The McMansion That Ate The Party

Hidden Hills, California. July 4th. 11:47 p.m.

The house has twelve thousand square feet and no soul, which is why everyone loves it.

Bryce Calder's parents are somewhere outside of Portofino on a 140-foot Sunseeker called Liquidity Event, and the last text from his mother said don't do anything we wouldn't do, which is funny because his mother once drove a leased Range Rover into a Calabasas Whole Foods and told the responding officer that she was emotionally dehydrated. Bryce is seventeen and owns two Supreme hoodies and a casual familiarity with cocaine that he describes as recreational but which has started to feel more like maintenance.

The foyer is the size of a JetBlue terminal. It has a chandelier made of something that cost forty thousand dollars and communicates nothing except that someone spent forty thousand dollars on a chandelier. The floors are imported limestone, which is slick now with beer and the ring-shaped condensation from bottles of Don Julio 1942 that Bryce found in his father's wine cellar alongside a case of 2009 Pétrus that someone named Madison has been using as mixers for vodka cranberries.

Madison. Madison Frey. Her parents are in the Maldives. She is five-foot-nine and recently appeared in a Revolve campaign and has a text thread with her therapist that she hasn't answered in six weeks. She's wearing a white Retrofête dress and nothing underneath and she's standing on the kitchen island doing something with a credit card that her father doesn't know she has.

"This is so good," she says to no one. She means the cocaine. She might mean her life.

The kitchen island is the size of a small country. White quartz. It cost more than some people's houses, which is not a thought anyone at this party is having. Around it: Connor Webb (father: hedge fund, Bel Air, Porsche collection, two restraining orders from ex-employees), Sloane Hartwell (mother: real estate, absent, functional alcoholic; father: tech, Marin, second family no one discusses), Tanner Voss (no one is quite sure who Tanner is or who invited him, but he has been here since nine and he knows where everything is, which is beginning to seem strange), and approximately sixty other people who exist primarily as decoration, as proof of concept, as an audience.

"Your dad's 550 Spyder is in the fountain," someone tells Bryce.

"The one from the sixties?"

"Yeah."

Bryce considers this. He pours more tequila. "He has insurance," he says, and this seems to settle something, and someone hands him his phone, and he takes a photo of the car in the water, which is lit from below with color-changing LEDs his father installed to look like the pool at the Aman Tokyo, and it does look good, Bryce thinks, actually, it looks really good, the Porsche sitting in the glowing green water, and he posts it to his close friends list with the caption freedom.

From the backyard, someone's playlist switches to something with a bass frequency that the house seems to absorb rather than reflect. The walls drink it in. This is a good house for parties and a terrible house for everything else. It has a movie theater that no one uses, a gym with equipment still wrapped in plastic from 2019, a library with books purchased by the meter from a set decorator who also furnished a hotel lobby in Scottsdale. There are seven bedrooms. Tonight, people are using six of them, and in the seventh, the door at the end of the east wing hallway, no one has been inside because the door has a keypad, and Bryce doesn't know the code.

He has never known the code.

He has never thought to wonder why.

2:14 a.m.

The crowd has thinned to maybe thirty. The infinity pool is full of people who are beautiful and drunk and shining with chlorine and something that looks like ambition from a distance and isn't. Madison and Connor are in the shallow end doing something that they will later not discuss. Sloane is asleep in a lounge chair with her dress fanned around her like a Millais painting of a drowning woman. The fireworks are done. The sky is the color of Los Angeles at night, which is not black but a bruised orange-pink, the light of ten million people doing things they'll regret.

Tanner Voss is standing at the edge of the pool, not in it, watching.

He is the only sober person here, which is not something anyone has registered, though Bryce will later, much later, try to remember if he ever saw Tanner holding a drink, and he won't be able to.

"Whose house is this again?" someone asks.

"Mine," says Bryce.

"No," says Tanner. He says it pleasantly, the way you'd correct someone's minor factual error at dinner. "Not exactly."

Bryce stares at him. Tanner smiles. It is a smile with nothing behind it, like a window painted on a wall.

"Get me another drink," Bryce says.

3:08 a.m.

The first thing is the hallway.

Bryce goes to find the bathroom off the master suite and takes a wrong turn somewhere past the second staircase, and the hallway is longer than it should be, which he attributes to being drunk, except that he's been in this house his entire life and he knows how long that hallway is, and it is not this long. It ends now in a door he doesn't recognize, white, no handle, no keypad, just a flat white surface, and when he puts his hand on it the door is warm. Not warm the way surfaces get in summer heat. Warm the way skin is warm.

He goes back downstairs and doesn't tell anyone.

The second thing is the mirror in the guest bathroom.

Madison finds it. She's fixing her makeup, which she doesn't need to fix but is fixing anyway, the ritual of it, the self-inventory, and she looks at her reflection and her reflection looks back and then it does something she didn't do. A small thing: a tilt of the head. She didn't tilt her head. She is sure she didn't tilt her head. She looks closer. The reflection looks closer too, and then it smiles, and Madison did not smile, and the smile on her reflection's face is specific in a way that frightens her, the smile of someone who knows something you don't, the smile of someone waiting for you to figure it out.

She goes back to the kitchen and pours a drink and says nothing.

The third thing is what the mirrors are showing.

Not all of them. Not yet. But Sloane, awake now, wandering through the house with her shoes in her hand, passes the gilt mirror in the sitting room off the foyer, and what she sees is herself, correctly, herself in her white dress, except that she is older in the mirror. Not much older: five years, maybe ten. But her eyes are different. Her eyes in the mirror are the eyes of someone who has been through something terrible and come out the other side and what came out the other side is not quite her. And there are lines on her face that she doesn't have yet. And she is alone in the mirror room, no party around her, no house, just her in her dress standing somewhere dark and empty, and the expression on her reflected face is of someone looking at a ghost.

Sloane realizes: the version of herself in the mirror is not looking at the mirror. It is looking at her.

She walks away quickly and tells herself it's the cocaine.

3:55 a.m.

The house has more rooms than it had at midnight.

This is not a thing that should be possible, and yet: Connor, looking for a place to be alone, finds a room off the third-floor landing that he would swear wasn't there before. A sitting room, furnished in the same cold luxury as the rest of the house: a white sectional, a glass coffee table, orchids that look real but aren't, a television mounted to the wall. The television is on. The television is showing what appears to be a live feed of the party. The party downstairs. He can see the pool, the kitchen, the people. He can see himself at the pool, from an angle that doesn't match any security camera he's aware of. The timestamp on the feed reads LIVE.

He watches himself in the pool. He watches Madison next to the version of him in the pool. He watches the version of him put his arm around Madison, and then he watches the version of him look up, directly at the camera, at the feed, at Connor watching.

The version of him on the television smiles.

Connor is not smiling. Connor has not been smiling for some time.

He turns off the television. It comes back on. He unplugs it from the wall. The screen stays bright.

4:22 a.m.

The remaining guests gather in the kitchen without quite deciding to, pulled together by some collective animal instinct, the way people cluster near exits during turbulence. There are eleven of them now. The rest have left or are somewhere in the house that is no longer findable. Sloane has been calling her friend Petra's phone for twenty minutes and it goes straight to voicemail and someone says they saw Petra go upstairs and no one has seen her since.

The keypad door at the end of the east wing is open.

Bryce is certain it was locked. He is certain he does not know the code. He is certain he walked past it an hour ago and it was closed. It is open now. The hallway beyond it has no lights on, but there is something in there, a low ambient illumination, sourceless, the kind of light that a room produces when it's been dark for a long time and starts to remember what light was.

"Petra went in there," Tanner says.

Everyone turns to look at him. He is standing by the refrigerator drinking a glass of water. He is the calmest person in the room and has been all night and somehow no one found this alarming until this exact moment.

"You saw her?" Bryce says.

"I've seen a lot of things tonight," Tanner says. "This house shows you things."

"What does that mean?"

Tanner sets his water glass down on the quartz island with a small precise click. He looks at all of them, each face, and his expression is not unkind, which is almost worse, because unkindness would be easier to dismiss.

"Your parents bought this place in 2018," he says to Bryce. "Before them it was a tech guy who went to prison. Before him it was a producer who disappeared. Before him the lot was empty for eleven years because every structure built on it came down within a year." He pauses. "This house doesn't have a foundation problem. It has an appetite."

"You're insane," Connor says.

"The car in the fountain," Tanner says. "The drugs on the island. The bedrooms. The mirrors. You've been feeding it all night and now it's showing you what it has to offer."

"Which is what?" Sloane says, and her voice is very small, smaller than she intends it to be.

"A version of your future," Tanner says. "The version you're building right now, tonight, with every choice you've been making since you were old enough to understand that you could make choices and that there were no consequences for people like you." He picks up his water glass again, then seems to think better of it, sets it back down. "There are always consequences. The house just makes them visible."

No one says anything.

From somewhere deep inside the open door at the end of the east wing hall, from somewhere past the sourceless light and the dark, there is a sound: a phone ringing. And then a voice. Young, female, familiar. And then the sound of a party. Music. Laughter. The specific, crystalline laughter of people who don't know yet what they're laughing about.

Sloane makes a sound that is not quite a word.

"That's—" Madison starts.

"Petra," Bryce finishes.

But it is not Petra's voice. Or rather: it is Petra's voice, but it is Petra's voice from earlier tonight, the way she sounded at eleven, at midnight, before whatever happened to her, and the sound of it from inside that room is the sound of something being played back, rewound, preserved.

The house, Bryce thinks, is keeping her.

The house, Bryce thinks, is keeping all of them. Is making a record. Is holding, in its white rooms and its cold limestone and its sourceless light, every version of them that has passed through its halls tonight: the version of Madison tilting her head in the mirror, the version of Sloane standing alone and older and already gone, the version of Connor watching himself on a screen he couldn't turn off. All of it stored. All of it held.

The house is full of them. Has been full of them for years, probably. Full of every careless beautiful person who ever stood on that kitchen island and felt like the world was theirs because no one had ever suggested it wasn't.

"We should leave," someone says.

"Yes," Tanner says. "You should have left some time ago."

They leave through the front door in a group, eleven people moving fast across the driveway's herringbone pavers, past the Porsche still sitting in the fountain with its chrome catching the pool's green light, out through the gate and onto the street. No one looks back, the way you don't look back in certain stories, except Bryce, because it's his house, because some part of him still believes that, and when he looks back the house is standing there exactly as it always has, lit up against the Los Angeles night, twelve thousand square feet of it, white and enormous and still.

Every window is on.

In one of them, on the second floor, a figure is standing. Just standing there looking out.

Bryce stares at it. The figure does not move. It is the right height, the right build. It is wearing what he is wearing.

He looks down at his own hands, which are shaking slightly, which is the first honest thing his body has done all night.

When he looks back up, the window is dark.

His mother texts from the boat: How's the house? Behaving?

He types back: Fine. All good.

He stands on the street for a long time after that, in the bruised orange dark, with the sound of the city all around him, and the house behind its gate, and all those empty rooms, and whatever the house is doing in there, in the dark, with everything it has collected.

His phone buzzes again. His mother: a string of Italian flag emojis, a champagne glass, a fireworks burst.

He puts his phone in his pocket and walks to Connor's car and gets in and the gate of the house clicks shut behind them, automatic, final, the way things close when they're done with you or when they're keeping something you left behind, and Bryce does not think about which one it is, and that, really, has always been his problem.

Petra calls the next morning. She says she fell asleep in an Uber and woke up in Sherman Oaks and she's fine, totally fine, she's sorry she scared everyone.

She sounds fine.

She sounds exactly like herself.

She sounds like a recording of herself from eleven o'clock the night before, looped perfectly, seamless, bright and laughing, and Sloane, who takes the call, notices this but does not say so, and they never speak of the party again, any of them, and the house sits on its lot in Hidden Hills with its limestone floors and its keypad door and its forty-thousand-dollar chandelier, and in the fall Bryce's parents list it with a broker who specializes in estate properties, and it sells in a week, over asking, to a family from Atherton with three kids and a dog, and the listing describes it as a rare opportunity, turnkey, move-in ready, full of light.