Chapter 1: Vegas, Baby

The lobster comes drowning in butter.

This is the only way Lyla has ever wanted anything to come to her: excessive to a tee, golden and perfect, without any shred of an apology. She cracks the claw with her bare hands because the little metal tool is for cowards, and the shell splits. Butter runs down her wrist and pools in the crease of her elbow, and she doesn't wipe it off.

She licks it. At the table.

At Carbone, inside the Aria, surrounded by eight women in bodycon dresses who have collectively ordered four salads, two branzinos (without oil), and a single shared appetizer of burrata that three of them photographed and none of them finished.

Lyla finishes everything.

"You're so bad," Megan says, watching her with the particular admiration Los Angeles women reserve for other women who eat in public. It's a mixture of horror and longing, like watching someone jump off a cliff into blue water.

"I'm on vacation," Lyla says, which isn't a defense so much as a fact. She's been on vacation from her entire life for approximately seven hours, and she intends to make it count. She tears a piece of bread from the basket, (the bread basket no one else has touched, the bread basket that might as well have a biohazard sticker on it given the way Bianca's sorority sisters are avoiding it) and drags it through the butter sauce on her plate until the bread is soaked through, heavy, shining.

She eats it and closes her eyes and makes a sound that she'd be embarrassed about if she were paying attention.

She's not paying attention. That's the whole point of Vegas.

Bianca is getting married in a few months to a man named Josh who does something with cryptocurrency that none of them understand and all of them pretend to. The bachelorette party is Bianca's last act of single-girl performance art: eight women, a two-bedroom suite at the Aria, four nights, and a schedule so aggressively planned it arrived as a Google Doc with color-coded time blocks and a section labeled "Emergency Outfit Changes." Lyla read it on the plane and felt a kind of loving exhaustion that she's come to associate with Bianca specifically. She loves her, yes, the kind love for someone who has been your best friend since freshman orientation and who will never, ever understand you, and whom you will never, ever stop loving anyway.

They're different, is the thing.

Bianca is tiny, at five-two, a hundred and five pounds, blonde in the expensive way that requires quarterly maintenance. She moves through the world so damn easily, like a woman who has never had to think about the space she takes up because she takes up so little of it. Her friends are the same. Megan. Ashleigh. Tara. Kayla. All of them cut from the same sun-kissed, sorority sisters, Pilates-toned, nine-hundred-calorie-a-day cloth, all of them sweet, all of them a little bit terrified of bread.

Lyla is not terrified of bread. Lyla is not terrified of much, food-wise, which has always made her the outlier in this group. Not a problem, exactly, but the exception. She's five-six and a hundred and fifty-five pounds, most of it distributed between her hips and her chest in a way that she has spent her entire adult life mentally rounding up to "big." She's not big. She's a size six(ish). But when your entire social circle is a size zero, six feels like she's been sinning her whole life.

She doesn't mind, exactly, but it's hard not to notice the way she's always the widest person in the group photo, the way her thighs touch and theirs don't, the way ordering dessert feels like a political statement when you're the only one doing it. She's stop noticing it, mostly.

Tonight, though. Tonight, she doesn't notice anything except the butter on her fingers and the wine in her glass and the sweet, reckless electricity of being somewhere that isn't her apartment in Van Nuys, that isn't the stockroom at Madewell, that isn't Travis's couch watching Travis play a video game that Travis never pauses to ask if she wants to play, too.

She orders the tiramisu. For the table.

She eats most of it herself.

Zoe arrives late.

She arrives late because the world hasn't built itself for women who look like Zoe, and navigating that reality takes time. Time to find the right entrance, the right path between tables, the right angle to slide into a booth without performing a geometry problem in public. Zoe has been doing this calculus her entire life and she's efficient at it, but efficiency still takes thirty seconds longer than not having to think about it at all, and so she's late, and she doesn't apologize, and the first thing Lyla registers about her is this: she walks into a room like she owns it, and the room doesn't argue.

She's a childhood friend of Bianca'a, or something. She's tall, five-nine or five-ten, and she is, by any honest measure, a large woman. Two hundred and eighty pounds, maybe more, if Lyla had to guess, though Lyla wouldn't guess because she's been trained by a lifetime of female friendship to never, ever estimate another woman's weight. But the number could never compare to the sheer physical presence, the way she fills the chair and then some, the way her thighs spread when she sits and her belly rests against the table's edge and her arms are thick and her chest is heavy and none of it, not a single damn inch of it, reads as anything other than deliberate, gorgeous, sexy.

Sexy?

Hard not to think that, when she's wearing a black dress that makes absolutely zero apologies or concessions. Low neckline. Tight. Every roll, every curve, every soft fold of her body on display like she got dressed in front of a mirror and said yes to all of it. Her skin is olive and luminous, her hair dark, long, and pulled over one shoulder. She has a face that would stop traffic at any size, with a sharp jaw, full lips, eyebrows that could end a man's career. She's huge, overweight, wobbly almost, but those words don't really fit: devastating, stunning, voluptuous, everything.

Lyla stares. She tells herself it's admiration. She admires confident women. She admires women who eat without apology and dress without compromise and sit down at a table of strangers and immediately order a steak, medium-rare, with a loaded baked potato and a side of creamed spinach, and then turn to the waiter and say, "And whatever wine goes best with not giving a fuck."

Lyla cannot shake the feeling that this girl is trouble. That this girl is dangerous. And somewhere, deep down, she knows that she...she wants, so desperately, to be that girl.