Playing House

"Do I mind if you do ketamine in my car?" I repeat Tom's words back to him, slowly, as though they might change into something else the second time around. The scrawny, long-haired man sitting in the passenger seat of my sedan nods at me with an expectant grin. I haven’t yet answered and he’s already rifling through his canvas backpack.

"Ummmm," I drag out, buying myself time that I don’t actually need. My inner people-pleaser will win like she usually does. "That's fine, I guess."

"Cool." Tom looks totally unfazed by my hesitancy. And, truly, why would I expect otherwise? Anyone who asks a near stranger for permission to do drugs in their car, mid-thunderstorm, is not going to be the picture of perfect emotional awareness. He pulls out a plastic baggie and scoops some of the powder onto the end of a housekey with easy precision. I tilt my head back and let my eyes close, reprieve from both my exhaustion and the sight of the man doing drugs in the seat next to me.

It was nearly sunrise by the time I walked back to the vendor campground and fell asleep after last night’s shift. And, yet, I’d awoken after only a few hours of sleep thanks to a combination of my tent turning into a greenhouse and the guys camping next to me, who apparently considered eight a perfectly reasonable hour to start partying. They were a trio of rowdy, athletic-looking men in their thirties, radiating an ex-frat-boy energy. One of them lived in Vail, Colorado, which they collectively referred to, with real affection, as "a rich white people's paradise." Our conversation yesterday consisted mostly of them talking about which drugs they wanted to do during the festival, and in what order. After popping my head out of my tent this morning and witnessing them shotgunning beers, I gave up on sleep and ventured into the main festival grounds. There was a rawness to it that didn’t exist during the nighttime when the grassy spaces were full of people drinking and chattering and dancing, house or techno or dubstep reverberating through the air. I walked around, lazily perusing shops selling handmade tie-dye and copper jewelry. Strings of lights hung over nearly everything, looped through trees and around stalls, waiting to be switched on once the party officially started for the day.

I was standing in line for a free pulled pork sandwich, meal-trades being one of the main perks of vendor life, when I spotted Tom bounding toward me—a coworker I'd met during my first shift. I'd come to the festival solo, hoping to make friends at my campsite and mostly failing, so I welcomed his company. We killed some time walking the grounds together, popping in and out of art installations, before trekking back toward vendor camping. The storm came out of nowhere about ten minutes after we got there. I hadn't exactly been keeping tabs on the forecast. That's how we ended up cloistered together in my car.

"You want some?" Tom turns toward me, key in hand, with an uncannily childlike tone, as though he's asking if I'd like to share a bag of Skittles.

"Uh, no thanks," I say, managing a polite smile. "I don't do drugs anymore."

There she is again, my inner people-pleaser. I know I can’t be mad at Tom for doing exactly what I gave him permission to do, but I am retroactively mad at myself for being a pushover. For all I know, this is just a normal Thursday for him, storm or not.

He lifts the key to his nose and inhales. White dust clings to the bottom of his left nostril. "This weather is totally crazy, man!”

"Yeah, it really is." The scene outside is comically devastating. Deformed canopy tents tumble across the field like giant metal spiders. People hurriedly run after their belongings as they’re whipped around other people’s campsites and underneath cars. I look at my own setup just feet away: a canopy desperately held to the ground by yellow plastic stakes, covering my tiny tent and knocked-over camp chairs. Rain pelts sideways against my car. "I wonder if our shift will be cancelled today." I tap the screen of my phone: fifty-three minutes until we're supposed to be at Pizza Star serving hungry festivalgoers. I quickly text the question to our supervisor, a man named Kitty who sports a handlebar mustache.

I recall my first shift, two days ago, at the gig I had taken excitedly in exchange for a free ticket to the music festival that had been on my bucket list for nearly a decade. I was stationed at the ordering window, separated from the crowds and the main stage of rotating EDM artists by artisanal pizzas—though I'm not sure "artisanal" is the right word for pizza made under the supervision of a man who periodically disappeared to do cocaine behind the booth. Kitty had stood in the center of the stall at the start of our shift and reiterated Pizza Star's dress code—no open-toed shoes, no crop tops, no loose hair—then left, and reappeared several hours later wearing a neon green leotard that exposed his bare nipples.

Everyone working at Pizza Star seemed to know each other already. Behind the ovens were two women—or maybe not, I wasn’t quite sure how to read them, and didn’t ask. One had a beard. She introduced herself as Anemone, "Nem" for short, a name too strange to have been anything but chosen. Mid-shift, she announced to me that she was on her period, in a tone that felt less like an update and more like a challenge. They ran the pizza ovens like the tent belonged to them, which, for all I knew, it did. I only ever saw those two control the boombox propped on the rinky shelf above the dish tank, blasting music that clashed hilariously with whatever was playing on the festival's actual stages. One line looped in my head for the rest of the shift—something about wanting a "Rollie, Rollie, Rollie, with a dab of ranch"—which I googled back at my tent later that night. They danced in place between making and pulling pies. They were good at it—genuinely good, fast and precise in a way that told you this wasn't their first summer doing it. Their dirty cutoff T-shirts didn't come close to meeting Kitty's dress code from earlier, and nobody said a word about it.

Tom and I were on counter duty for our first day. When he told me his name, I remember thinking it was too serious, too classic, too old, for the man standing in front of me. We had chatted behind the counter, falling into an easy rhythm—I talked and took payments, he plated the slices and refilled the case with fresh pies. It was better that way. I'd spent years bartending, quick with people and money; Tom moved like someone who'd never had to be. We immediately bonded over our shared musical taste, names of musicians coming out of his mouth that I had longed to talk about with someone else. His eyes lit up talking about music. He knew house music—which plugin an artist favored and what DAW they used.

Over our two shifts together, I learned he lived in Richmond, Virginia, where he'd worked in audio engineering, and that he seemed to know an unusual amount about the city’s deadhead scene. He mentioned, once, an LSD ring moving through there—something darker underneath it he never quite articulated, whether because he didn't want to say more, or couldn't. I didn’t push.

Mostly what struck me about Tom was his sincerity. He was friendly and easy to talk to, and never once made me feel like he was working some angle, the way most guys I'd befriended up to that point eventually revealed themselves to be. There was something almost childlike about him—an openness, an eagerness—that sat strangely against the drugs and the stories and the general chaos he seemed to carry with him. I didn't know what to do with the contradiction. I still don't, entirely.

The wind whooshes against my windshield. A canopy two rows over gives up entirely, folding in on itself and cartwheeling toward the tree line. I think, randomly, of a couple I met on day one who told me they were sleeping in a hammock strung up somewhere in the strip of trees at the edge of the field. I wonder, a little uselessly, where they are right now.

Tom doesn’t seem worried about any of it. We keep talking, mostly about music, in my fogged-up car while the storm tries to take the festival apart around us. At one point, he gets quiet and tells me he wants to stop doing ketamine. Not dramatically—just states it, the way someone sheepishly admits to their dentist that they only floss once a month. He tells me most of his friends back home do it too, that it never really feels like the right time to stop. Maybe once festival season's over, he says. It makes my heart hurt. I know that lie well—telling yourself you'll stop, just not yet, not until it's exactly the right time.

The storm settles after about an hour. Before getting out to examine the carnage around us, my phone buzzes: Kitty, letting us know the festival is still on, our shift isn't cancelled, and can we meet by the porta-potties immediately.

"I'm just gonna change real quick," I say to Tom, stepping out of the car toward my tent.

"Wait—can you help me with a ponytail? I got yelled at yesterday for my hair." He laughs awkwardly, gesturing to his shoulder-length hair.

"Oh, sure." I reach back into my car for a spare hair tie. The only one I can find is the scrunchie wrapped around my gear shift, one of my favorites—pink satin with a blue paisley print. I pause, knowing that I’m never going to see that scrunchie again, and decide that’s actually okay. I toss it to him, already turning back toward my tent.

"No, like—can you put it in for me?" He holds the scrunchie out, and for the first time since I’ve met him, he looks genuinely nervous. "I don't really know how to do a ponytail."

"Wait, seriously?" I ask, a little surprised that he’s managed to grow his hair this long and never put it up. I step behind him and gather his hair back—unkempt and a little greasy, though I can't really fault him; it’s the middle of summer and we’re sleeping in tents. I work it into a modest ponytail, aware, as I do it, of how oddly tender the gesture is, how it might appear to campers nearby—the kind of thing you'd do for a sister, or a child, maybe a lover, definitely not someone you met two shifts ago.

Tom jogs off to his own car to change, and comes back with a seltzer in each hand, one of them for me. I take it, mostly out of habit.

A few minutes later, Tom and I are sitting on the back of Kitty's golf cart, waiting for another newbie, Joe, to join us before we can head over to Pizza Star. I slide my nonslip Crocs on and off, recalling my introduction to Joe yesterday. He was reserved and more clean-cut than anyone else I worked with. It surprised me when he pulled a business card out of his cargo shorts advertising that he was a professional hypnotist. Discover your past lives! Find out who you really are! it read, framed by colorful mandalas on a galaxy print background. I had tucked it away wistfully.

Kitty’s annoyed voice pulls me back to reality. "What are you doing? Are you seriously drinking right now?” he scoffs, gesturing to the can of seltzer in my hand.

"Oh. Sorry," I mumble, dumping the can I’ve had two sips from out into the grass next to me. Tom looks at me and shrugs, his own seltzer wedged safely out of view between his feet. Kitty turns back around, muttering under his breath. At least he’s wearing a T-shirt today, so I don’t have to recount that I was reprimanded by someone with his nipples on display. Joe shows up, mercifully, and we zoom off to the booth, saving a half hour’s walk through the mud.

We pull up behind our booth and I’ve just barely climbed off the back of the cart when Kitty sets up a neat line of powder and snorts it right there in the open, right off the seat he just got up from. I stare at him, genuinely stunned—apparently two sips of seltzer had been the real crisis of the hour. I open my mouth, think better of it, then say nothing. Kitty’s rules are clearly only for people like me—passing through for a weekend, playing vendor the way children play house—not for the ones who measure time in festival circuits and sleep in a van more often than not.

Tom raises an eyebrow at me, the irony clearly not lost on him. I turn around, shaking my head, and let out a laugh. He smiles back, toothy and genuine. "Thanks for letting me hide out in your car.”