Clementine turns her whole body to face Priya and claps her hands together. “Ooh, this is fun! That I’ve had? Or I want to have?”
“Um, either?” Priya tells her.
“It doesn’t matter, it’s actually the same. Chris Evans and Rita Ora. You think he’d be the star, but she knows her way around a clitoris.”
Finn’s jaw drops. Literally drops. I imagine my face must be doing something similar. We’re at dinner with the son of a billionaire and someone who’s fucked Captain America. Meanwhile, here we are: an assistant, a struggling actor, and an internet columnist. I can only imagine how much they’re regretting their choice of dinner guests.
“What about you?” Clementine asks Theo.
“Celebrities are too high-maintenance for me.” He looks over at Clementine and adds, “Sorry, darling.”
She shrugs, unbothered by his assessment, before turning all her attention to Priya. “Same question back to you.”
“Maybe Dominic Broughan—”
“No,” Clementine interrupts, “he’s an awful kisser. Too much tongue. You know the type.” She makes a sour lemon face and darts her tongue in and out like a lizard. The table collapses into giggles, which just eggs her on. She starts groping the air in front of her. “Proper handsy, too,” she adds, “and he’s pocket-sized. Only came up to my collarbone.”
* * *
? ? ?
?After dinner, Theo switches the record, and a melancholy Irish ballad pours from the speakers. “The Pogues, really?” Clementine asks from where she’s sprawled on her back on the living room carpet. The pen holding her topknot in place was lost some time during dinner and her silvery blond hair is fanned around her like a lion’s mane.
“？‘Fairytale of New York’ is Britain’s favorite Christmas song,” he says defensively.
“Let’s play a game,” she says as the song’s tempo picks up. “Theo, do you have any cards? We could play strip poker.”
We’re all a bit drunk. After the initial tension receded, Clementine managed to win us over. Me with her music taste, Finn with her encyclopedic knowledge of musicals （turns out I wasn’t wrong about the former theater nerd assessment）， and Priya with tidbits of celebrity gossip. It’s not hard to see why she’s famous. There’s something magnetic about her. Something sparkly and indescribable.
She’s also a terrible influence. She appointed herself in charge of refilling our glasses with more of Theo’s never-ending supply of red wine and topped us up with liberal pours whenever our glasses dipped below half full. “I’m an optimist, darling,” she said as she refilled mine almost to the brim. “I like full glasses.”
I have no idea how much I drank, but my wineglass never emptied over the course of our two-hour dinner.
“No cards, I’m afraid,” Theo says.
“I have a game we can play,” Priya offers. “Do you have a bedsheet?”
“Yes?” Theo answers. He looks confused but leaves in search of the sheet Priya requested.
Clementine hauls herself up to sitting with a giddy expression on her face. “Tell me, tell me. What game are we playing?”
“Sheet game,” Priya says.
“Sheet game?” With Clementine’s accent it comes out sounding more like “shit game.” I giggle. I’m drunker than I realized.
“Tell us how it works,” Finn says and moves himself from his chair down to the floor with Clementine.
Theo returns with a white bedsheet and hands it to Priya. “Great, I was about to explain the rules.” Everyone listens to Priya with rapt attention. “First, everyone gets ten slips of paper. You can write down anything you want. A person, a movie title, a place, an object. There are four rounds: The first round is like Catchphrase. You can say any word except the words on the paper to get your team to guess. The second round you can only say one word. The third round is charades. The fourth round is charades under a bedsheet. We use the same words every round, so people get better at guessing as it gets harder.”
“Are there teams?” Finn asks, already excited.
“Yes, we split up into two teams. We go back and forth and each team gets a one-minute turn to get their team to guess as many words as possible. The round is over when we get through all the slips of paper. Each paper your team gets right is a point.”
“This feels too complicated for drunk people,” I say.
“Trust me, it’s fun. The winters are cold at Syracuse, we had a lot of time to fill.”
“I’m game,” Finn says.
“Me too,” Clementine adds.
“Fine,” I say.
“What are the teams?” Theo asks.
“How about boys versus girls. You have one fewer person, but you can go first,” Priya suggests.
Theo moves to stand behind Finn and reaches down to rub his shoulders like a manager hyping up his prizefighter. “You up for it?”
“Absolutely.” Finn beams like he won the lottery.
After refills and tracking down pens—the only ones in Theo’s office were two Montblanc fountain pens in decorative stands, plus we found Clementine’s hair pen under the dining room table—we brainstormed our words and threw our folded slips of paper into a crystal bowl.
“This is way fancier than when we played in college,” Priya says. “We used to use the popcorn slash vomit bowl for this.” She heaves the vessel towards Finn, who is going first.
“One minute on the clock. Go!”
Finn picks out his first slip of paper, and grins when he reads the clue. “It’s a musical about Oz!” he shouts at Theo who has a blank expression on his face.
“Kristin Chenoweth!” Finn adds.
“Erm . . .” Theo scrunches his forehead in thought.
“Popular!” Finn shouts. When Theo doesn’t say anything, Finn tries singing it instead. “POP-U-LAR.”
It doesn’t help. I feel bad for Theo. This reminds me of the time Finn tried to teach me how to play Zip, Zap, Zop, the game they used for warmups in his acting class, and was furious when I didn’t catch on fast enough.
“Witch!” Finn screams at Theo.
“Can we pass, then?” Theo asks.
“Oh my god, we’re going to need to fix this ASAP if we’re going to be friends,” Finn scoffs as he picks a new slip of paper.
“Murder podcast everyone’s obsessed with.”
“Serial?” Theo says.
Before Finn can pick a new slip from the bowl the alarm on Priya’s phone rings to signal time. “They got one point.”
Theo reaches over and grabs Finn’s thigh. “I let you down. I’ll do better next time.” I watch as Finn stares down at Theo’s hand wide-eyed.
“They’re cute,” Clem leans over to whisper to me. I nod, unsure of how to answer.
Priya takes the first turn for our team.
“C’mon, Priya, you’ve got this!” Clementine urges, giving her a drumroll by slapping her hands on her thighs.
Theo starts a timer on his phone. “And, go!”
Priya pulls out her first slip. She squints one eye closed while she thinks. “Topless paparazzi photos of Clem,” she says.