It might not be a big deal for you, but it is for Dora. It is a difficult thing for Dora. To swing by the nearby Trader Joe’s for a thing of smoked gouda and a tangerine scented soy candle. To dart out for a quick happy hour get-together with work colleagues. To spend a leisurely hour at an outlet mall without feeling—or rather knowing, deep in the meaty marrow of her bones—that she will be killed in that same courtyard where she stands between the Under Armor outlet and the Auntie Anne’s.

You would not guess it though. Dora is an exceptional talker. She has the right balance of pretty and self-deprecating to get by as a woman in this world. Dora is funny—not too funny to rub the wrong way—but funny enough to lighten your load. Dora is a good talker, but as she tells you about how she once went a day with her skirt tucked into her underwear, she’ll be sure that you’re going to slit her throat then and there. In front of the whole crowd, she knows you’ll do it. She’s smart enough to realize that you might just be pretending until you aren’t anymore and you drop all artifice and emerge as the truly vicious being that you are—the creature that hates Dora and has all this time—the person who has been conspiring against Dora with all the other good-talking people for months, no years now. Dora does not stop telling you the story, but she knows what you’re going to do. And she knows that while some people might film it, no one will stop it. 

Dora does not have a diagnosis. Some kind of paranoia. Who knows. Maybe agoraphobia? That might be kind of hot actually. Very Emily Dickinson/Shirley Jackson-chic. Dora, to some extent, knows it might be agoraphobia or maybe even something grander and direr. Again, who knows these things?

Dora is 21 and good looking. She has two-years-of-braces-straight teeth and a half of a college education that her parents bankrolled. But Dora cannot leave her house. She’s going to—well by going to, she’d pondered—trying one of those virtual therapy websites advertised on the podcasts she listens to sometimes. They seem expensive though. Dora too feels uncomfortable with the image of herself furiously typing her despair in a chatroom. The whole thing is too reminiscent of the Friday nights she and her 13 year old friends spent chatting with randomly generated strange men on Omegle and Chatroulette in the mid-2000s. The whooping opposite of mental wellness.

Today is Dora’s birthday. 21! The day was full—busy with school work and emails to answer and her remote part-time job. She’s been celebrating the 21st year of her life with sweet Robin, feasting upon cylindrical takeout containers of green curry and tom kha gai while sharing a bottle of white wine Robin said she’d picked exclusively for the packaging.

“No, I fully get that it’s just the branding, but I mean...the branding! It’s great, like props to the graphic designer who worked up the logo.

“I can’t tell the difference anyhow so I’m good with it,” Dora nods.

“Can anybody?”

“Well, actually, an amendment to what I just said: I can tell if it’s sweet or not sweet, but that’s basically the extent of it,” Dora concludes. Robin claps her hands in agreement and they polish off the remaining glugs of the clear, blond elixir. It is sweet, they decide. As Dora had anticipated, Robin soon brings up the coming evening. It is Dora’s 21st birthday Robin reminds her. It is a monumental evening grandly designed for making hazy, heady memories. They should be going out, sipping on strawberry daiquiris, finding subterranean speakeasies and running bare-legged to the town’s best pizzeria before it closes at midnight. It is not an evening for streaming the same Netflix shows or facetiming one’s old high school friends in a closed-door bedroom. They should go out, Robin decrees but Dora shakes her head “no.” She tenses her neck inadvertently. The tendons would be tauter, but she’s already knee-deep in half a bottle of wine.

“C’mon!” Robin implores, drawing out the word.

“Nah, let’s...I’m just kinda tired from work, ya’ know?” Dora responds, gnawing on a thin strip of cuticle. 

“C’mon! Just a couple rounds and a nice little spinach-artichoke number. C’mon! I know you wanna,” Robin slaps her thighs like the starting percussion of a symphony. “Let’s do it!”

“Uh—”

“—C’mon!”

“I don’t—” Dora protests, but she can already feel that she’s going to do it. She becomes dramatically less afraid of the outside when she’s had a drink.

“How often do you turn 21! It’s major!” Robin insists again, shuffling through her playlist to find the right pump-up song. Maybe classic Shania Twain? Maybe Britney for a dash of nostalgia? Something high-pitched with a strong beat that makes you wanna swing your hips and inhale a line of glitter. 

“Maybe…” Dora starts. She knows she’ll be a clenched-neck creature all night if she does actually go out, but she knows too that Robin is right. You only turn 21 once. She can envision a glorious evening out. A “rip-roaring GOOD TIME” as her Aunt Shirley had wished her on her Facebook wall. She’d thrown it a like. It was sweet. Definitely better than the message she’d received from some other random people. There were the few former camp friends who wished her well and the former supervisor who wordlessly posted a sweet string of emojis. There too was the kid she’d performed with in a high school production of The Music Man plus the boy who had kissed her just below the eye at a Halloween party in sixth grade. And of course, a handful of strangers wished her well too. One such guy she’d never met before had apparently been her Facebook friend since she was fourteen. Maybe a middle school acquaintance or some random cousin? She was from a massive cartoonishly Southern family so oftentimes she ended up being related to most mysterious men who would like her biannual profile picture changes. This guy, though, one “Paul Lewis” had posted “as always, you’re beautiful on this birthday, pretty lady.” Doing a light investigation, Dora had clicked on his profile while scarfing down her morning Wheaties. He was a 35-year-old or so white guy pictured in a white button-up shirt. Flipping through his photos, Dora could see him posing with a massive, silvery bass. He apparently—based on another Facebook photo—was close with his little sister and owned a small business, “Patriot Pool Supplies and Cleaning.” What—Dora wondered—about his particular pool supplies and cleaning services made them so patriotic? Did the other pool maintenance companies in town have a divergently unpatriotic bend to them? 

“Okay, can you be ready in 20?” Robin wonders, cracking two canned gin and tonics. She squeezes a redundant lime into each, handing one to Dora. “Yeah, 20?”

“Depends on if I can borrow your mascara…?” Dora smiles. Okay. Yeah. She’s gonna do it. Gulping down vigorous throatfuls of the G&T, she can feel herself starting to look forward to the night out. That was the thing. Dora did not need a diagnosis or any podcast-advertised therapy subscription when she was sipping on something fizzy and bitter. Just two cups could do what all the learning and conversation in the world could not. 

“What say you to a couple shots?” Robin hollers from across the apartment, already doling out two squat glasses of the cheap gin they keep above their fridge. 

“I think a definite ‘fuck yes’,” Dora shoots back, jumping her way into a pair of too-tight shorts. “You know what’s good is when you steep the gin in tea. Like you put tea bags in vodka or gin or whatever for a while and then it’s like, I dunno my friend from second year told me about it but ten out of ten. It really elevates the experience.”

“Ooooo, that so?” Robin grins, planting a quick ass-slap on Dora.

“Big-time,” Dora tilts her head.

“Learn something new every day.”

“You ready to go soon?” Dora says, uncharacteristically eager to emerge from the poorly insulated walls of her apartment. It was the G&T likely. Or perhaps the two shots Robin and her had guzzled, leaving wet glasses loitering on the faux marble countertop.

“Gimme a second,” Robin holds up one finger, darting to the bathroom where she pees with the door partially cracked so they can keep talking through the door. “Thoughts on me bringing a water bottle of GT with me?”

“Yes. Good. Very into that,” Dora says, feeling herself sink into a better edition of herself. She likes this edition of herself. Far less anxious. Far more fun. Zipping up her shorts, Robin moves through the door. 

“Yeah?” Robin asks.

“Yeah. Ready?”

“Let me get it first,” Robin nods, filling up a bottle as they head out the door.

It’s maybe 20 degrees cooler outside. Dora tugs her denim jacket into herself. It’s not fringed or rhinestone-encrusted but it might as well be. She could be a cowboy right now. Heading out with her posse, in an exquisite electric blue get-up—though she doubted real cowboys ever really wore outfits like that. It was just Hank Williams and Glen Campbell and Dolly etc.

They reached the bar in maybe ten minutes. It was at the peak of a violently steep stairwell. Ascending, one can’t see the top, but only hear the roar of people you likely know from somewhere. One time, maybe a year ago, Dora climbed those stairs with Sloan and when she turned her neck to the right, she’d seen the crooked-smiling guy who once grabbed her at a party. He hadn’t touched her anywhere he shouldn’t but just gripped her by the hips, digging his thumbs below the bones. That night long ago, he’d lifted her slightly into the air before dropping her down and tugging down her skirt in one hard motion: a warning of sorts maybe. Who knows. That time, at the crest of the stairs, he had been talking to a girl who looked maybe seventeen? Wordlessly from where Dora stood, brandishing her fake ID for inspection, he had spoken to the girl with his characteristic knowing half-smile. That same cowboy kind of confidence that Dora felt now walking beside Robin three-drinks-in. An old-west go-out-and-get-em kind of flannel grin touched ever so often with the long-stemmed beer he cradled in his excessively-knuckled hand.

But this night, on Dora’s 21st, there is no bad man. This night Dora ascends to the bar’s top floor to find a table-full of her best friends awaiting with sweaty pitchers of some sour, nightly special ale. A marvelous surprise.

“You guys are...Stop! This is too, too much!” Dora laughs as she falls into their outstretched arms. They fill a thin plastic cup for her and she swallows it in seconds. She feels good and is good. She is a woman with exceptional friends and a phenomenal, very-good life. She feels as though she’s levitating in this moment, surrounded by her sweet friends—Igor (yes, his name is Igor!) who describes being ghosted by a guy with an Ayn Rand poster on his wall and Kristian who brings Dora a lovely gift of oatmeal soap. Other friends, more and less known, reach across the table to hug or snatch the draining pitcher. They bob and swerve to the songs that float above the room above full tables that spill out into the already-narrow aisles. Excess chairs pulled from other tables are crammed beneath too-small tables, jostling for room for all the squirming thighs and waving arms. The room is astir. Waitresses hustle to and from tables, pausing to rest their tired chins atop the shoulders of friends and lovers. Behind Dora and Robin, a group of friends squeezes into one another to take a Polaroid photo. They congratulate themselves on the perfect retro-ness of it, slightly drunk and sloshing their amber beverages onto the warped, wooden floorboards. Older couples loudly and happily squabble over the rules of a board game set out before them. A table of fraternity pledges shouts changing orders at a waitress, dressed in identical sear-sucker suits. At the bar, bartenders who seem to know one another well dry pitchers and close out tabs. One guy leans across the shellacked bartop to take a recently-arrived patron’s order. He motions for a beer and surveys the room, openly eavesdropping and absorbing the conversations of nearby tables.

Dora would not much mind if this night extends deep into some other realm, so late in fact that she would not need to ask anyone to walk her home safely because no other soul in this galaxy would still be up. 

They laugh “you’re-too-much-stop!!!” laughs deep into the silky, velvet night. Friends peel off one by one, descending back down those steep stairs to awaiting Ubers and other, unknown friends with other afterparties to attend. By closing time, it is just Dora and Robin and a friendly couple they’d met at a salsa dancing class they’d only ever attended once. Longtime couples like that tend to like talking late into the night like that, Dora had noticed. Was there something about being with another person that long that made you want to talk to one other couple for the rest of the night before returning home? Maybe.

“Oh shit,” Robin jolts forward, straightening her posture.

“Everything okay?” One half of the couple asks.

“What’s up?” Dora wonders.

“One... my roommate’s locked out and she’s plastered or...her text is like totally misspelled and she was just seeing her ex, just, one second, I’m gonna call her,” Robin scrunches her brow, shuffling off to the bathroom for a little quiet.

“Hope it’s all okay,” Dora shrugs and the couple nod furiously. They discuss new TV shows they’ve seen and how the couple’s orange tabby cat sleeps on its back with its paws up in the air and how the live-action Cats musical was an absolutely insane fever dream. By the time Dora speculates that all the A-listers starring in the movie might have only done so because the movie’s producers kidnapped their families, Robin returns. 

“Hey, I’m so, so sorry. I gotta go help her. She’s not in a good way. It’s...can I call you an Uber though? Maybe we can meet up after though I don’t know how long this is gonna take honestly. She’s throwing up, it’s...real bad.”

“No, no, don’t worry about it! I totally understand. I’m good, totally, good, okay?” Dora assures.

“You can get home safe though?” Robin confirms.

“For sure. I’ll probably call an Uber.”

“Yeah? Okay, cool, I’m sorry again, really, but text me when you get home safe, yeah?” Robin hugs Dora around the neck, pressing her warm cheek into Dora’s hair. “Text me, yeah?” She repeats.

“Of course. It’s really, this was an incredible birthday. Thank you,” Dora assures and the couple nod along smilingly, doling out “goodbyes” as Robin disappears back down the steep staircase into the evening. The evening proceeds as such evenings often do with chatting and sobering up just a little and tiring of the conversation and deciding against another round.

With many hugs and thanks for the lovely night, Dora finally excuses herself around midnight, clutching the rail as she went down the staircase. Pushing open the door, the cold slaps her. It is far harsher than it had been before when she’d been moving so powerfully towards the evening’s possibilities with Robin. Opening the Uber app, Dora enters her address. 

“Uh-uh,” Dora murmurs to herself when the estimate ($37.42) comes up for just a few miles. It’s surge pricing. Dora decides against the ride and bundles herself up, heading back home. It’s , maybe a mile’s walk, but she knows it well. This stretch mandates a good amount of swerving to avoid collusion with the packs of loose fraternity boys. It must be some kind of rush event. Dora too passes a pack of first year women consulting their phone, apparently lost. They shiver in their matching 1960s-inspired costumes—a few flowers and peace-sign necklaces haphazardly thrown upon their normal night-out uniform of tube tops and jeans. 

“Yeah but I think Park Street is the opposite way like where we just passed,” one girl argues. Her friend disagrees while the rest shiver.

“I’m just gonna call Ricky. I bet he can figure it out,” the friend responds and Dora leans in, not minding her own business,

“Hey, sorry, Park Street is actually just right there,” she points out the street sign down a couple blocks, “hard to find.” The first years nod and offer quick thanks before hustling across the street, narrowly missing the oncoming snout of a white Ford Fusion. Dora walks on. To her left she passes a 24/7 cookie delivery place while, just a few yards down, she passes a competing 24/7 cookie delivery place to her right. Still a little drunk, she giggles to herself at the across-the-street rivalry, remembering how she’d recently heard that one had sued the other for using the same branding for their red velvet and white chocolate holiday cookie. On down a ways, mostly drunk crowds spill out from bar’s outside patios. Friends yell loving “aye look at that fucker they let in!”s at friends. A lanky guy with mutton chops scampers away from a bouncer who just caught him trying to jump the fence. The hollers make a happy harmony with high-pitched EDM blasted from weary speakers.

This is how Dora imagines most nights must be. As she strolls, ¾ and then ½ mile out from her apartment, she thinks of all the nights she’s missed. All the memories she’s neglected to make whilst sheltering inside her apartment, wary of the outside world and its incommodious threats. Having breached the crowded commercial area now, Dora walks by herself, thinking of nights that never were.

Dora would like very much to change that. It was a good evening, this 21st birthday of hers and she wants more nights like this with full tables and brimming pitchers. Or even just more nights out with Robin, maybe at a picnic at the park with spiked seltzer, BLTS and some leftover melon platter pilfered from some student council meeting. She could imagine her better self out in the world, strolling to the movie theater to catch a 5pm showing or greeting the hostess at the dine-in ramen place on Park Street. On this first night of her 21st year, Dora kicked herself for opting out of it all. She wants a full life. An open life. And Dora is going to try for it from now on. 

She resolves this as she summits the walkway leading to her apartment complex. Stretching left and right, she readies herself for a hefty helping of leftover curry and a good night’s rest. It is on the right turn of her stretch that she sees it then. A white truck parked in the lot just by her place. It’s pitch, but she can read the lettering: “Patriot Pool Supplies and Cleaning.” 

Dora does not have a diagnosis. On her 21st birthday, Dora does not like to leave her home. It is an unwieldy kind of paranoia. It lives, largely, in chemical imbalances in her brain. It’s unreasonable, excessive and intrusive. It’s something Dora should work out soon.

But. Every so often. You have to admit: Dora has a point.