Neon in Daylight. Hermione Hoby

      “Really?” Kate said, hearing her own feigned ignorance, the way it weakened her voice.

      “Ride or die for that all-natural nicotine,” Inez said, and Kate couldn’t tell if she was joking. Then, scrutinizing Kate’s face as she pulled a lighter from her pocket: “You look familiar.”

      The sweet hiss the cigarette made as Inez inhaled.

      “Maybe you just have one of those faces,” she went on. “People always tell me I look familiar. I think I just have one of those faces. You know?”

      Inez turned to look at Kate and calmly blew smoke out the side of her mouth.

      “Do I look familiar?” Inez said. Before Kate could answer she spoke again: “You blush a lot.”

      It was a plain statement. An observation, not a judgment.

      “Like, a lot.”

      “Yes,” Kate said, stupidly.

      “Why?” Inez said.

      “I don’t know.”

      But Inez kept looking at her, waiting for something more.

      “I suppose,” she tried, “I just get embarrassed. Things embarrass me. I get self-conscious.”

      Kate couldn’t tell whether the answer had satisfied her. Inez didn’t say anything, but flexed her lips in a way that suggested she was digesting the words, then looked to the grand piano man.

      “He’s not embarrassed,” Inez said.

      “Nope,” Kate said.

      Beside him, a couple were now dancing, badly. He was twirling her, or trying, but she was going the wrong way and laughing at the failure of it.

      “They’re not embarrassed,” Inez added, jerking her chin at them.

      The man was all loose and playful in the hips, overdoing it in an effort to get his woman to loosen up. She looked stiff, reluctant, finding his sashaying laughable, too aware that people were watching and that Rachmaninov wasn’t really the sort of music you could salsa to anyway.

      “Even though,” Kate said, trying out a switchblade of sarcasm, “he should be.”

      Inez responded to this small unkindness with a loud laugh, a daylight sound, an unbidden thing, and Kate felt a rush.

      “He looks like he just took his first salsa class,” Kate added. She was smoking too fast, inhaling too hard, making herself dizzy.

      “Yeah,” Inez said. “And she looks like she’s about to dump him.”

      Kate ground out her stub on the stone beside her and Inez took out her phone and scooted closer, asking Kate for her last name. She began scrolling through Facebook on her screen with both thumbs, exhaling smoke from her nostrils like a beatific dragon. Kate saw her own face materialize on the small rectangular plane in Inez’s hands.

      “Baby got a haircut,” said Inez, looking down at the image: an already-outdated librarian person. Kate felt the blush rise again, and her hand going to the back of her neck.

      “Yeah,” she said, and then she felt her phone buzz: Inez da Souza has added you as a friend.

      “Da Souza,” said Kate, approvingly.

      “My mom’s last name. Feminism or whatever.”

      Inez looked down at Kate’s phone, its screen saver. “Is that your boo?”

      In the picture George’s face was lit with a small and reluctant smile. She’d directed him into this photograph, on a late afternoon a year ago in his Cambridge room, telling him the evening light was too perfect to miss. It was perfect—low and long in the sky so that all the planes of his face were rendered with drama. He’d been grumpy about it, in the way that boyfriends are obliged to be when their girlfriends insist on taking their picture, and he’d held that expression of skepticism on her, the half-raised eyebrow, the moue of cynical reluctance, a photo face that was no good to her, until she’d pretended to give up, and then, as his face fell back to normal, had whipped her phone back out and snapped.

      “He’s a babe,” Inez said.

      “He’s in London,” she responded. Inez seemed not to have heard her.

      “Do you get fucked up?” she said.

      “What?”

      “You know, do you like to get fucked up? Because then you wouldn’t feel embarrassed.”

      She said it so straightforwardly.

      “I don’t really like coke,” she said, feebly, making a guess. “I did it once and . . .”

      Inez exhaled smoke and regarded her with a sort of indulgent amusement. “Coke’s overrated. That’s some dumb rich-bitch shit. It burns your soul out. It’s just Adderall for dicks with money.”

      “I’m not really . . .” she said.