Do I smell like fries? I ask, trying to act like I am keeping it together, trying to pretend I didn’t just say something incomprehensible. The Restaurant is Zagat-rated and our party spent over four grand on one dinner that involved compotes, reductions, infusions, compound butters, a coulis, a pan jus, but somehow the smell of French fries is what I always carry home on me. He puts his nose in my neck and inhales tenderly. We’re still standing right there in the living room in front of his dad. Crème brûlée, he says. Come on, I’ll show you to the ladies’.

This is the thing about the service industry, you can get trained to be slick and hospitable in any situation and it serves you well the rest of your life. Once you figure out that everything is performance and you bow to that, learn to modulate, you can dissociate from the mothership of yourself like an astronaut floating in space. That’s how you can show a fucked-in-your-truck girl down the hall to the ladies’ and tell her her neck smells like crème brûlée in front of a zombie dad while some freebased flesh you’re related to waits for you to carry it inside. That’s how the crunked girl can get in the shower like she’s told and stand over the drain and pee and not think about what might happen next.