My nose rouses before my eyes do. The unmistakable stench of summer: sweat, sunscreen, gasoline, all dehydrating in the sweet chloroform of A/C refrigerant. The smell assaults my nostrils and a jet of water hits my face. I scan the train for the culprit. A girl in yellow swimming goggles and beaded braids, aiming a water gun directly between my eyes. Her chubby cheeks accentuate a toothless grin.

Suddenly, the seat shakes underneath me. Whenever the train flies around corners like this, I imagine everything tipping and toppling, derailing and dangling above panicked pedestrians. I picture this little girl clinging to the side of an open train door, too short to reach the strap hangers on the ceiling. Would a latent maternal instinct compel me to grab her by the braids like a superhero? Probably not. I’m self-aware enough to know that even in fake reality, I would push the girl aside if she was in the way of a stanchion to cling on to. Just when I’m about to spiral down my fictional guilt, I see a woman in a ruffled swimsuit and denim overalls confiscate the girl’s water gun.

“It’s not polite to shoot strangers, honey. How would you like it if I sprayed you with water while you were sleeping?” Her voice is stern but tender. Didactic without invoking shame. A tone unlike my mother’s. I take note, in case I do end up choosing motherhood. An overflowing assortment of lime-colored shovels, two-liter soda bottles, family-sized chipbags, and deflated floaties surround the mother and daughter. That’s when I realize we’re heading to the beach. But which beach?

“She has something on her face,” the girl whines. “I was just trying to help her get it off.”

The mother makes apologetic eye contact with me before quickly averting her gaze, as if she has caught me picking my nose.

I bring my palm to my cheek. Black ash covers my life line. It takes me three swipes to launch the camera app on my phone due to my shaking hands. I hold the phone in front of my face and try to steady myself. When my reflection finally sharpens, I smudge the soot that streaks my cheek. I lick my finger to lubricate the cleansing but only succeed in blurring the black over my sunspots. My hand stains with the stench of campfire. A call from Lily, in the form of a selfie of us with pomelo peels on our heads, interrupts my makeshift mirror. I pick up. Sirens howl behind her hysterical rambling.

“Your apartment” — loud gulps of air punctuate her words — “is on fire,” she blurts. “Mitch was inside. I wanted to surprise him for lunch. Saw firefighters. I’m sorry,” she hiccups again. “I’m so fucked up right now.”

Sweat falls from an eyelash as I imagine the scene with closed eyes: Fire trucks as they block the already chaotic intersection, causing an eruption of incessant honks in discordant concert with the rattle of the above-ground train. The smell of lighter fluid indistinguishable with the canola oil from the Popeye’s below my apartment. Fried chicken and burnt hair. Mitch, burning alive.

“Do you think they’ll find the drugs?” Lily’s conspiratorial whisper teleports me back to the train that throttles me towards the unknown.

Lily is the last remaining relic from my early 20s, when drinking and partying were considered acceptable and respectable passion projects. We met in a dive bar bathroom during the verdant summer where we hoped to make it big as Broadway actresses. Instant besties after bumping elbows and coke in a tight bathroom stall. We got jobs at a chic hotel in Herald Square, spending our nights bartending and flirting with out-of-towners who would “forget” their room keys underneath exorbitant cash “tips.” After our shifts, we continued our binge with bodega beers in Madison Square Park, often winding up at a private karaoke room in Koreatown, plastered and belting show tunes. Our 3am blackout special was Wicked’s For Good (she was Glinda, I was Elphaba—of course). For years, we were each other’s only audience. Our hungover days melted away in cafes where we shared a cold brew through two straws while prowling Backstage for auditions that never led anywhere. Our paychecks were slim but so were we.

Ever since I gave up on my acting ambitions, Lily became a tier 3 friend at best. Besides, her hierarchy was inflated because she helped me move, though I know she only did it because of her crush on Mitch. When they hooked up that night, his mattress was as naked as they were, frameless on the floor beside the box it came in, not even fully inflated. Even though I was down the hall, past my bedroom, the bathroom, all the way in the living room, I still heard her shrill moans amplified in the empty apartment. After the practiced orgasm, Lily traipsed in the kitchen and lapped from the faucet like an eager dog. Mitch and I didn’t have cups yet. She met my gaze with smug satisfaction, as if the victor in a contest I didn’t realize I signed up for. I felt embarrassed for her. She was wearing her Monday underwear, even though it was Sunday.

She became a fixture in the apartment from then on, always wearing her wrong day-of-the week underwear, as persistent and annoying as the flickering lightbulb in our bathroom. Lily was around even when Mitch was gone, always under the most confused pretenses.

“My place doesn’t have any A/C,” she whined a few weeks ago. The popsicle she was sucking on turned her tongue razzberry blue. Downstairs, the street was loud with summer commotion. Lily pressed her forehead to the window and watched pedestrians sweat. “Our apartment doesn’t have A/C either,” I retorted.

The entire apartment smelled like Lily’s sandalwood incense and the dozen Black Ice air fresheners that Mitch hung from his five inexplicable box fans. Bile crept up my stomach. The smell reminded me of the perfume floor of a department store, which always gave me headaches whenever my mom used me as a prop to shoplift Clinique.

“Could you please open a window?” I batted my eyelashes exaggeratedly at Lily in pretty please. She pouted and opened the window petulantly. Her typecast was a kid whose flowers were getting stepped on. I ignored her by pretending to type on my laptop, having landed a remote job at a start-up responding to customer care emails from old people who didn’t realize they could pinch to zoom on their phones. Lily joined me on the couch, curling up next to me until she fell asleep on my shoulder. She stayed there, for six sweet hours, until Mitch got home.

Mitch always returned late at night or early in the morning, depending which way you look at it. Whenever Lily heard the key turn, she untangled herself from me and jumped into his arms, wrapping her long freckled legs around his torso.

“I missed you,” she purred in his ear. “I thought of you all day.”

Mitch shrugged her off and walked towards the bathroom at the end of the hall. “I need a shower.”

“I’ll join —,” she trailed as he shut the door in her face.“I’ll be in bed waiting for you.”

That night, I only heard his grunts.

One month after that and one month before today, I found the two of them at the dining table, stripped down to their underwear. The five fans were off as to not blow away the blow. Lily, her dotted cheek delicately scooped on her palm, enamored as Mitch carefully mixed white powders. She watched him like he was a painter dragging long strokes across a canvas. Every so often, she sprinkled a bump on her nipple and squealed with zeal as he lapped it up. I had thought Mitch’s drug dealing was cool until Lily blabbed to me that night that he was lacing his supply with fentanyl as a cost-saving measure.

“It’s so smart — like when that airline saved tens of thousands of dollars by removing a single olive from their salads,” she bragged. “He promised to take me to Ibiza next month.” She said it the annoying way, with the z as a th.

She started belting — I took a pill in Ibiza to show Avicii I was cool — and threw the song on, amplifying her phone’s shitty speaker by slotting it in a water-stained glass. She continued her off-key karaoke: You don't wanna be high like me, never really knowing why like me, without a smidge of irony. I wondered if she knew Mike Posner wrote that song during the umbra of his depression. Or if she knew Avicii died by slicing himself open with a broken wine bottle. No one ever talks about how sometimes the jauntiest songs have the darkest meanings.

At the first beat drop, Lily pulled me to join her sways. It reminded me of the infancy of our friendship’s. Borne on claustrophobic dance floors, breastfed with cheap beer. The friendship that was raised by exorbitant eggs benedicts and hair-of-the-dog martinis purchased on credit. The love that came of age behind our shared laughter and struggle. Whenever Mitch was gone, I imagined she and I lived there together instead, a thought that brought an indecipherable pang to my chest. The setting sun painted the apartment in shades of gold and amber, illuminating the sweat in her ginger hair like rain on a spider web. As we danced, she was close enough where I could inspect her injuries—gashes of indigos and purples and dark reds upon her unevenly tanned skin—whispered testaments to unobserved moments of tension. All I know are sad songs, sad songs. Lily’s voice reduced to a defeated mumble next to my ear. My body softened as hers crumpled, her silent sobs transferring from her open mouth to my left shoulder. Up close, she smelled like rosewater.

The train screeches to a stop. An announcement fills the train, the voice too garbled to comprehend. Outside, the world reverts from fast forward. Children bounce off coolers twice their size, led by parents fanning themselves with brochures as they brace the heat. I cross the sliding door portal into an oppressive humidity.

“I don’t know what to do,” Lily says on the line. Her panic cascades into a quiet quiver. “I loved him.”

“I know,” I offer emptily. The exodus of commuters sweeps me down the stairs and toward the ocean. Four keys dig into my hand as I squeeze.

Last week, I found Mitch in our living room, circling a girl no older than 18 with a giant roll of saran wrap. There were blocks of compressed powder strapped to various parts of her body and a gun at his feet, a silent threat until he pointed it at me and warned: “Don’t say a fucking word to anyone—especially Lily.” I memorized the girl’s face, her expression blank against her high cheekbones and dark skin, and went wordlessly to my room. My heart pounded like it wanted to punch through my rib cage. Behind my closed door, I tried to slow my heartbeat with cowardice.

With my heart in that same frenzied staccato, I ask Lily, “Did you know about the trafficking? The girls?” A tired vendor honks the bugle attached to his brightly colored cart on the boardwalk beside me.

“What girls?” Lily asks. My body unclenches, intimate enough with her intonations to discern her lies from her ignorance.

Last night, I dreamt that I slipped seven sleeping pills in Mitch’s nightly Coors Light. He passed out on the cracked leather recliner he wasted his life in. How fitting, I thought, in a hazy stream of consciousness, that he die in it, too. I struggled getting his limp wrists and ankles in the clunky handcuffs I bought from Amazon. A steal at only $9.99 for a 4-pack. I then distributed accelerants evenly throughout the two bedrooms, three closets, bathroom, living room, and kitchen. I left as soon as flames started taking shape.

I woke up on the train.

“What girls?” Lily repeats, with an increased insistence this time.

Her voice is static now. I bequeath four keys to an unforgiving ocean. They will become anonymous among the kelp, jewelry, fish, and bandaids. My feet bury in the sand. I’ve always loved the way that waves feel thrumming against my ankles. As I look to the horizon, I imagine my supine and slack torso sweeping over the edge. Lily’s garbled voice—demanding now— fades, as it too gets carried out by the water.

JUN CHOU is a Brooklyn-based writer. During the day, she works as a Product Designer for The New York Times Cooking. She is a regular contributor to The Creative Independent and her writing has been featured or is upcoming in Teen Vogue, Electric Literature, Ricepaper Mag, BBC Travel, and Complete Sentence. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @junnotjune.