Chris was working as a Disney mascot when he met her, and supplementing his income with bracelets he made by hand out of rusted lengths of barbed wire and sold on the side of the street on the weekends. You couldn’t take the mascot costumes out of the park or he would have gone to the party still in drag – he was short and thin and they’d given him the Minnie Mouse costume – but he was ripe with twelve hours in a black hole shaped like a cartoon and his hands were filthy and scraped raw. He wasn’t anyone’s prize.

She had three inches and forty pounds on him and she wasn’t working just then, just couch surfing from apartment to apartment. She wasn’t invited to the party, but she was crashing with someone who was, and she had tagged along. Why shouldn’t she? She knew everybody. It was just she was hard to get ahold of. And she did know everybody; everywhere she went there was a hand on her shoulder or in the small of her back and voices laughing. She was holding a bottle of Hawkeye when he ran into her and she could have had three heads and he wouldn’t have blinked. She was the most beautiful person so long as she was holding the vodka.