#&event.

&. ji nee / @pcrkjinee​ event: st patrick’s festival. location: the temple bar.

It was a bad decision to have followed the whims of an invitation she hadn’t been expecting, and stone cold sober in a crowd of drunken Angelenos who fancied that they could outdrink the Irish, Chloé had come to realise that she needed a drink. Or thirty. Whatever would kill her faster. She had managed to fight her way to the bar before she had been caught, surrounded by camera flashes picking out an easy target separated from the herd — wasn’t this a private event? — and she swore, holding up her lukewarm Guinness as a shield, struggling to breathe. “Motherfucker! Leave me alone, fuck off!”

&. bryce / @brycbrooks event: st patrick’s festival. location: the temple bar.

Expecting drunken men not to be assholes was ridiculous. She knew that. Her bar was practically on the ground. And still, she was let down. Someone was persistently catcalling her, yelling at her to ‘take off your top, blondie’, and she spun around to scream back. She was met with as unwelcome a sight as possible: the king of SoCal Sinners, or whatever it was. “Try me. Say one more word and you’re going to get a whisky to the face.” Chloé knew his voice, everyone knew what Bryce Brooks’ sounded like after six years of his stupid show, and the voice yelling at her hadn’t been his. But — he was a man. So — threatening him was good enough.

&. evie / @lcrkspur​ event: st patrick’s festival. location: the temple bar.

Cardinal rule of being an Angeleno: don’t acknowledge celebrities — unless, of course, they were your boss and you wanted to fuck them. Ignoring someone’s fame, or infamy, was now Chloé’s own personal rule. She knew the woman trying to order a drink, or at least get some water, was Evie Larkspur. She pretended she didn’t. “Hold on, I’ll get his attention. What do you want?”

“Oh, bullshit. Bullshit!” Phoebe’s hand shook from how tightly she was gripping her phone, and she was talking to herself, but she didn’t care. “Bullshit, can you believe-- can you even believe this?”

The news reports were out for Oya’s concert. Who wore what, who arrived and left with whom, those were the usual. “Fantheon” bloggers gushing about their favorite parts of the performances. And then the official word from CNN, the Times, the Times Union, and the Post: “Rave at the Ramble: Designer Drugs ‘Rain’ on Oya’s Congregation in Central Park.”

Her voice was shaking, too, but Phoebe was in no mood to reel in her outrage. “As if-- as if-- I went to art school!” she snapped. “I know from fucking mescaline and LSD. And they expect people to believe there’s a drug that makes everyone see the same thing? Hear the same things? Bull-fucking-shit.”

It was slow and sleepy enough at the bar-- that was what happened when a notorious free-booze event was happening right across the borough-- that Phoebe didn’t think much of it when she got the first text from Ylmaris: Close up shop. She glanced around and wondered how much time she would have to account for last call and cleaning, formulating a reply, but then everyone’s phones seemed to be going off in unison. Everyone’s.

She got a chill. Nothing happened in unison like this in New York. It had even been a more staggered reaction the night Freya died, and she was barely up the street.

“Holy shit, turn on the news--”

“It’s not gonna be on TV yet, it just hit Twitter-- are you seeing this?"

Phoebe pulled up Twitter on her own phone and started rapidly scrolling through. Hashtag Lucifer. Hashtag “Children of the Light.” Hashtag if you’re not with us you’re against us. It was happening almost too fast to put together, and all Phoebe could think about was that kid at the vigil and then again in the park.

He was right. Fuck me, he was right.

Another text. Go home. Stay inside. It was a record speed for Phoebe, but there were only about six people left who needed to be told to get out. Everyone else had started getting their shit and leaving from the jump. The dishes and taps could wait until morning, but... Of course but. Any foot traffic heading south from the Orpheum would meet Phoebe halfway between the bar and her apartment, dead center. They might scatter in all directions at the call, but if any went downtown-- the roads ran on a grid in Manhattan. North-south and east-west. It wasn't enough of a head start. Would they be on the streets already? Would they be a mob? What would Phoebe be to them as a bystander?

She wasn’t sure how many blocks she’d gone or what time it was, not even sure if the concert was still going, nauseous and marching on autopilot, when she thought she felt someone grip her shoulder. “Get off me--!”

"Oh, fuck me.”

Phoebe grimaced at the crowds pooling in the street around her. It had been an early night at the bar-- management had predicted, correctly, that business in this part of the Village would grind to a standstill once the celebrity “goddess” Freya’s vigil got underway-- but Phoebe hadn’t connected the dots between ‘closing shift 15 minutes before the biggest event in Manhattan of the year’ and ‘good luck making it home before midnight if you live on the Lower East Side.’

She could always take the L-- if she could manage to shove her way through all these people to walk towards the subway station, anyway-- if the subway was even still running.

Why wouldn’t it be? It oughta be. It’s New York. People die every day. Trains had never stopped for Phoebe's grief before, after all; she was sympathetic, but the world kept spinning. It had to. She leaned backward to avoid a particularly demonstrative mourner’s lit candles, done up like one of those Scandinavian Christmas angels with a full, fiery crown.

Phoebe became suddenly, keenly aware of how flammable she probably was, between spilled vodka and the cleaning chemicals she used on the bartop and taps before clocking out, and corrected herself. Well. Gods don’t die every day. Not even in this city.

...Whatever. Phoebe wasn’t scheduled for Sunday, and it wasn’t like she couldn’t reschedule her hot night of cold leftover takeout and Netflix for sometime after sun-up... but still, she’d been on her feet for the last 7 hours, and wasn’t fond of the idea of pushing that until dawn. Time to take action. Positioning herself bodily against the flow of foot traffic, Phoebe moved to directly block the path of someone at least not openly sobbing. “Have they got anyplace to, like... sit down around here? I just need to wait this out.”