You are a billionaire’s new, about-to-turn-19 wife. You are the youngest person at the Mint Green Party, which is being held in Central Park. Everything is mint green. Even the earrings. Even the cuff links. Even the parasols protecting skin tight over cheek / chin / jaw implants. Someone’s yapping poodle is running around, pistachio curls bouncing, as servers put bloody plates in front of you and your gray-haired husband, Gary, and murmur, “Gorilla steak.” Another server puts a crystal goblet next to your plates at precisely 2 o’clock. “Glacier melt,” she says.
The outdoor heaters take the autumn chill away. The steak melts in your mouth, and you want to ask Gary if the cook will make it for the two of you at home, but he’s busy talking to the billionaire across from him about getting a shadow yacht. You might be a mom now, but you feel like a child, sitting with people who make more in one minute than your dad made in a year. The billionaires wipe their bloody mouths and say haw, haw instead of laughing. The dusk-lit lights of New York City are sea foam meringues, and you hope the nanny is remembering to sing the peacock song for Molly.
Guards in lavender jumpsuits ring the party, facing outward, pistols hanging off their belts. They are watching for the Benign Terrorists, and since no one knows what they look like, it could be the woman walking the Great Dane, it could be the smooching couple by the tree. Gary told you the security advisors were beside themselves. First of all, they said, have your Mint Green party on a super-yacht or a private 747 or one of your people-hunting islands. For god’s sake, they said, you will not be safe in Central Park. And you, three weeks graduated from high school, said but is it safe? Gary laughed and ruffled your hair, the way he does with Molly. He said, the Benign Terrorists have been around for years. If they were going to do something really bad, they would have by now.
The billionaire next to you, whose face is smoother than Molly’s but who keeps talking about seeing the Glenn Miller Orchestra live, picks up his phone and bawls for his assistant to charge it. You don’t have your phone with you. Gary likes for you to be present. You tug on Gary’s sleeve and whisper-ask where the bathroom is and he says, does the baby have to go pee-pee? and everyone in earshot goes haw, haw and he points to a little trailer in the distance. Inside, you run your fingers over the real marble counter and the soap, which a little card tells you was made by children, but in a good way. There’s pee all over the seat, and once when your mom was pregnant with your sister, the two of you went into a Porta-Potty at the fair, and there was such a mound of shit and flies that your mom stumbled out the door and threw up right there on the ground. You wipe the pee off the seat with toilet paper and then wonder on your way back to the party if it could have been the Benign Terrorists. Didn’t they break all the toilets on every whaling vessel that one year?
You wish Gary wouldn’t call you a baby.
At the tables, the billionaires are spooning custard out of hollow elephant tusks, making little coos that you don’t understand until you see the custard sparkling in the candlelight. The smooth-faced billionaire leans over and points to your custard and tells you it’s diamonds, and when you take a bite, you roll the glittering glit on the roof of your mouth and lean against the table, which wobbles a little. Gary snaps his fingers, and a server gets a wrench and tightens and loosens, but after he leaves the table, it still wobbles. Your mind goes again to the Benign Terrorists, but that’s stupid. Look at all the guards.
The after-dinner entertainment starts, a comedy set consisting of real New York City residents reading their real medical bills out loud. One man lists the care his newborn son had during a two-week stay in the neonatal intensive care unit. When he reads, “Total: $570,889.23,” the billionaires are laughing so hard they can hardly breathe, and their laughter is infectious. Gary is wiping tears from the corners of his eyes. Whenever their giggles trail off, someone says, “and twenty-three cents,” and they’re off again.
It’s after the comedy set that the billionaire with the most numbers after their name asks the host why children weren’t allowed at the party. Another billionaire chimes in, saying they were heartbroken, that Elysian has the most darling mint chocolate chip onesie, and more and more are asking and the host, bewildered, says there was never anything about children in the invitation. In the ensuing silence a billionaire at a different table says, “Is it really human rights violations if the ‘victims’ can’t afford lawyers?” and then you are diving for Gary’s phone, everyone is diving for their phones, but none of them are charged and you run to a guard unheeding of his gun and beg for his phone, but the guards’ phones are dead too and no one is walking their dogs or jogging anymore and the pedicabs that were supposed to be waiting are empty spaces in the dark and you and the billionaires run through the night, holding up rainforest-dew gowns, yanking off lime-sorbet jackets.
But you’re too late. Everyone is too late. By the time you and Gary burst into your dark penthouse, you already understand. The nanny is gone. Molly is gone. Her yellow blanket and her soft elephant, and the way she grins up at you when you sing the peacock song, her jagged tooth lonely in her mouth. All of it. Gone.