There are six lines of Vyvanse waiting on the iPad mini. One for Izzy, one for Kayla, one for Taylor and two for me. I already snorted so much that I remembered my entire Torah portion— טאַתֶּ֨ם נִצָּבִ֤ים הַיּוֹם֙ כֻּלְּכֶ֔ם לִפְנֵ֖י יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹֽהֵיכֶ֑ם רָֽאשֵׁיכֶ֣ם שִׁבְטֵיכֶ֗ם זִקְנֵיכֶם֙ וְשֹׁ֣טְרֵיכֶ֔ם כֹּ֖ל אִ֥ישׁ יִשְׂרָאֵֽל— that’s how good this stuff is. I could dig a hole to China and save the Uyghurs. I’d be happy to take the SATs or the ACTs right here, right now. I feel like I’m Saturday morning. I’ve just solved the murder of Jonbenet Ramsey, and I can’t want to tell you who did it. I can smell the 5G in the air. The whole world tastes like Pop Rocks on my tongue. Getting high is so fun. We’re going to stay up all night. No one is the boss of us.

Izzy says she wants to take Greta Thunberg’s virginity. I tell her that one day I’m going to fuck Barron Trump. Kayla has a nosebleed. Taylor licks it up. We talk like Alvin and the Chipmunks. Our words flutter around the basement like anime butterflies on CIA crack cocaine. Nothing is funny. Everything is funny. It’s all so good. It’s all so bad. We don’t even have our learners permits. No one can blow our minds. We’re best friends forever and forever will be over soon.

Out of the girls at the slumber party, I have the nicest boobs. We can all agree on that. They are perky and small, but round with little pink nipples and a healthy bounce. I got them for my sixteenth birthday. As the anesthesia kicked in, the doctor who did them told me about how he fled North Korea. I dreamt of his hunger and mother and fear and worship and turnips as he cut into my chest and stretched my skin so beautifully. My boobs were his masterpiece, he said, they made it all worth it. The white tiger he had to shoot as he crossed the DMZ, the family that he knows will be punished for generations because of his crimes, the guilt constantly dripping at the back of his throat, it was worth it now. Izzy, Kayla and Taylor all booked consultations, but he ended up shooting himself in the face before he could fix their boobs. In his note he apologized to the old family he left in North Korea and the new family he left in Santa Monica. He wrote that my boobs had set him free. He had finally brought something beautiful into the world and now he could leave it. I still dream about that tiger he killed in the DMZ. I wonder who it became next.

The bathroom is a Roman vomitorium. Taylor has her fingers down Kayla’s throat. Izzy is brushing the enamel right off her teeth. I am staring at the clumps of Nobu and Pink Berry swirling like dervishes in the toilet. We all want to be Dachau-liberation-day-skinny for spring break on Little Saint James. We need a vacation because LA is like Narnia now. Climate change is real. It’s always winter, but never Christmas. I celebrate Hanukkah anyways so I don’t really even care. When I grow up I’ll control the media or the banks, but first I’ll study comparative literature or photography or drama at NYU. College will be fun, but I’ll miss my friends and our slumber party conversations and their fingers down my throat.

We are the most popular girls in school now. All the other girls are fat from the hormones in their chocolate milk or paralyzed by vaccine resistant super chlamydia or too busy saving up for their top surgeries to even care. The other most popular girls in school threw themselves off a bridge, into the dry LA River. They just couldn’t see the point in doing anything else. Izzy, Kayla, Taylor and I weren’t invited. We still had our baby fat and braces. We watched the most popular girls in school get power washed off the concrete. I even saw a few pigeons scavenge around for pieces of meat. We had a slumber party after the funeral and we knew that somewhere the dead girls were doing the same. That’s what death is, an eternal slumber party. If they’d have invited us I know we would have gone. Thank God we were ugly ducklings. Now we are swans.

The night is dark like it always is. ISIS blew up the moon. The tide doesn’t know when to come in anymore. Surfers committed mass suicide. It was so gnarly. There was another sarin gas attack at Disneyland. This time Mickey had the masks ready for sale in every gift shop. It’s still the happiest place on earth. My parents had sex on Space Mountain. Nine months later I would be the second worst thing to happen on September 11th, 2001. One second, I was a martyr, committing a violent act of poetry, piloting a plane right into a skyscraper, filled with love. Then there was a puff of fire and smoke and I was a beautiful baby girl being pulled out of a soap opera actress’ vagina in Los Angeles. That’s a fun fact about me.

I’m cutting more lines with my debit card when the iPad mini starts singing some song from that Disney movie about the transgender princess and the talking poodle. It makes my heart beat too fast and bouncy like a possessed pogo stick. We can’t figure out how to turn it off without disturbing the heaping mound of Vyvanse powder sitting on the screen. The song is teaching us a lesson about self love and radical acceptance. Kayla’s autistic brother is moaning from his room upstairs. He wants his iPad mini. We’ve stolen it to do our drugs, because all our phone screens are broken and would trap the precious powder in their cracks. Kayla’s brother is buff Boo Radley sobbing like a baby on a flight to Tokyo. He wants to be near his transgender princess song. Too bad he’s non-verbal. He can’t tell on us and he never will.

The undocumented nurse nanny has no idea why Kayla’s brother is melting down faster than the ice caps. All she knows is that the bus ride home tonight will be long like it always is. I can hear how much she needs a green card as she attempts to cover him with a weighted blanket. That blanket is only making him stronger, Kayla says. He’s too strong. Only a stepdad can subdue him. He doesn’t want the weighted blanket. He wants the song. He lives in hell. “This Vyvanse has given me the power to telepathically communicate with your autistic brother,” I tell Kayla. He wants you to know that he lives in hell. We all do, she says as she scampers up the stairs with the iPad mini. She’s right. The song gets farther and farther away and so do the tormented telepathic waves. I’m higher than that really high building in Dubai.

I look like Anna Sophia Roberts or Elle Fanning or Amanda Seyfried. My face is beautiful. I am blonde. I am Jewish. My Bat Mitzvah was beautiful. My parents were so proud. My recitation brought the rabbi to tears. I think he could feel who I used to be before I was me with my blonde hair and big eyes. I gave my other life for God. Instead of 72 virgins, I got to be a girl from LA. At the party after the ceremony I came in flying on a trapeze. There were cupcakes that looked like circus tents and contortionists and a friendly chimpanzee named Travis. I held his hand and saw something I don’t want to talk about in his eyes. Travis is famous now because he ripped off a woman’s face and she had to get a face transplant and then a second face transplant because her body rejected the first. I think my body is beginning to reject this face that is mine for now. This time I won’t hijack a plane. I might inhale air duster. I might drink windex. I might eat a Tide Pod. I might even just let time move as fast as it does and die an old lady with this same wrinkled face.

We think that Taylor will be the first of us to die. She has popcorn lung. Her parents will join a class action lawsuit against Juul. She says I can have first dibs on her tracksuit collection. This makes Izzy and Kayla so mad that they start moaning like an autistic brother filled with wordless yearning. Taylor explains that I will probably die next so it’s only fair that I get to pick first. Everyone agrees that I will meet some tragic and sudden death like Elle Fanning did on that Yacht. It’s such a coincidence that I look like her. I don’t want to end up like her. I guess there are worse ways to end up. I guess it’s a compliment like when the rabbi cried or when I decided I didn’t want to die.

We are in the basement and we are Generation Z. Z is the last letter of the alphabet, but we will not be the last generation. Some of us Gen Zers have babies of our own. The babies will be called Generation A for Alpha. A is the first letter of the alphabet, but they are not the beginning. They are a beginning, just like us. We are zoomers. We are speeding towards something as we laugh in the basement. The earth spins so fast. Sometimes it goes so fast that I want to get off. Most of the time I am thankful for the speed. I am a zoomer and I am built for this. I wonder if we will ever get to where we are going. I wonder how much will change before it’s all over. Being young is so cool. Everyone who has been young knows this. Every dead stepdad and autistic brother and undocumented nanny has also been filled with that brief and powerful and perfect feeling of speed. We’re here and then we’re not.

It’s 3am now. The basement, paneled in wood and decorated with WWE memorabilia by so many stepdads, is now a medieval dungeon. I might be trapped down here forever. The night might never end. All this speed might get me nowhere. What if we’ve just been running in place? What if it’s one big long treadmill? I think I am crying a little bit. Everyone else is too busy practicing their one handed cartwheels to see what I see, to feel the treadmill below our feet. The neon Budweiser sign begins to flicker faintly. I can smell some dead stepdad’s aftershave, a manly musk mingling with the burnt toast and silly putty smell of 5G. The little men of the foosball table begin to play a match. I wonder which dead stepdad will win. Hell can be anywhere, but usually it’s everywhere. Is that where we are speeding off too or are we all already there? I want to tell the dead stepdads that I like the way they paneled the basement, but Kayla is chanting something in Latin and they are gone again and I am doing a one handed cartwheel as fast as I can.

All the cities are on fire like the Amazon was when the Amazon still was. I’m making TikToks while they burn. I am Nero with bulimia. I order communion wafers on Amazon Prime. The flesh of Jesus Christ is a low calorie snack. I have been trying to get better. I do sit ups and meditate with the Headspace app. The slumber party is over. The sun is rising. It happens every morning. This is just one of many Saturdays. The sun is up now. Isn’t it terrifying? Isn’t it wonderful?