“Oh, fuck you,” I blurted, and turned away, feeling idiotic. I got three steps when the guy called after me.

“Jeez, wait, don’t get bent out of shape.”

But I was born bent out of shape. I could picture myself coming out of the womb crooked and wrong. It never takes much for me to lose patience. The phrase fuck you may not rest on the tip of my tongue, but it’s near. Midtongue.

I paused, straddled between two steps, heading down.

“Look, I know Lyle Wirth, obviously,” the guy said. “You on the guest list or something?”

“I don’t know. My name’s Libby Day.”

He dropped his jaw, pulled it back up with a spitty sound, and gave me that same checklist look that Lyle had given me.

“Your hair’s blond.”

I raised my eyebrows at him.

“Come in, I’ll take you down,” he said, opening the door wide. “Come on, I won’t bite.”

There are few phrases that annoy me more than I won’t bite. The only line that pisses me off faster is when some drunk, ham-faced dude in a bar sees me trying to get past him and barks: Smile, it can’t be that bad! Yeah, actually, it can, jackwad.

I headed back up, rolling my eyes goonily at the door-guy, walking extra slow so he had to lean against the door to keep it open. Asshole.

I entered a cavelike foyer, lined with broken lamp fixtures made of brass and shaped to look like stalks of wheat. The room was more than forty feet high. The ceiling had once been painted with a mural—vague, chipped images of country boys and girls hoeing or digging. One girl, her face now vanished, looked like she might be holding a jump rope. Or a snake? The entire western corner of the ceiling had caved in at some point: where the mural’s oak tree should have exploded into green summer leaves, there was instead a patch of blue night sky. I could see the glow of the moon but not the moon itself. The foyer remained dark, electricity-free, but I could just make out piles of trash swept into the corners of the room. The partygoers had hustled off the squatters, then taken a broom to the place, tried to spiff it up. It smelled like piss anyway. An ancient condom was spaghetti-stuck to one wall.