She gave me a knowing look, but all she said was, “I wonder where Jesse is.” She seemed to be getting more tense as she led me into the kitchen, which was probably one of the largest kitchens I had ever seen. There was no food, but a ton of wine bottles and alcohol littering the marble countertops. “Seriously?” I said. “Not even carrots and dip or something?”
“What?” Roux yelled. She had to, the music was loud and pounding. I suspected it was the kind of music that sounded better when drunk.
“Is there food?” I yelled back.
“Looks like a liquid diet tonight,” Roux said with an exaggerated wink, then immediately grabbed a bottle of red off the countertop and took a swig, not even waiting for a glass. The label was French and I assumed that it was as expensive as everything in the house seemed to be. “Uh, do you want a glass?” I asked her. “Maybe a Dixie cup?”
“Nope!” she said, wiping her mouth a little. “Tastes better when it’s direct from the source!”
We wandered out of the kitchen to come face-to-face with a huge stainless steel staircase. It spiralled upward through three more floors and just looking at it gave me vertigo. I wish I hadn’t promised not to use the elevator. Just as I was about to say something to Roux, a kid dressed as a ninja suddenly came leaping toward the stairs, and even though I couldn’t see his face, it was obvious that he was drunk.
Sure enough, he tried to jump over the railing, but he lost his footing and sort of dangled for a second, before falling several feet to the marble floor. It was so noisy that only a few people noticed, but Roux saw and she shook her head in disgust. “Ugh,” she said as he peeled himself off the floor in a daze. “Worst. Ninja. Ever.”
She wandered off with her wine bottle, and I really wanted to follow her just to make sure she didn’t end up crumpled in a bathtub somewhere, but I had a job to do. Roux was a big girl, she would just have to take care of herself.
It didn’t stop me from feeling a little guilty, though, as I left her behind.
As I wandered into the center of the house, I recognized a few faces from school, but hardly anyone even acknowledged me, which was awesome. The fewer people who remembered seeing me there, the better. Still, it was hard to move through the crowd and I found myself throwing a few inconspicuous elbows just so I could clear a path through the human sea.
After elbowing Batman out of the way and fending off the inappropriate advances of Spider-Man (“No, I don’t want to be caught in your human web, gross”), I made it back over to the huge stainless-steel staircase and started to climb. Halfway up, I heard a crash and prayed that Roux wasn’t bleeding from an arterial wound somewhere in the foyer. What had I been thinking, making her come with me? She was a disaster, so drunk that she looked like a broken marionette. I had never had such a liability before, and I swore that as soon as this job was over, I was never going to have another friend ever ag—
“Do you always talk to yourself?”
Jesse was standing at the landing of the stairs, smiling down at me. “Let me guess,” he said. “Multiple personality disorder.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your costume.”
I knew I should have taken the elevator.
“I’m a spy,” I told him, wondering if I could shove him down the stairs and make it look like a tragic accident. “No multiple personalities yet,” I added, and then wondered if having twelve different passports totally refuted that statement.
“Oh, that’s riiiiiiight,” Jesse said, leaning against the silver banister. “Spy girl. I remember you. How’s it going?”
“Just ducky,” I said. “Halloweening it up, you know.” I glanced past him and saw that the rooms upstairs were fairly calm, as compared to the near-riot of people downstairs.
“Did you just make Halloween a verb?”
“Poetic license,” I shot back, even though the thought of Jesse discussing verbs was enough to make me hate him a little less. “What are you supposed to be?”
He stood back a little and showed me his tuxedo, his tumbler half-filled with ice and what looked like scotch, the toy gun tucked underneath his jacket. “I’m James Bond,” he said.
This was all becoming a little too meta for me, but I guess Jesse took my surprise for disdain. “Sorry, that was really cheesy.” He grinned, and I was totally not admiring his smile and his nice dimples and, my God, it was really warm in this house.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “Hey, is there a bathroom up here?”
He pointed vaguely over his shoulder. “There’s a few up there, but they’re all taken by people making out.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me before cracking himself up. “Sorry, that was really cheesy, too. Did you just get here?”
“Um, yeah.” My opinion of Jesse seemed to be changing every three seconds. He knows about verbs? He has a nice smile? He doesn’t take himself too seriously? Our dossiers really needed to start including this kind of information. “I came with a friend.”
“Oh yeah? Who’s your friend?”
“Roux?” I said it like a question on purpose, just in case Roux did something that made us all end up in court. I wasn’t going to jail for that drunk muppet, that was for sure.
“Roux? Are you serious? She’s here?” Jesse looked down the stairs. “Holy shit, she’s brave.”
“Yeah, well, she’s a big girl.” I climbed the stairs so that Jesse and I were both on the landing.