The Girl He Dated After Me Walked Into My Party Like She Owned It

I wear a sheer black dress as the strip club fills up around me. It’s the same club from Anora, now swelling to capacity. There’s always a peculiar electricity in the minutes before a performance begins, before the burlesque dancers peel off their gloves one finger at a time, before the sword swallower emerges, before the professional clowns wander table to table offering absurdity as salvation from otherwise ordinary nights.

The room is crowded with strangers, but none of them feel accidental. They have arrived through the strange breadcrumb trail of my online reputation: the unhinged girl who throws parties with strippers, who calls her mother while high, who plays pranks on men in bars, who asks friends if she can cuck their sexual experiences, turning the spectacle into essays. They know the version of me I’ve constructed long before they know the person standing in front of them. That is why they came.

I’ve found a certain confidence in hosting parties as an internet celebrity. In the beginning, I gave my followers too much agency within our interactions, letting social awkwardness roam free while they struggled to bridge the uncanny gap between the girl they felt they knew intimately online and the stranger standing in front of them.

But the more accustomed I became to attention, the more playful I learned to be with it. I crafted a party persona who used the false sense of familiarity to take social risks. I’d compliment breasts, I’d ask to touch people’s eyebrows, I’d pull strangers onto the dance floor, kiss foreheads, and whisper secrets into ears I’ll never remember. The party version of me is not only a pleasure to inhabit, she leaves very little room for fawning. The message is clear: if you want to approach me like we already know each other, fine. Let’s get to know each other.

It is a kind of sea best navigated with anchors, people who know me well enough to witness me inside the character of myself. People I can drift back toward throughout the night to gossip over Diet Cokes at the bar, to squeeze hands and hide in bathrooms with.

Tonight, that person is Astor, a person I originally stalked on Substack before they somehow became my friend and editor.

They wear a long skirt and a low-cut dress with thin spaghetti straps, exposing the tattoos scattered along their arms like annotations in a margin. Their dirty blonde hair frames their face in soft, controlled waves, and standing beside them gives me a strange sense of power, as though beauty itself can be communal.

We orbit each other all night, drifting apart and naturally returning. As the mainstage act approaches, we finally settle into our seats. The room tightens toward the stage; conversation dissolves into anticipation. It feels like the collective inhale before a plunge, an exhale from the labor of being social.

That’s when a familiar face approaches me: Emma. I’ve seen her drifting through various Jewish events over the years, as she’s a dating coach who once offered to set me up with someone—the kind of warm acquaintance built through repeated collisions.

I try to place where I saw her last, turning my memory into a game I narrate aloud. We’d both gone to a sauna once, but no, that wasn’t it. Then I remember: a Shabbat dinner on the Upper West Side.

“Not usually my scene,” I tell her, “but a guy I was seeing invited me.”

I clarify that we’re not dating anymore, and Emma smiles at me with a softness that immediately feels dangerous.

“I know,” she says. “We actually just went on a date.”