The girls met two male models, a father and a son, and took them home; or rather, little Athens went with the father to his hotel, and elegant Lorelei took the son to the room the girls shared in an old mews cottage. The son stood in the door⁠—the room was furnished with piles of clothes, stacked shoeboxes, black Penguin paperbacks, and board games. A forest of vitamin and perfume bottles on a side table had been felled by a fallen curtain rod. He imagined these two curious girls sleeping in their rumpled pink sheets like fairies in a flower.

Lorelei watched him undress. The father looked like a man of great talent and character: androgynous, world-worn, a seventies rock star. His son just looked pretty. 

How did you and Athens meet? he asked. 

I won her at a fair, Lorelei said. I hit her with a hammer and she was mine.

The next morning, Athens and the son switched places. He went back to his father’s hotel, and she came home and plopped onto the bed.

Well? 

The room was nice, Athens shrugged. He ordered a bottle of wine, had half a glass, and fell asleep.

The kid’s a sweetheart, Lorelei assured her. He’ll have his dad take us out before they leave. 

Oh! Athens brightened. He fixed the curtain!

After some number of cocktails in the hotel lounge’s deep chesterfield couches, the staff wouldn’t serve them anymore. The models suggested seafood, but the girls stumbled their dates across town to their favorite diner. The son took one of his father’s swollen, ring-heavy hands into his own. Athens squeezed the other, while Lorelei sprinkled sugar on her buttered toast. 

The models forked over seven hundred dollars and promised to return. New people came into town, and the people who had always been in town stayed. The girls went to the royal gardens and ate popcorn, they teased the gardener about the hole in his pants, they stole his tools and brought him home and made love to him. Athens embarked on a new fling, borrowing Lorelei’s clothing and frippery for the duration of the courtship. The girls coordinated like mature exes: Coming back, Ted with me. Or, Will you be home tonight or out?

Schedules permitting, they lunched together, or went out for drinky dinners⁠—something nitrogenated, something rose-petal-speckled⁠—sometimes not speaking the whole time, miming orders at the servers and laughing away. When one of them came into sudden money they took themselves to the aquatic restaurant in the nice part of town, where they were in gross violation of the dress code policy. If the manager complained about the riffraff, the maître d’ would point out that the girls always left the biggest tip of the night. From their seats at the pool bar, they could watch cocktail waitresses prance and patrons swim through the water, the occasional greenish plume of urine smoking around their legs.

The girls found this hilarious.

Athens tended toward the scrappy and eclectic. It had started when she was a child: her mother saw what little Athens was doing to her nice clothing⁠—cutting gashes into denim knees, snipping thumbholes out of her sleeves⁠—and insisted she learn how to make alterations properly. Now Athens hemmed her dresses, and she affixed replacement buttons for her beaux, who were always taken aback by this gesture. Athens wasn’t a very precise girl; the needle didn’t quite fit her as an instrument. 

She got her new guy to buy them an upright piano, a bone-colored one. Lorelei tinkled around on it and set herself to singing, though it was really Athens who could sing, who would hop onto tables and tap her feet and belt out ballads. Lorelei had no voice but felt she had something to say, something that couldn’t be said in plain speech. She was older, not by much, but she had been broken before: heartbroken. She was the well-mannered friend⁠—if someone wanted a cup of water, she would turn the house upside down to find a chipped, stained mug and fill it from the tap. Sleepy-eyed, full-lipped Lorelei rarely voiced her own problems. When she and Athens went on their separate adventures, she would emerge from the Arabian prince’s paradise or the Irish rapper’s abyss only to text Athens, I’m fucked … I’m so fucked … Athens would reply a day or two later, only for Lorelei to go silent again.

The two slept naked together, cuddled, but never under the pretense of romantic affection⁠—that would ruin everything; they were like sisters. Speaking of, where were their families? Sometimes Athens’s elocution whiffed of aspiration and Lorelei’s scrimping masochism implied impoverishment, but both girls came from good backgrounds, neither richer nor poorer than one expected. Their families assumed they worked in cafés or at desks.

Whenever a man managed to stick around, he would invariably inquire about the other girl⁠—Where’s Athens tonight? If a suitor asked too many questions, the girls would get suspicious, though never jealous. They were a fascinating pair for being so well matched; there was no alter ego, no little-sistering. Their value systems simply aligned. Athens said she and Lorelei were phoenixes that had crawled from the ashes of an apocalypse: girls who must make something of the afterbirth.

Aftermath, Lorelei said.

Athens’s brother called⁠—their grandfather had passed. Lorelei came home to Athens kneeling in heaps of laundry, packing (or something like it).

Together, the girls carried the heavy bags to the bus stop. Athens stepped on board and cried, A whole bus to myself! She pumped her fist as if to honk the horn. 

Lorelei waved her off and walked back to the cottage. In her friend’s absence, she folded origami companions, noodled around on the piano. She took herself to the hookah bar and puffed mango-scented clouds at anyone who approached. Athens returned a day later with bibelots and a meager inheritance. She paid their rent and took them on holiday to a tropical island, buying Lorelei the prettiest bathers; she could not resist how her friend looked in the frilly strings. They were not fancy girls, but they did love the absolute best of things, and also appreciated the simple pleasures the earth had to offer: good red dirt, full-fat Coca-Cola. 

After a louche day at the beach, the two returned to their hotel room. Athens sat on the floor, sewing beads onto a strip of bright fabric she’d bought at the market. Finished, she tied the band around her friend’s salt-frazzled hair and admired her handiwork. Get dressed, she said, tossing a gold slip at Lorelei.