Party Girls in NYC

I hope I’m not a person to you guys. I hope I’m a concept. 

You know that meme where it’s a stick figure drawing of a boy and girl texting, and she says, I’m having a bad day, and the stick figure boy is like, Damn shawty when you gonna have a good day? That’s me, the girl. 

In my bedroom, losing it. Big light still on. The boy is The Lyrist. He sounds like a teacher who cares, trying to give me half credit for something illegible. 

HIM 

I don’t understand. What's wrong? 

ME

My life isn’t what I want it to be. I’m not who I want to be. I can never be what I want because I’m too anxious. It’s passing me by. 

I’ve turned into a child, unsoothable, crying so hard that I’m sleepy. 

ME

I’m never going to get better. I’m already almost DONE with school and I have NO friends. My roommates hate me. I’m never going to be a writer. 

HIM

But what happened? 

ME

Aly got in- invited to the— 

(Mumble mumble mumble.)

HIM

Baby, what? 

ME

Aly got invited TO THE MET BALL AFTER PARTY! 

HIM

Oh.

I can hear him racking his brain for my solution. He always wants a quick fix, never to lament like I do. His voice crackles through invisible wires. 

HIM

She can’t get you in?

The Lyrist is familiar with this world, and over it. His mom used to be a big journalist for a big news agency. He’s been to every NYFW since he was fifteen, working as a freelance photographer. Emmy Rossum told him he was adorable.

ME

The guy said no. 

Last Fashion Week, The Lyrist snuck me into The Blond’s show. I swear I saw Christina Aguilera, but she was wearing a lace mask so I couldn’t know for sure. Now I couldn’t go to the Met Ball after party. Couldn’t couldn’t couldn’t couldn’t! 

Aly knew a guy, a promoter. It hurt that he said no. I wasn’t cool or hot enough. Clout sometimes trumps beauty in NYC. Aly had both, because she was a model signed to Ford. She’s a 5'8” vision—hip bone, jawline, thick brows, mermaid hair. Our moms are work friends, nurses back home in Texas. 

The afterparty is at The Box, a nightclub. Hard to get into. I’ve never tried. She’s been before. The morning after, beautiful skin blotchy, she told me one of its performers, a trans woman, wore a balloon under her dress, popped it with a hanger, and a baby doll dropped out, hanging from her dick like an umbilical cord. That was tame for The Box. I savored her recounting, slurping coffee, wake-n-baking in our dark living room. 

I’m staring at the HEAVENLY BODIES poster on my bedroom wall — I bought it from the museum’s gift shop the first time I visited New York. My high school raised money for poor kids with single mothers so that I could tour colleges. The poster got the good spot, above the green dresser my roommate found on the street. 

Modeling is a lot of waiting and flights that never pay off. Aly stays with me when she’s in the city for castings. Then, exiled again to her parents’ townhouse in Texas. I never go back to Texas for long. Instead I go to school and kiss my boyfriend. He says she has reason to be jealous of me too, but I don’t get it. 

HIM

Baby. I guarantee you that the party will be boring. All they do is stand around and take pictures. It’s not fun. Why do you want to hang out with these people anyway? 

I wanted to say, You think you don’t want it, but you do. What he says next is worse. I’m quiet. I’m uncomfortable with people. That’s true. It’s just not your thing, and that’s okay. The lack feels like a hole in my chest, a quiet seething. 

“You're not that kind of person.” 

Yes I am! But he wouldn’t believe me, and I was terrified of not believing me. 

***

I am checking up on my friend Renata’s cat while her new roommate, Anastasia, is back home in Jersey for a funeral. Renata is home for the summer in LA. She is a perfect friend for me because she goes to my old college on the Upper West Side and I go to my current college in Brooklyn, which means there is distance. And because she is from LA, she can’t tell I am hiding who I really am.

Renata is cool, generous, funny. If the bouncers bounce us, she yells, Do You Know Who I Am? I Am a ROCKEFELLER!!!! She grew up living between León, Mexico, with her mom, and the City of Angels with her old dad. He is a costume designer for movies, has a lot of different daughters with different wives, and knows a lot of people. Renata is born to work in PR.

Her apartment was in Dimes Square before I knew what that was. A triangle of land between the Lower East Side and Chinatown. Residents, internet semi-famous, host intellectual anorexia podcasts and admin TikTok accounts for finding cocktail bars equipped with hot finance daddies. It might be edgy and offensive if it wasn’t so unserious.

The apartment is under the Manhattan Bridge. We can feel the walls vibrate with each passing train. We are North Dumpling and Kiki’s and 169 Bar, and they have a fire escape where they like to smoke capri cigarettes and watch the sun rise and set. I don’t smoke cigarettes. The view of Dumbo is only partly blocked by the luxury skyscraper, newly built on the water. It is unoccupied because no one can afford it and because it is right next to a strip of projects.

They have roof access. Loose, uneven wires run across, and other tenants have abandoned Amazon furniture, decaying. It is a dump, it is beautiful. One can tag the bridge if they dare to leap.

My girls tan in bikini tops and chain-smoke, sunscreen reflecting light like strobes or shooting stars. At night, you can see the actual stars and the lights flickering down below and out across the water. It makes you wanna reach out and grab them like fireflies. It makes you wanna believe in the New York City of the movies.

Renata’s bedroom has one tiny window facing brick, her walls covered in Virgin Mary postcards—one from me, from New Orleans. That makes me feel good. Her bedframe blocks the closet door, and I nudge it just enough to slip inside. I touch the different fabrics of her clothes, find a rainy day wad of cash in the pocket of one of her furry coats. I don’t take it—I wouldn’t—but a strange pleasure expands in my chest knowing it is there. Knowing a secret of Renata’s. Examining her belongings like specimens, I feel closer to her. The walls of the living room begin to shake to the bass of a rap song. Their neighbor across the hall is a fat ass white girl from Louisiana, whom we infer is a hooker. She wakes up around 8 P.M. and blasts music. Sometimes at 4 A.M. she blasts it. One time the ring camera sees her running down the hall, fighting with a boyfriend, naked.

My boots drop with a thud. I stretch out on her sofa like a cat in the sun. Her actual cat, Pixie, joins me, purring. She is a mischievous little black thing. Renata used to say, “You guys are like twins!” Beams of light stream in from the front bedroom’s fire escape. It feels like a luxury, being comfortable in a friend’s space. I have failed, hard, at making any friends at my new school. I don’t fit in there. Those kids are into Berlin. Aly is in Texas. Renata has been my only girlfriend in the city.

Renata doesn’t want a new roommate. She wants to live with her old roommate, Ember, her best friend, forever. I met Renata through Ember, who I met during our freshman year in the dorms. We really like to sing that song “BFF” by Slayyyter. You are my best friendddd till the fucking world endsssss. We each have a matching LES tattoo somewhere on our bodies. Renata paid for half of mine. At the summer's start, Ember left New York and moved to Alaska for a military boy from New Jersey, who she married in Vegas right after her 20th birthday. The military is paying her rent now. Paris Hilton has been engaged three times!

She left Renata here like the lost half of a best-friend necklace. Anastasia took over her lease—a friend of a friend of a friend from the dorms. I was promoted to Renata’s sidekick. I like feeling crucial. She asks me to take pictures of the apartment and send them to her, so she can see the state of things while she is away. To see how dirty Anastasia is, basically.

She is looking for a problem with Anastasia because she is upset about Ember leaving. Anastasia is home for a funeral, too, which I feel sympathetic about. But I do what I am told. Talking shit about Anastasia brings me closer to Renata.

I feel like an alien pretending to be a girl. I piece together that the ash probably came from some mix of sage, weed, and cigarettes. Bottles of vodka and wine, empty pizza boxes. Anastasia—if you’re reading this—I smoked a little bit of your weed. Sorry.

I pick up her copy of How to Murder Your Life by It Girl Cat Marnell, resting on a low bookshelf. I thumb through it, hoping to find something underlined. The book is a memoir about being addicted to angel dust and adderall and editing the beauty section of a fashion magazine in the 2000s. Girls who don’t read read Marnell—she is mythic. She is one of the first pictured in The Cut’s “It Girl Issue,” almost all of them whiteish, and tiny.

I just finished the book myself, as part of my research into writers I want to emulate. I read in an article that Marnell’s advance is half a million dollars. I try to imagine that kind of money.

I like being in their bedrooms—my girlfriends, these party girls—when they aren’t. Because I am a freak, psychoanalyzing a girl based on what is scattered across her bedroom floor. It is like looking through windows, or old Facebook posts, or watching reality TV, or people-watching, or whatever. I read their rooms the same way I read chronicles of party girls. I am sooo Prozac Nation. I am remembering the notes my classmates gave my last submission: I wish I understood why your narrator wants to be there. I wish she had a stronger justification.

I compare her bedroom to my own back in Brooklyn, in the basement under Moot Bar. I have made it into something weird and beautiful and niche without trying—fairy lights, turquoise crushed velvet, voodoo dolls, old photographs. If my room had a scent, it would be stale weed, Nag Champa, vanilla.

I am being weird about all of this—so stupid and rigid, caring so much. I pour the cat’s food into her little bowl and tell her goodbye.

***

I am invited, electronically, to the launch of a new column-based magazine, which feels like how I imagine snorting crack would. The magazine is very downtown—by the creators of that alt-popular “first Dimes Square print magazine.” I am invited because they are desperate for content. They published my op-ed about my parasocial love for Taylor Swift, which has soured into intense criticism. My first byline. Big deal—the publishing and the party. Real writers will be there.

I buy a skin-tight violet minidress, so glitter-bombed that it shifts from bluish to pinkish in the light and flakes off on everything. I spend weeks online browsing for the perfect dress. The Lyrist takes the Peter Pan bus in from Baltimore to be my plus-one for the night. He is my ideal plus-one: charming, handsome, has been to parties in Thailand, parties with celebrities, even one with our old boss. What I learned interning at PAPER Magazine is this: it is all smoke and mirrors. It doesn’t matter who I am at the party—it matters how I look, and if I am seen.

What I learned from It Girl Caroline Calloway: I spend money I don’t have on the dress. It is an investment. It Girls are start-ups. The idea is that Calloway is more personality than writer. I am not sure which I would rather be, or if there is much of a difference.

I became interested in Calloway after consuming everything about Marnell. I liked Marnell, Mueller, Babitz, even Didion, but I wanted someone contemporary to model myself after. Calloway had the most interesting trajectory—one of the only writers ever to have an active Reddit snark page. When Instagram was new, she bought a couple thousand followers. She grew the fake following into a real one, sold a memoir to a Big Five publisher before she was twenty-five, and got a hefty advance from the same publisher as Marnell.

Her ex-best friend published a tell-all essay in The Cut claiming she had ghost written most of the captions and half the proposal: I AM CAROLINE CALLOWAY. Calloway fled New York, in debt from evading rent and spending the advance. Eventually—like, years later—she bound and shipped the long-awaited turquoise books, entitled Scammer, herself, selling each copy for $45. The operation was headquartered at her grandmother’s place in Sarasota. So funny. I know all this off the top of my head.

SHE CHEWS HER BOTTOM LIP AS SHE THINKS.
“I’M OFTEN REDUCTIVE ABOUT MYSELF IN A JOKEY WAY… 40 GRAND TO PARTY… IT IS AN OPPORTUNITY… I DON’T KNOW WHEN WE WILL SEE AGAIN THE WHITE-HOT MOLTEN CENTER OF WHAT’S COOL EMBRACING CANCEL CULTURE… POP-CULTURE LUNAR ECLIPSE… IT GIRLS ARE START-UPS, AND START-UPS NEED FUNDING.”

—CAROLINE CALLOWAY’S VANITY FAIR PROFILE.

My dress is so tight and short, I might as well be naked. It hugs my hips and rides up. In high school I had curves, but college and New York starved off all the baby fat that made me look healthy. And they are starting to remove the buccal fat from women’s faces.

I shave my whole body and lather my skin and curls with creams: shea, mango, cocoa butter, coconut. I hate my frizzy hair, hate how I don’t fit into the glossy pool of white girls who run magazines and dominate photoshoots. Life would be seamless with hair like Ember’s—long, flat, no tension, yellow-gold like a shooting star sticker. I take out my claw clip, then put it back up. Tendrils erupt like hydra heads. I smooth them down, and they frizz and multiply. I feel too big for my body, too big for my empty room, like Alice after eating the cake.

I huff when The Lyrist rings the bell because I am not perfect. It jolts me out of tracing over my pores and flakes, stretching my skin. I have been standing so near the glass that the tip of my nose has reddened. He gives me a slack-jawed, wide-eyed look when I first answer the door. 

The walk to the train goes like this:

HIM

What’s wrong? 

ME

(Anxious.)

Nothing.

HIM

What’s wrong?

ME

(Attitude.)

Nothing.

HIM

Are you upset because you think you look bad? 

ME

(Paranoid, angry.)

Why would you say that?

I hit the blinker on my dab pen twice. To prove to The Lyrist and to myself that I am That Type Of Person, I am going to fake it til I make it. Smoke and mirrors. My dress is awesome, my makeup is awesome, my cowboy boots are awesome, my funky key-choker is fucking awesome. I am banking my writing future on looking awesome at this magazine party—because it isn’t about writing.

The elevator doors open, transporting us from a random hotel on a higher up street in Manhattan than we are familiar to The Georgia Room. We are thrust into a throng of real magazine editors, photographers, contributors, stylists. The peacock-teal walls and the ceilings have a golden trim.

And I am on the list!!!!!!

The Lyrist orders us a rum on the rocks and a Dirty Shirley for forty dollars. He says it tastes cheap. I have forty dollars total in my bank account. Ember had sent ten dollars. He, from Baltimore, can’t help but remark how white the room is. Everyone wears black, no one looks particularly dressed up. I pull my dress down, which now feels childish. Why do you want to hang out with these people? We stand awkwardly. I ask myself, What would I say if this were a movie?

I grab him by his tie and lead him to the roped-off seating section. “Let’s sneak into VIP and play truth or dare.” He snakes his arms around my waist as we make our way to the velvet sofas, empty except for one woman, her back facing us.

She is hunched over her tanned knees, iPhone lighting her chin, in a peep-yellow feathered coat. Long, cool, Barbie blonde hair. Silver pointed-toe heels. I have seen the outfit before.

I recall an Instagram story I watched earlier that night from @CATMARNELL. The woman I was blabbering about in all my sophomore writing classes. Every trendy girl writer in New York knows her, every aesthetic girl with an Adderall addiction. My body stiffens. The Lyrist walks right into my back. I grab his arm and duck away from VIP.

HIM

What?? 

ME

You know the lady whose memoir I’m reading? The one I keep talking about? 

HIM

Caroline Calloway?

ME

No, she doesn’t actually have a memoir. The one who used to be a beauty editor, got her own Vice column for being a drug addict, and now I’m reading her memoir?

Better than Calloway, Marnell is mother. Marnell is bestselling. If Calloway is cunt, I am a cuntling, and Marnell is the cuntress.

HIM

Uhh, yeah.

ME

The one from D.C.?

HIM

Ohh. Yeah.

I jerk my head in her direction. 

ME

That’s her. 

He smiles like he knows something I am about to learn. 

HIM

Go talk to her.

ME

I will.

HIM

Right now.

ME

I will.

HIM

Right now. Before she leaves. 

He points his chin toward her. 

HIM

Come on, she looks bored.

She does. Still scrolling. She is sober now. I can’t imagine this party sober. I have been chain-puffing my green apple dab pen all night. Every thought I’ve ever had leaves my brain. The Lyrist stands beside me, slightly behind, watching. I can’t face him.

These next few steps feel like the first of the moon landing. Small, but really big. Slow. Heavy. One foot in front of the other. Have you ever been thrown into a pool?

She is hunched on the couch, scrolling. I tuck my hair behind my ear and kneel beside her. I feel like I might pass out. I am trying to be icy cool.

“Hi! I love your book.”

She looks up.

She didn’t hear what I said, even though I was kind of shouting. She makes a huh? gesture, leans in toward me with her hand cupped around her ear. I hope she doesn’t recognize me from the time I DM’d her on Twitter, a few months ago.

“Hi... sorry to bother you. I love your book."

“No! You’re not bothering me!” She is looking at my dress. I am trying to think of an endearing and clever way to keep talking to her. I know she’s been into travel blogging. “Have you been traveling lately?”

“I’ve actually been traveling a lot with my dad. It’s really nice.”

The dad from the memoir? I think he kind of sucks. That’s how she wrote him. Does she know that I know? 

She goes on, “I’ve been working on my new book, too, but that takes forever. Like two years.” 

I scramble for something else. “Have you ever been to New Orleans? You should go there.” 

“I would LOVE to go back there—I was conceived there! My parents met at Tulane before they moved to D.C. when my mom was seven months pregnant with me.” 

I feel like it can’t be a coincidence. At Namaste, they would call it synchronicity.

I take in her doll-like face—a profile I read of her described her that way. I wonder how old she is now.

She asks, “Are you a writer?” 

Am I???

“Yes! I— I’m getting my BFA in Writing. I just interned with PAPER in the spring.” 

“That’s great! Interning is super important. I interned with a bunch of magazines when I was your age.” 

Glamour, Teen Vogue, I know. That’s why I’m doing it. 

“A lot of young writers want to skip that step.”

I am probably shaking when I say, “Yeah! My friends and I are OBSESSED WITH INTERNING.” 

What the fuck? That isn’t even true. She lets it slide. “I didn’t realize Justin was so young!” Justin—the PAPER editor-in-chief, who only spoke to me once after months of interning for him. “I love Gutes, too.”

“Who?” Fuck. I need to stalk these people harder.

“Gutes!”

“Oh! The editor. I’ve actually never met her. I emailed her about an internship a few weeks ago.” Gutes is a downtown darling, destined for a book deal.

“Let’s go meet Gutes!” She stands up. “Your boyfriend can watch our stuff.” She takes my hand and drags me away, abandoning the skin of a million baby ducks.

We shove our way through a crowd of Bushwick-looking people and end up near the back of the bar. She stands on a chair on top of an already elevated platform. She visors her eyes with her hand like an adventurer. A guy with heavy eyebags comes up to her and asks, “How are you?” but she practically shoos him away. Both editors/co-founders—Gutes and Megan—jump on stage to make a speech. We dart back to our spot in VIP with The Lyrist. Cat excuses herself to take pictures and tells me to stay put. I can hear my therapist cooing, Look what happens when you open yourself up.

I walk into The Lyrist’s arms, grinning. I don’t hear what they say in the speech. I feel like I have broken through a portal.

She comes back with both of the night’s most important VIPs. Megan, the editor I am more familiar with, is wearing a gold-yellow floor-length dress with circular mirrors stitched to the skirt. Gutes has her curly retro bob pinned back on both sides, wearing T-strap Mary Janes and lace finger gloves.

Cat introduces me over the blaring music. “THIS IS—”

“Oh, I know you! You wrote a piece for us.”

My mouth is on the floor, I can feel my eyes sparkling. Gutes says something like, “We’ll call you back about the internship when everything dies down. Give us a week.” My smile hurts my cheeks.

Cat tells me, “Stay on it! Be persistent!” She tosses her head back, laughing like bells chiming. Her thick mane doesn’t budge an inch. “I’m like a stage mom. I don’t have kids.”

I can feel the air shifting around me. The room is making space for me. The editors disappear into the crowd. Magic dress.

ME

So, what’s your favorite club here?

CAT

The clubs here aren’t like they used to be. You used to be able to go clubbing and run into P. Diddy and 50 Cent. The music scene was in Toronto for a bit, but now it’s all LA LA LA. New York City was hot when I was your age.

We chat a bit more about nothing before, 

CAT

Okay. I’m gonna go.

I wonder if she is leaving the party or just me, but she cuts my thoughts short with, “Let’s DM!” She hands me her phone. It is heavier than it looks in my hand. The Instagram search bar is open. She smells good.

I feel worried she might forget something, so I say, “DON’T FORGET YOUR PURSE!” And she says, “I know.” She snatches it up, and is gone.

I slide my iPhone from the leg of my cowboy boot. It glows: @CATMARNELL FOLLOWED YOU.

She never DMs me back. Her follow does get me followed by other literary internet figures, though, and invites to a few downtown poetry readings. Gutes never calls either—or responds to any of my emails. The Lyrist and I dance in the middle of Georgia Room. The unmoving crowd parts for us.

Every once in a while I bounce up and down, shaking his shoulders. I spin and spin and spin in my awesome lucky dress. The Lyrist gets glitter on his face, in his hair. I love him. He looks at me, disco ball reflecting in his green eyes.

ME

What?

HIM

(Grinning, taking me in with his eyes as I hit the Macarena)

These people are going to eat you up. 

I smile, hit the pen. Someone says, “I love your dress!” We order two more shots of house tequila for another $40. 

ME 

(Like Evil Lindsay Lohan when she becomes a clone of Regina in Mean Girls, looking around the room, seeing if she recognized anyone else) 

She could really help me, you know. I would love to have her life. 

HIM

Did you know her hair is a wig?

ME

What? 

He pulls out his phone, and his Google browser read: 

CAT MARNELL IS STILL ALIVE 

CAT MARNELL PAYS TAXES NOW

CAT MARNELL TALKS SUCCESS, LOVE, AND ACCIDENTALLY TURNING HER HAIR INTO A METH LAB 

WHAT DID CAT MARNELL DO TO HER HAIR 

CAT MARNELL SPENT HER ADVANCE ON FURNITURE, NOT DRUGS 

CAT MARNELL IS LONELY ALL THE TIME BUT STILL HAS A LOT TO SAY

HIM

People are not nice to her.

I go to the bathroom before we leave—to pee, but also to look at myself in the mirror. I wipe flaked eyeliner from underneath my waterline. A beautiful woman emerges from a stall and moves to wash her hands beside me. She does not look like a Barbie. She has long dark hair pinned underneath a beaded black headpiece. Looks like chainmail armor.

ME

I love your outfit.

Her lips are ruby red, they curl into a pearly smile. 

HER

Thank you, baby. I love your boots. 

ME

Thank you. I’m from Dallas.

HER

I’m from Houston!

ME

Ah. I bet you know how to drink. And dance.

HER

(Chuckling) 

And dress.

I could never be overdressed. I should be from now on. Best night ever. 

The Lyrist is glad when I came back. He says a woman in a basic black outfit has been winking at him. 

ME

You better be glad I didn’t see. I would have fought her. Who winks anymore? 

He laughs.

HIM

You wouldn’t. 

ME

(Laughing, drunk, stars in my eyes, only half-joking)

Maybe I would.

“All the boys love to flirt with us 
In our mini skirts, drinking champagne till it hurts, oh yeah 
We've been smoking all day 
We walked around the city and I think we ran into your ex 
G-g-g-got our matching Juicy lockets 
Keep our celly in our pockets 
You're my sexy little BFF...” 

PEYTON GATEWOOD is a writer from Texas. She is @funkydelphi on Instagram.