Anna Brand

The Blue A

I come from a long line of garden weeds, of berries picked too early and melons picked too late, lover of raspberry jam, untold stories, bees, reusable bottles, chatter in a crowded restaurant, escaping in New York City streets. I only know myself from stories: the day I laughed so hard I slammed my head on the back wall and pretended I was okay for the rest of my life. The look on their faces when I said I was going, the taste of tears and a lump of something in my throat. Before me there were hills, time and wind blew rock to pieces and created the sands in which I laid with her that night in South Carolina. I come from wicker chairs on the porch and thunder. Hands clapping and white lightning; my mom crying because of something else I did wrong. Three bats under the side roof of my rotting childhood home, I love them for eating mosquitoes and for the way that they fly, others hate them for shitting on the deck. I come from the constellations in the sky, left-wing politics, a 100-year-old banana bread recipe I’ll probably never learn. Yesterday I was everything, today I am not a single thing, and tomorrow maybe I will be something in between.

Liza Rosen

“Are you gonna do a little before we get upstairs?”

“No—no, no, no. I want to be sober for at least, like, the first half hour.”

“Okay.” Emmaline (@emmmachine) pauses. “I’m gonna.”

Emmaline’s veiny neck shoots downward and from her favorite little gray clutch she derives a palm-sized green pouch secured with a sterling silver kiss lock. She places her thumb and forefinger on the lock’s two intertwining bulbs and then slides them past one another, as if prying open somebody’s jaw.

Inside, there are several items: a Zippo lighter, rolling papers, four baggies of cocaine, three dehydrated clusters of weed, an amethyst, a Swiss Army knife, and two sprigs of rosemary. She extracts the knife and a teener of coke from the pouch and lays them both gingerly on the car’s center console. Eliora (@eliorasworld) drives a Jaguar.

“We should do acid again soon,” muses Emmaline. “It was really fun last time.”

Eliora nods.

Emmaline coils like a waning moon over the center console of Eliora’s expensive car and gets to work. Emmaline, with eyes like an overwrought baby bird, studies the scene unfolding at her hands as if she is performing surgery. The vistas always change and they never do.

She lowers her chest in an easy, familiar swoop, the tip of her nose brushing the hard plastic of her iPhone case and her nostrils contract, sucking up her favorite alkaloid like it’s air. She sits up straight and moans until the initial feeling of ecstasy collapses into perfect serenity, then she lifts and stirs her shoulders in a happy, celebratory way, her body lilting with pleasure.

“Okay, just give me one second and I’ll be ready,” says Emmaline effusively, clasping her hands together. “I feel like Kafka,” she adds, rolling her eyes into the back of her head. The two friends burst into laughter.

The Spirit Sisters depart their vehicle with a shared queenly composure. One heel on the ground and the other swooped over fluidly, two bare legs touching and a straight back tightening. They look at their feet, then the ground, then the apartment buildings above.

Across the street, a middle-aged dark-skinned woman is sitting in a mesh camping chair underneath a rainbow umbrella. A handheld fan decorated with cartoonified pink tulips flutters rapidly in front of her face.

“That looks so good, highkey,” Eliora remarks to her friend, bumping Emmaline’s shoulder with her own.

“So good,” concurs Emmaline. “I haven’t been to a fruit stand in soooo long.”

“Same, me neither.”

Both were silent. “I don’t really want to eat before this,” Eliora says finally.

“Yeah.”

Los Angeles in the summertime: jacaranda trees disrobing, black, dried gum adhered to the sidewalk, dead grass, innumerable street and sidewalk fissions, obsessively maintained front-yard shrubbery, woodchips, stucco, palm trees planted on lane dividers after much deliberation, Indian laurel fig trees, hunchbacked women pushing black laundry carts filled with everything they own, novelty frozen yogurt shops neighboring dispensaries neighboring all-organic grocery stores as expensive as God’s own tears, and undulating green hills laid regally at the bottom of the sky. People uproot their whole lives to be here.

The ladies are holding hands and wearing cowgirl boots to a party that requests its attendees emanate “alien vibes.” They are both having good hair days.

Two blocks over, homeless encampments line sidewalks like rocks on a riverbed. They are ubiquitous and still.

“You look so hot right now,” Emmaline says to Eliora.

“Take a photo of me,” Eliora replies.

A joyless ritual. It seems benign, perfectly victimless. Oh.

Eliora retrieves her cell phone from Emmaline, trancelike, as if her arm is all steel and electrical wires moving through a pre-plotted, computerized gesture. Her eyes pour into the screen and through the fifty-eight live photos Emmaline just captured like she is reading instructions for how to diffuse a bomb. “I hate my knees,” she murmurs.

Emmaline and Eliora are artists, designers, models, beat-makers, fire suns with water moons. And party girls. Duh.

The ennobling hand of Instagram fame had seized Eliora and Emmaline earlier this year. The two met at their application-only performing arts high school, where Emmaline concentrated in costume design and Eliora studied photography. Together, they are the Spirit Sisters. They have their own clothing line called “Spirit Sisters.” They make crochet everything and sometimes jewelry. They make social appearances like this one on most weekend nights and usually a few days during the work week.

Tonight, Eliora is encased in a two-piece body con dress laced with real silver. She hates the way her knees and toes point at each other. Eliora has always kept her hair long. In elementary school, she was called “Dumbo.” She got her dad’s ears.

Her best friend and business partner Emmaline is wiry in many respects. Her arms and legs are always talking to each other through the old electrical network running through her capillaries. Emmaline, the preen queen. An angular, insatiable little woman with wild wheatgrass for hair. Emmaline knows everything about backcountry camping, her little sisters, and the early history of Druidism.

The ladies have a two-person vaudeville act they put on at parties. They’re entertainers. For high-stakes situations Eliora has one of those cheshire cat smiles, an unzipped jacket pocket for a mouth. Otherwise she has straight, often closed lips. Her mother says she’s an observer.

She’s “one of those girls” who “knows everything about everyone,” or, whatever, just a “crazy bitch.”

Emmaline and Eliora are destined for the rooftop patio of this one green building in West Hollywood where an Instagram acquaintance, Layla (@babys1stlobotomy) currently lives. Layla’s parties are always invite-only. You have to have at least fifteen-thousand followers to get in.

One is left to contemplate: who might be sufficiently illustrious to find themselves at a soirée like this one? The answer is not so simple. Someone who carries the severed foot of a rabbit and always has their shoulders thrown back. Someone who picks their feet up when they walk.

To attend Layla’s party, everyone must take one rattling elevator and seven flights of stairs up to the roof, to show they really want to be there. Isn’t there something so delicious about that?

But isn’t there something sad there too.

Bald thighs throbbing with overwork ascend more stairs, more stairs, more stairs, sweating. Layla’s apartment building is so ugly. Emmaline and

Eliora say nothing to each other for a few minutes. The party thrums upstairs through the ceiling. They just listen.

When they burst through the door to the roof, evening air bursts through them. A reprieve.

“Let’s get a picture together, Em.”

They bend. They extend their legs out toward the camera and prop their front-facing hips up so their back-facing hips look small.

Now, who in the world is more beautiful than the Spirit Sisters in this moment? No one. Sorry.

The rooftop: concrete, rusty railing wrapped around the perimeter, fake palm trees, a cardboard cut-out depicting a desolate, coppery Martian valley, Svedka, Smirnoff, Grey Goose, Jäger, Bailey’s, Jameson, Fireball, crystal if you know who to ask, PCP, a little bit of acid, weed, obviously, a hundred beautiful young women in technicolor, around half as many young men garbed in skintight racerbacks, striped boxers, dollar-store approximations of alien antennae, jock-straps, metal handcuffs, as a joke, and iridescent confetti strewn all over the ground. It smells like perfume, body odor, and weed.

The women are, of course, the real spectacle. And everyone knows it. The ladies know it because in middle school they practiced walking around like runway models who don’t care that they’re pretty. They would lift this newfangled ambulatory style from the perfect seclusion of their girlhood bedrooms and deposit it into their school hallways, and walk delicately from class to class like baby deer.

Now they are women, and they make it all look so easy.

Women! What do they want? Women want to hear some jokes that are actually funny. Jokes they can’t resist laughing at with their whole bodies. Women want bigger, fattier portions at fancy restaurants. Women want to swim naked in any lake in the world without consideration for microbial contaminants embedding into their labias. See?

Here is the thing about the carousing youth of Los Angeles: nobody here was extracted from their mothers’ wombs already coated in gold. It took work. To gleam and glimmer like this.

“How many, Emma, how many? This fucking girl, bro. How many do you have right now?” another Instagram acquaintance, Tyler Aiken, (@tylersde- mons), asks in an open, jocular way.

The lengthy lady throws her head back and laughs. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t know how many. I don’t know.”

“You’re famous, bro, you’re so famous. This girl has like four-hundredkay on Insta and she makes six figures on OnlyFans every month.”

Comments from men about her OnlyFans, even ones stitched together like this to seem friendly, are very weird. They might as well just tell Emmaline that they watch her porn. She replies with an adorable little laugh and says, “Yeah, Tyler, that’s why I have a house in Venice and you live with your dad in Altadena. Don’t fucking talk about my money.”

Doja Cat begins to play. Everyone on the dance floor gyrates in a similar way, as though all of the partygoers were trained to dance by the same group of people. Their movements are highly gestural, borrowing from the way people tend to gesticulate in conversation. Everyone looks loose and a little angry. Emmaline disappears into a throng of girls to do more coke.

Eliora and Emmaline have been to many hundreds of parties together. People expect to see them at things like this. Everyone loves to see the Spirit Sisters dance.

Wendell (@wndeeeeezy) casts a wanton glance at Eliora and says, “Look who the cat dragged in.” Wendell is broad and airy. He makes lip-syncing videos and takes 35mm film photos of his friends when they’re fucked up. He looks like he did anabolic steroids to play baseball in high school. He looks like the romantic male lead in a Disney Channel original movie.

Eliora laughs and advances toward him with an even, lackadaisical swagger. She says something without thinking. The two of them have been texting for three months. Eliora refuses to publicly disclose her involvement with Wendell. She thinks he is unperceptive and not a very good photographer. “Who are you here with?” she asks, crossing her arms over her chest.

“No one,” he says, “I came to see you.” Then: “can I see your tits,” and Eliora pulls her shirt up, and it turns out there are feathers all over the place.

“Do you ever feel like you’ve forgotten how to be yourself?” Emmaline whispers to Eliora.

A pair of petrified little meat birds, looking around at their peers like what the heck am I doing here.

“Yes,” her friend whispers back. “What do you mean?”

Imagine this: you are roving around the English countryside or something and an ugly little mage materializes from behind a bush or something and says at twenty-two you can have bright, unblemished skin, a teenytiny waist and watermelon hips, and other pretty girls to coo over the way you layer your necklaces, but you will forsake your seven-year-old self every day. Imagine choosing wrong.

All of the sudden Eliora feels like her heart is too big for her body. Her breath has no room to go anywhere. She stretches an arm outward and sees a matted white wing.

Cool girls, girls who get the joke, girls who “can hang,” girls watching their lives transpire from ten feet up end up dead and cold just like everyone else. Sorry. Is that a little too morbid for a story as fun as this?

Ellie and Emma are packed head-to-toe in one of those huge industrial chicken barns in Montana or something, squinting through splintered wooden planks of walls as the sun explodes over the mountain, and day starts. Life is short, only eight weeks or so. Young chicken sells for cheap.