think she’s doing with my husband over there? Three guesses but you only need one. Um, says Ginnie. I might need all three, actually. I’ll pray for you, says the woman. She closes her eyes and mutters. Her hands circulate as if she’s conducting a symphony or making a puppet dance. Ginnie starts to feel like an insect pinned to a card in a museum. An empty beer can rolling by the side of a highway. She watches the woman’s thin white fingers, which bend and wriggle like worms. She wonders how much people would hate her if she kicked the woman in her skinny stomach. There, says the woman, opening her eyes. Now, you promise me you’ll confess your sins. That’s the only way you’ll be free of them. Sure, says Ginnie. Okay. The woman nods, satisfied, moves back to her husband. Free, Ginnie thinks. But her sins are load-bearing walls. Ornate pillars. The lattice that holds up the roses, which are too flimsy, too heavy-headed, to grow on their own, no matter how much water or sunlight they’re given. She remembers the roses in her pocket and fishes it out. The petals are darkened, smashed against each other. The thorns no longer threaten because they’ve subsided into the flattened stem, which leaks tepid green juices. I can’t have this rose, Ginnie realizes, it died the minute I plucked it. And what if there are no demanding gods, nothing to promise her redemption, only this half-hearted, damaged series of days that go on and on. She gets up, goes outside, unburies Uncle Joe’s Rolex, cleans the soil from it with her sleeve. Back inside, she sneaks up behind him and replaces the watch on the end table by his chair. Laughing, guzzling spiced rum and telling stories about rock climbing, Uncle Joe hasn’t noticed it was ever gone. Ginnie takes one last look at the watch, which is now only a thing, depleted of time and history. Upstairs she checks on Joey, sleeping with his wet mouth open. Maybe he’ll find the angels again, she thinks, and she hopes so. She goes to bed and dreams that she and Joey melt into shapeless slime, then burst from cocoons completely transformed, sure, for just one perfect second, that they have become what they were always supposed to be.