I’d been in Los Angeles less than a day and I still wasn’t sure what to make of the place.

That wasn’t a complaint. Los Angeles was just different. Coming from Atlanta, I was used to a city that felt familiar even when I didn’t know the neighborhood. I understood the rhythm of it. The traffic, the sprawl, the way you could drive twenty minutes and somehow still be in the same damn city. I could tell what side of town I was on from the buildings and the roads.

L.A. didn’t give me that. Everything felt bigger and more compressed at the same time. The mountains were right there, but so was the ocean. Palm trees on streets that had no business having palm trees. Expensive cars every couple of minutes. Everybody moved like they had somewhere important to be, including the ones standing still.

Then there was the industry thing. I’d known Roland was doing well out here. I hadn’t understood what doing well meant until I started meeting the people he’d met. Actors, producers, a director whose name I recognized from a movie I’d half-watched on a plane, and a whole tier of people I’d never heard of who could apparently get a film made if they woke up feeling like it.

Roland had been one of my closest friends since high school. Basketball first, which was probably the foundation of the whole thing, and then years of doing dumb shit together. Construction sites at night. Getting chased out of places we had no business being. Skinny-dipping with girls who were willing to make decisions of the same general quality we were. Staying out until hours that guaranteed somebody’s mother would be sitting up in the dark when we got back.

Nothing with drugs or guns or anything that could have permanently wrecked our lives.

Roland moved out here to write full-time. I stayed in Atlanta. Somehow both of us ended up all right. He’d landed deals on a few productions, and those had introduced him to a ridiculous number of people, and I was proud of him in a way I’d never actually said out loud.

Tonight’s party was for one of those people.

Amy Sutherland was twenty-five, an aspiring actress who had just booked her first real role, and Roland had met her earlier in the year working a project. Tonight was her birthday. She was celebrating at her condo, which was big, bright, and decorated with the kind of restraint that costs money. Enough luxury to make you wonder whether she owned all of it or had just gotten very good at seeming like she did.

The place was loud in the specific way a party gets when there are more people than the furniture planned for. Music underneath everything, turned up just past conversation level, so everybody was talking a half-step louder than they needed to. The kitchen had become the center of gravity the way kitchens always do. Somebody kept the balcony door cracked, and every so often a thread of cool air cut through the warmth and the perfume and the smell of somebody’s cigarette out there. Ice in a metal bucket by the drink table. Two women on the couch with their heels off and their feet tucked under them, already at the stage of the night where they’d stopped pretending they were going to circulate.

I’d been there about thirty minutes when I decided I liked it. Mostly because I could stand in one place with a drink and watch.

People watching was one of my favorite things. I’d always been like that, and I’d never fully been able to explain why it was interesting. The way somebody held a glass. Whether they looked you in the eye while they talked or checked over your shoulder for something better. Who interrupted, who got interrupted, who laughed a beat too late because they’d stopped listening a while ago. Who gravitated toward whoever mattered most in the room. Who was comfortable, and who was working very hard at looking comfortable. You could learn a surprising amount about a person without asking them a single question.

Roland, for example, was impossible to miss. He’d always been outgoing, but Los Angeles had turned that up another notch. Maroon button-down tucked into jeans, blazer, loafers, short dreads neatly done, and that grin that made strangers feel like they’d known him a year. He was working the room, but not in the fake way. Roland genuinely liked people. Within half an hour he had an entire group of strangers laughing, two women clearly interested, and one of them not bothering to hide it.

Neither was Amy, which was the funny part.

She’d been talking to four or five people at once all night, but her attention kept drifting back toward Roland every time he opened his mouth. And Roland, to his credit, wasn’t flirting. Not directly. He was praising her. How hard she’d worked. How long she’d stayed in it. How many times she’d been told no before somebody finally said yes.

“You deserve this,” he told her.

Amy lit up like somebody had handed her a set of keys.

I took a sip of my Jack and Coke and shook my head. Yeah. I could see where that was headed.

Earlier that evening, while we were getting ready at his apartment, Roland had leaned into the bathroom doorway and announced it.

“Bro, I’m telling you. Tonight is your night.”

I’d looked at him in the mirror. “My night for what?”

“You know what.”

“I genuinely don’t.”

“Bullshit.”

I’d laughed, because he knew exactly how little effort I put into meeting women. It wasn’t that I was opposed to a good time with somebody who happened to be interested. I just wasn’t going to spend an evening hunting for one. I’d rather have a couple of drinks, eat something good, talk shit with my friend, and enjoy being somewhere that wasn’t home.

Roland had no intention of letting that happen. Every fifteen minutes or so, he found a way to work me into whatever conversation he was running.

“This is my boy Amari.”

Then, before I could get a word in: “Dude’s an aerospace engineer.”

A woman with a clipboard’s posture and no clipboard raised her eyebrows at me. “Like NASA?”

“Like airplanes.”

“He builds the flight systems,” Roland said. “Custom stuff. The part that keeps the whole thing from becoming an expensive metal coffin.”

“I do all right.”

That was my standard answer. Sometimes I upgraded to I try. Then I’d take another sip and let somebody else talk.

Three conversations later he did it again, and this time he added the degrees, which was worse. UVA for the bachelor’s. Georgia State for the master’s, because apparently I’d gotten bored and gone back. Somebody said wow in the tone people use when they’ve decided you’re a category instead of a person.

I didn’t need a room full of strangers knowing my résumé. Whatever made you interesting at a Hollywood party, I was reasonably sure it wasn’t a mechanical engineering degree. I was there to hang out with my friend. Roland kept doing it anyway.

Then the front door opened.

A guy walked in, and the first thing I noticed was that he was already drunk, or close enough that the distinction didn’t matter. Dark hair, a lot of it. Mixed or Latino, maybe, though I couldn’t tell for sure and it didn’t seem like the kind of thing worth deciding from across a room. Jacket over a T-shirt, jeans, Converse.

He came through the door like he expected somebody to announce him.

Nobody did.

He handled it himself.

“What’s up, everybody!”

A few heads turned. Somebody laughed. He went straight for the drink table without stopping to greet a single person he’d just interrupted, and poured himself something with a ratio that made me wince from fifteen feet away.

This guy is going to be hammered in twenty minutes.

Then I noticed the woman who’d come in behind him. And forgot about him.

She stopped just inside the door and let the room happen for a second before she moved into it, which is a thing people do when they aren’t sure they want to be there yet. When she finally walked in, she didn’t follow him. She drifted a few degrees off his line, close enough to be with him and far enough that a stranger might not assume it.

I was fairly certain they’d arrived together. I was also fairly certain she was putting effort into not looking like it.

That made me curious before anything else did. She was tall. The heels were doing some of that work, but not all of it. When she passed a guy I’d been talking to earlier, I had a reference point, and she was somewhere around my height in her high heels.

Light brown hair down past her shoulders. Fair skin. A green dress, dark green, the kind of fabric that caught the light every time she turned, and short enough that she’d made a decision about it in front of a mirror at some point tonight. I couldn’t have told you what the dress was called or who made it. I could tell it was expensive the same way I could tell a plane was well built from the outside without opening a panel. Nothing about it was working hard.

Her eyes were light. That’s as far as I got from where I was standing. Blue or gray or something between the two, and at that distance the room’s lighting wasn’t going to give me more than that. She was holding a drink she hadn’t touched.

I looked away and took a sip of mine. Then I looked back, which answered a question about myself I hadn’t asked.

The guy’s name arrived a few seconds later.

“Keenan!”

Somebody called it from over by the kitchen. Keenan raised his glass over his head.

“That’s me!”

He said it loud enough that half the condo heard him. I watched him take a long pull, then another.

Yep. He was going to be a problem.

Not because he was drunk. People drank at parties. Hell, I was drinking. It was the way he needed the room to confirm he was in it. He started telling jokes to a circle of guys who clearly knew him, and a couple of them landed. A couple didn’t. One or two were just far enough out of pocket that I caught two people trading a look over his shoulder.

He didn’t notice. Or he did and it didn’t register as information.

He was trying to become the center of the room, which was the part that wasn’t going to work, because Roland already was one and hadn’t done anything to get there. Roland never had to reach for it. People just handed it to him. Keenan was trying to take something that only gets given.

I glanced back at the woman.

She’d moved to the edge of the group. Still smiling. Still doing the job. But the smile had gone shallow somewhere in the last ten minutes, and when Keenan got louder, she found a reason to be six inches farther away than she’d been. When he laughed at his own joke, she looked down into the drink she still wasn’t drinking.

Then she checked the door. Not obviously. A glance, the kind you’d miss if you weren’t already looking.

Then the room. Then back at him.

Her shoulders came down about half an inch. That was the moment I understood.

She regretted coming. Maybe not the party. Maybe just the arriving-with-him part of it.

I didn’t know her. I didn’t know Keenan. I had no idea what they were to each other. Dating, friends, coworkers, two people who’d met an hour before they got in the car. Not my business, and I’d spent enough of my life reading rooms to know that being good at it doesn’t grant you standing in them.

But I knew that look. She’d already started working the math on how to get out of the situation. And somewhere in there, my attention had stopped being on Roland, or Amy, or the party, or Los Angeles.

I had a flight home Monday morning. I knew exactly one person in this city. The woman in the green dress had walked in on somebody else’s arm, and whatever that somebody was to her, he was hers to deal with and not mine to have an opinion about.

All of that was true.

I set my empty glass down and started toward the drink table anyway.

I made it as far as the drink table and no further, because Keenan had started making rounds.

Apparently being in the room had stopped being enough. Now everybody had to be told. I watched him work his way along the wall, shaking hands, saying his own name before anybody asked for it, and I had about ninety seconds to decide whether I wanted to be somewhere else when he got to me.

I didn’t move fast enough.

“Hey, man. I’m Keenan.”

He stuck his hand out at Roland first. Roland, being Roland, shook it and smiled like he’d been waiting all night.

“Roland.”

“Good to meet you, bro.” He turned. “And you?”

“Amari.”

“This is my boy Amari,” Roland said, because he couldn’t help himself.

Keenan nodded at the condo in general, at the ceiling, at the catering trays somebody had set out on the island. “Y’all ever been to one of these where everybody’s a writer?” He lowered his voice. “I got cornered by a dude for twenty minutes about his pilot. Twenty minutes. I don’t even know what a pilot is. I was nodding like I had notes.”

I laughed before I decided to.

Behind him, the woman in green laughed too. Quick and real, a little surprised, and then she caught it and pulled it back in.

That was the first useful thing I’d learned all night.

Keenan grinned at his own line and settled into it. “Where you from, Amari?”

“Atlanta.”

His face lit up. “Hotlanta!”

I nearly inhaled my drink. Got it down without embarrassing myself, but not by much.

Hotlanta. Nobody in Atlanta calls it Hotlanta. Nobody. Walk into a bar on Edgewood and say it out loud and somebody will quietly begin the process of revoking your residency.

I gave him the polite smile.

“Man, I love Atlanta.”

“It’s a good city.”

He looked at me a second longer than the conversation needed, and something behind his eyes changed gear.

“You don’t sound like you’re from Atlanta.”

There it was.

I knew exactly what he meant, because I’d been handed some version of it since I was about fifteen. He wasn’t hearing what he’d budgeted for. He had a sound in his head that he’d gotten from somewhere he’d never examined, and I wasn’t it, and the gap between the two had come out of his mouth before anything in him thought to stop it.

I could have asked him what somebody from Atlanta was supposed to sound like. I’ve asked before. It never goes anywhere good and it always costs me the rest of my night.

I took a sip instead.

“I just talk,” I said. “But I’m definitely from Atlanta.”

There was about a second and a half of nothing.

Roland’s eyes came over to me and went away again. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. We’d been having that conversation without words since sophomore year.