Movies have supplanted dreams in the popular consciousness, and have become our benchmark for the unreal, and the almost real.

There’s a girl looking at me. She’s wearing those tracksuit bottoms with the buttons up the sides, a cheap satin cami and heavy hoop earrings. I’m still bewildered by this act of appropriation: rich white girls pretending to be poor white girls (who I assume were originally appropriating 2000s hip-hop culture?) pretending to be rich black women. It’s bizarre.

The thing with Flo, with a lot of people our age: she’s so fucking quick to blame everyone else for her shit, you know? And you do choose these things. You choose to make yourself feel like an absolute fucking spineless, easily led pile of shit with a steaming hangover tomorrow morning. Maybe even tomorrow evening. The night is young, and I have so much cocaine in my bra.

I sit in the front, because I’m the only adult, and the only person who can handle talking to strangers for extended periods of time. I order drinks, I order cabs, I make men go away, I make drug deals happen, I get us into places. In the land of the borderline autistic, the man who can make eye contact is king.

There’s a soft part of your brain. A place where you’re still just a child. Once someone’s poked the soft spot, the dent doesn’t go away.