All These Things I've Done (Birthright #1)(19)

I went to my bedroom to find something to wear other than my old bathrobe. Nana once told me that, in her day, the way we dressed was called vintage. New clothing production had all but ceased a decade ago, and a sartorial concoction like Scarlet’s required a lot of effort and planning. Unlike my best friend, I hadn’t put any thought into my outfit for that evening. I threw on an old dress of my mother’s – red jersey, short and swingy but with a modest neckline. It had a hole in the armpit but I wasn’t planning on doing a lot of hand-raising anyway. On my way back to the living room, I knocked on Leo’s door to say goodnight and to make sure there weren’t any hard feelings between us. He didn’t answer so I pushed it open slightly. The lights were out, and he was buried under the covers. I gently closed the door behind me and went to join my friends.

‘Oh,’ Natty said when she saw me, ‘you look pretty!’

Scarlet whistled at me, and Win saluted.

‘Knock it off. You guys are embarrassing me,’ I said, though, if I’m totally honest, I did enjoy their compliments. ‘We may as well go to Little Egypt now.’

Win removed his hat from my sister’s head and we were on our way.

It was only a five-minute walk to the club but it took twice as long because of Scarlet’s shoes, which were stilettos and not necessarily the greatest for walking. By the time we got to Little Egypt, the line to get in extended past the long flight of marble steps that led into the building. Little Egypt was pretty much the only thing going in this part of town.

Scarlet flagged down the bouncer. ‘Can my friends and I please go in? Pretty please.’

‘What’ll you give me if I let you, blondie?’ the bouncer wanted to know.

‘My undying gratitude,’ Scarlet replied.

‘Back of the line,’ he said. We had just started walking down the stairs when the bouncer called, ‘Hey, you! Red dress.’ I turned. ‘Annie, right?’

I made a face. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘Nah, it’s not like that. I used to work for your pops. Good man.’ He unhooked the velvet rope, waved the three of us inside, then reached into his pocket and thrust a bunch of drink tickets at me. ‘Toast to the old man, OK?’

I nodded. ‘Thanks.’ This sort of thing happened pretty often, but it was still nice. Daddy had had a lot of enemies but even more friends.

‘Be careful in there,’ the bouncer warned. ‘It’s crazy tonight.’

The bar was below a sign that said INFORMATION. Another sign, bolted to the front of the counter, listed admission prices from back when Little Egypt used to be a museum. We traded in our tickets for beers. There was only one kind and it wasn’t particularly savoury: a fizzy, amber pond scum. Why would someone ruin perfectly good water for this?

‘Bottoms up,’ Scarlet said.

‘What’s that phrase mean exactly?’ Win asked.

Scarlet shook her head. ‘You ask a lot of questions,’ she said. She took his hat off his head and placed it on her own. I felt sad for Scarlet, because she was using the same move my little sister had.

I took a sip of my beer and, in my head, I toasted Daddy. Nana said that kids used to get in trouble for drinking when she was young and teen drinking had been illegal. Now you could get alcohol at any age as long as the person supplying it had the right permits – it was no harder to come by than ice cream and significantly less hard than getting, say, a ream of paper. It seemed incredibly strange to imagine that people had ever cared so much about alcohol. Maybe the illegality had been the enticement, I don’t know. I’d rather have water any day. Alcohol made me fuzzy when my lifestyle required me to be sharp.

We left the bar and headed to the dance floor. The music was appropriately deafening and someone had brought in strobe lights, but you could still feel that the original intent of this place hadn’t been nightclub. Even packed with a thousand people, all the stone made it incongruously cool inside. There were marble pedestals everywhere and girls in underwear-like clothing were dancing atop them. If you walked a bit further, you came upon a shallow, intricately tiled pool that was roughly the size of a ballroom, and a mosaic fountain under a mural depicting a bucolic villa by the water. Both the pool and the fountain were, of course, completely drained and badly in need of a renovation that I knew would not be forthcoming. For a second, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it must have looked like when it was a museum. At some point, I became aware of Win standing next to me. His gaze was fixed on the mural and I wondered if we were thinking the same thing.

‘Stop daydreaming, you two,’ Scarlet yelled. ‘There’s dancing to be done!’ She grabbed my hand, then Win’s, and pulled us into the middle of the dance floor.

Scarlet danced next to me for a while and then she danced over to Win. I sort of danced by myself (making sure to keep my arms down so as not to reveal the hole in my dress or inadvertently make it larger) and observed Scarlet and Win. Scarlet was quite a good dancer. Win, uh, wasn’t. He hopped around like an insect or something. His moves were comical.

He hopped over to me. ‘Are you laughing at me?’ he said, leaning down to my ear. The music was so loud he needed to do this in order to be heard.

‘No, I swear.’ I paused. ‘I’m laughing with you.’

‘But I’m not laughing,’ he said, and then he was laughing. ‘Notice you don’t move your arms much yourself.’