Moderation E-Book

Elaine Castillo

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 447

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Sometimes people just...click. 'A highly charged, passionate and tender love story. Wonderful' Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time 'Castillo is a literary firecracker... If you liked Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, you'll like this' Pandora Sykes, Books and Bits Thirty-something Girlie Delmundo works a day job as a content moderator, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She's one of the best at it, too - dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to wall off all her emotions when she was still a kid - so it's no surprise to anyone when the social-media company for which she works offers her a big salary rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, lush and near-perfect simulations of civilizations long since dead. Girlie takes the job, and getting paid to spend her days wandering the crowds of medieval jousts or exploring romantic Left Bank Paris seems too good to be true. Almost. Sure, she signed up for having to deal with the sordidness of pretty much any virtual space, but as she begins to explore the intricate worlds that she moderates, she notices two deeply troubling things: that there might be something much darker built into the very code of the company, and that William, technically her new boss, a man whose barriers are as mighty as her own, might just be that long-forgotten thing... Girlie's type.

Leseprobe

Also by Elaine CastilloAmerica is Not the HeartHow to Read Now

First published in hardback in the United States of America in 2025 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2025 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Elaine Castillo, 2025

The moral right of Elaine Castillo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 496 3

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 497 0

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 498 7

Printed in Great Britain

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Come with me if you want to live.

T-800 to Sarah Connor, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991),written by James Cameron and William Wisher,directed by James Cameron

Still New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?

Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your questions will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

1

Little Brown Fucking Machine

Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one of the very best. All the chaff, long ago burned up by unquenchable fire: the ones who had hourly panic attacks, the ones who took up drinking; the ones who fucked in the stairwells during break time, the ones who started bringing handguns to the office, the ones who started believing the Holocaust had never happened, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that no one had ever been to the moon at all, or that every presidential candidate was picked by a cosmic society of devils who communicated across interplanetary channels; the ones who took the work home, the ones who never came back the same, or never came back at all. The floor was now averaging only three or four suicide attempts a year, down from one or two a month. The ones who remained, like her, were the wheat: the exemplars, tested paladins, the ones who didn’t throw up in the hallway and leave the vomit there. They’d been, to continue speaking of it biblically, separated.

None of the white people survived. Not that there were that many of them to begin with. Young middle-class hopefuls bulging with student debt, they’d shown up around the time the position was still being called process executive, back when the site was still in the Bay Area. Back when she still lived in the Bay Area; back when any of them still could. Most of the white candidates didn’t make it past the initial three-week training course; the ones who did left within a year. The majority of the workers had been Filipinas, with a smaller minority of Cambodian, Indonesian, Laotian, Vietnamese workers: people who knew about the job through that reliable network still unmatched by LinkedIn, otherwise known as family—people who’d grown up knowing their mothers and aunts had been moderators, and so too would they follow. Sometimes a particular year—she’d started to think of her surviving cohort as a kind of graduating class, although what they were graduating from or toward, she did not know—would have one or two working-class Korean Americans, one or two Black Americans, usually people who were married to Filipina or Viet employees and had heard about the job through them. Of the two hundred or so who worked at the Vegas site, nearly all were women. Nearly all the women were Pinay.

To pass her final assessment, Girlie’d had to stand in a conference room of no great nor small size, indistinguishable from the nine other conference rooms in the building, and, in front of her peers and potential future colleagues, moderate a video of a tied-up and blindfolded young girl of about six or seven who was being made to fellate an unseen man. The girl had bruises along her shoulders. The man, who was recording and audibly enjoying the act, had gray in his pubic hair. The trainees had already been reminded that they wouldn’t be allowed to pause the video or remove the audio during their presentation.

Earlier that morning, a young Cambodian American trainee who wore three soft friendship bracelets around his left wrist—two fraying, one new—had moderated a video of a young man, about the same age as himself, being stabbed multiple times, gurgling bright blood into a Champion sweatshirt as he abortively begged for something; not quite yet his life. In the middle of his presentation, the young trainee, without pausing the video, discreetly crouched behind his podium to throw up into a wastepaper bin he’d presumably positioned there for this very reason. By the time it was Girlie’s turn, the room still smelled of pepperoni and bile.

Girlie stood in front of her prospective coworkers and managers, presenting a carefully supported case for why the video of the tied-up girl should be banned from the social media site in question, on the grounds of child pornography. On the one-to-five scale they’d all been taught, the video was a solid five.

One of her potential supervisors challenged her, face stony: How did she know the girl was a child, and not a consenting adult?

It was true, they could barely make out the girl’s face, behind the blindfold, on the blurry blown-up image beamed on the matte-white projector screen, in front of the forty faces waiting, as in a court of law, for a verdict. It was true, there were plenty of small-breasted, small-boned women in the world, Girlie among them; it was true, there were plenty of people who cried during sex, or liked rough play of all descriptions. This was the real test of the moderator, in the end: being able to sift through, again and again, each workday’s thousand and one true things. This was the real work, beyond the stabbings, the rapes, the paranoia, the conspiracy theories, the hate speech, the carved-out crater in the living world where belief had collapsed in on itself like an exploding star. Reaching into the wound with two clean fingers, pulling out the still-steaming metal slug. “The socks,” she said.

Girlie asked for permission to rewind the video. Permission was granted. Then she aimed her laser pointer toward a corner of the frame, where one of the girl’s feet was barely visible.

By this point four women had left the room, one crying. The red light pinned to the girl’s ankle and did not shake.

“The socks feature an illustration of a main character from the animated Disney film Frozen,” Girlie continued. “Judging from the scale of the TV remote control next to her leg, I would estimate a girl’s size three or four.”

Girlie got the job. So did the young man who threw up before her; he’d thrown up, but he hadn’t paused the video. That was good enough. She was proud of herself, but knew she had no real reason to be; the hiring managers weren’t all that picky, in the beginning.

• •

Think of yourself as someone who makes our social media family a safe and fun place for everybody, that early job description read. The best candidates will not only be able to apply content policy and execute handling procedures with consistency and efficiency but will also be able to identify subtle differences in the meaning of digital communication and accurately enforce the client’s terms of use. Here at Reeden we believe that a community that learns together, grows together—you will actively benefit from and participate in employee assistance programs, program reporting initiatives, and appropriate training to foster your well-being and the well-being of our entire employee family. You may find that we love a good party, and you can usually expect one to be happening on campus somewhere! Now come on, we need your full concentration—it’s time to imagine what it’s like being a Content Moderator!

At the beginning there were user-experience researchers floating around—UXRs, they were called—forever doing some study or another, there to observe the lives of the moderators, the better to improve said lives. There was the Day in the Life method, in which a UXR would shadow one moderator throughout the workday, sitting po-faced at her side while she rewound a video of someone’s partial decapitation, scribbling in a notepad. There was card sorting, a method meant to “uncover the user’s mental models, to improve informational architecture,” in which the UX researchers would hand the moderators a deck of index cards labeled with categories—sometimes examples of content to be moderated, like DISEMBOWELED HORSE, sometimes pictures of famous Hollywood actors, to be categorized according to the character they most embodied: ACTION HERO for Schwarzenegger, ROMANTIC LEAD for Clooney, et cetera. Girlie looked at the film still of Schwarzenegger as the T-800, put him in the MATERNAL ROLE MODEL category. She didn’t receive any feedback about what this said about her informational architecture.

Every single one of the UX researchers was a middle-class woman. Oh, they were diverse—white women both Bostonian and Scandinavian, Black women both Southern American and West African, Asian women both Korean Californian and Indian immigrant—but in that Tolstoyan way of all happy families being alike, all middleclass women looked the same to Girlie.

The solutions they found were the same too: the studies, ultimately, all found that the moderators could benefit from a variety of wellness tools, as well as regular team-building events to encourage decompression and foster camaraderie. Girlie hadn’t asked for weekly cake parties. Girlie had replied “a raise” when a researcher asked how her job could best be improved. She didn’t get a raise; the funds, it seemed, had been allocated into the social activities budget. They got a karaoke machine.

By the time the initial flurry of these researchers and tech reporters had dissipated, employees were merely encouraged to attend two wellness coaching sessions a year, and at least one wellness group session a month. Every few months or so the company still held a Mental Health Symposium, full of indispensable tips and crucial training about how to protect her internal space, set up boundaries, and not hesitate to make use of the resources at hand, nearly all of which were helplines that went straight to an answering machine, or infrequently monitored email addresses programmed to auto-send a PDF about anger coping skills, mostly recommending different forms of deep breathing.

After the first year was over, Girlie skipped both her one-on-one visits and the group sessions, all the cake parties and symposiums. She had a job to do, and she was doing it. If she hadn’t been as productive, perhaps the mandatory wellness sessions would have been more stringently enforced—but the company policy, in general, was that if you looked like you were doing okay, they left well enough alone. Even if you didn’t look like you were doing okay— someone at another site, it was rumored, had a heart attack at their desk and died there; there was a new moderator at that desk within the week—they left well enough alone. There was just so much to do.

At first, there were no official specializations in the moderation department—“our aim is to upskill all of our moderators,” the Bay Area manager had said in those early days, “so they can action all potential abuse types.” But there was an unspoken understanding that certain employees were particularly gifted in specific genres of abuse, and so in training they would be partnered with—or would become, themselves—unofficial subject matter experts.

No one wanted the title Hate Speech Expert or Head of Child Sexual Abuse on their LinkedIn, but it was known amongst the moderators that if you were struggling with a racist abuse issue, you went to Maria (one of the four moderators named after the Virgin; this one was ex–grad student Maria—to be distinguished from the other three, who were all older Pinay women, none of them particularly good at identifying tendencies toward racial abuse, in particular their own).

If you had trouble judging whether or not a video contained scenes of animal torture, you went to Robin, the uptight young Pinoy nerd everyone said was the youngest employee Reeden (well, not Reeden, exactly) had ever hired, recent UC Davis grad, never talked to anyone, didn’t flinch or cry like that one white guy—last one left on the floor—who quit after seeing the video of someone beating a bag of puppies to death with a baseball bat.

If murder and gore were your bugbears, you went to Rhea—former ER nurse, McCain Republican, self-proclaimed gun enthusiast, sometimes found cooing on the phone to her geriatric Italian husband, and who’d started moderating after her retirement, just to bring some extra cash in. Rhea, alternately known as Ray, not quite a deadname since Rhea switched back to it whenever she felt the privileges or protections of being Ray were superior, usually when they had to accommodate a senior manager visit. Rhea was a consummate capitalist ex-provinces girl in the school of Girlie’s own mother, which was to say: nothing was dead if value could still be extracted from its ghost.

The young Cambodian American trainee who’d thrown up, Vuthy, was Rhea’s apprentice now, following her around like a puppy, showing her pictures of shotgun wounds and asking for her advice, so they’d often be found chatting pleasantly in the hallway about the difference between birdshot, buckshot, and slug, how to look for the scalloped edge around a wound, what powder tattooing looked like at close range.

And if child sexual abuse was your issue—whether someone being fucked within an inch of their life was a four-foot-eleven adult Asian woman or a child speaking choppy French to appeal to his expat clientele, how many photos of naked children wearing angel wings constituted a cache of pornography, which ever-changing code words to flag on which ever-disappearing Passport Bros message boards, which cities were the hot spots for meeting places for affiliates and the newly initiated, how to differentiate between a right-wing nutcase endlessly SWAT-ing a laundromat from an actual potential trafficking bust—you went to Girlie. Girlie didn’t have any apprentices.

Later, perhaps in recognition of the need for aspirational examples of workplace advancement, the specialists were officially called SMS. Subject Matter Specialists; the word Experts being a touch too self-actualizing. They even received a raise: one dollar more per hour.

The Vegas site was the highest-performing location in the national network; they hovered around a 97 percent accuracy rate, just a percentage point short of the company’s set target, which was never achieved by any site, and was in effect a built-in justification for all future budget cuts and layoffs—they were perpetually ever so slightly underperforming, always as a direct result of the previous year’s budget cuts and layoffs. Accuracy rate meant that when the people in Vegas thought something was child trafficking, it was child trafficking. When the people in Boston or Dallas thought something was child trafficking, it was usually just a brown mom and her mixed-race kid in Target. The managers had talked a lot about learning algorithms. Clearly the concept—that is to say, learning—hadn’t quite reached critical mass in human beings yet, but one could be hopeful about machines.

Girlie’s own accuracy rate was around 99.5 percent. The old judicial joke about pornography was, in Girlie’s case, both the earliest of life lessons and the ultimate performance review. When it came to child sexual abuse, Girlie knew it when she saw it.

As for why so many of them were Filipino—well, what was there to say that hadn’t been said in 1765; in 1899; in 1946; in 1965? The bootstraps way of putting it was to say they excelled, frankly, in the manner of people who had been formed to excel in these very specific theaters: because they spoke and read good English, because they respected chains of command, because they kept a positive attitude, because they would take a fifth of an American worker’s pay, and most of all: because they were familiar. They knew Americans; what they liked, what they didn’t, the ditties they sang, the food they ate, what they looked like when they were horny, what they looked like when they were dying, the psalms that struck their hearts, the way their women set their curls, the shift of air around a man before his fist hit flesh, the hours of night when God was least visible. There was no other country in the world, no other people in the world, better suited to the content moderation of America. And from America, to the world. Ad astra, et cetera.

Well, why not? Her mother was a nurse, her aunts and distant cousins all nurses and maids and cleaners scattered everywhere from Jeddah to Singapore to Rome. There was a glowing line that trailed through them, all the way back to that first early Pinay, a twentieth-century almost-girl, being taught by a white woman how to administer quinine to a malaria patient.

A glowing line through them, like a lava-bright rift in the earth, which traveled all the way to Girlie: there in the office park, cleaning the feeds of their stubborn stains of rape and bludgeoning; there in the Vegas desert, far from home; there in that soul-shaped place called heredity.

• •

There was, of course, an attrition rate. The turnover in the content moderation racket was—high, to say the least. Management liked to give the impression they were concerned when employees showed signs of needing a break, or wanting to leave.

In terms of “signs-that-a-worker-was-going-to-leave,” there was the story of Maring.

Not quite one of the fake Marias, too young to be an aunt to anyone, Maring never said hello, never met Girlie’s gaze, wore a beige peacoat buttoned all the way to the top, collar popped to cover her neck, never took it off even when she sat at her desk on the moderator floor, not in springtime, not even in summer.

Girlie had just assumed that Maring was one of those newish Pinay immigrants who didn’t like to be seen associating with other Pinays, thought of Pangasinan as the province good only for producing slaves for the Middle East, referred to Pangasinense as “Panggalatok,” that type. Maring wasn’t light-skinned, but Girlie was now evolved enough in her socioeconomics to know being an uptight mestiza wasn’t necessarily a class giveaway. Though Maring did have about her person the rigid primness of someone who knew she didn’t belong there, but who through the stormy winds of fate and martial law had somehow ended up a contract laborer in Vegas, rather than being driven through EDSA in an air-conditioned Lexus by an Ilocano chauffeur. This, Girlie believed, without having spoken to her once. Girlie, not for the first time, understood she was perhaps prone to judgmental thinking.

Ultimately, Girlie didn’t spend that much time thinking about Maring; she certainly wasn’t the only moderator who seemed to be on edge all the time. It was a silently understood thing that you couldn’t sneak up on a moderator from behind, couldn’t tap anyone’s shoulder without clearing your throat unless you wanted a reflexive elbow in said throat. Everyone had moderated a hundred, thousand videos of someone coming in from behind to end somebody’s world.

Like Girlie, Maring was another SMS, and her specialty was teenage internet usage, in particular campus violence threats. No one knew the whole story, but the rumor was that she’d kept reporting one kid in particular for hate speech.

He’d been on specific forums, standard stuff, making threats, saying men should enslave women for sex and food, kill the ones that didn’t listen. He was also on a number of gun fandom forums: asking how to get an assault rifle without a license, how to skirt the holding periods, was it better to grind, file, or drill off a serial number, various locked posts repeating the same question about Dremels.

Maring kept reporting him. It wasn’t just her; other moderators had flagged that user as well, but Maring had seen his posts for the longest period of time, had followed his user behavior over nearly two years, likely knew more about him than his own parents. He’d been banned from some forums, but came back under a different username, masked IP. Reeden HR kept insisting his constructive vision for the future of womankind—which was to say, raping them in all their factory-issue holes and then in all the holes you modded for them aftermarket, preferably with the dullest knife possible—was a free speech issue.

The teenager later shot thirteen students and two teachers at a high school in Ohio. Rhea said Maring recognized the boy’s face on the news. That was the last conversation Maring had with anyone at Reeden. She turned in her resignation the day after the shooting, then drove her car into a tree—0.4 percent blood-alcohol level.

There were no signs, was the conclusion, after the investigation into her death. Unless one considered the work itself a sign. Management upped the free meditation workshops.

As for her own wellness: Girlie lifted weights regularly, drank a protein shake every morning and one again before her macrobalanced lunch, ate her five a day. She continued to please her primary-care physician at every routine visit: her metabolic panels, her lipid panels, her hormones, her blood glucose, her high good cholesterol, her low bad cholesterol, every measured metric came back sterling; solidly, stolidly above average (except, occasionally, the BUN/creatinine levels, which were a little elevated; typical meathead lifter results, too much protein, too little water).

The closest thing she had to a physical ailment was something that had started in her midthirties: she’d started smelling cigarette smoke, on and off, but with increasing frequency, so that for months she thought someone in the family had secretly taken up smoking. Girlie started looking around the house for everyday items being used as secret ashtrays, caches of stubbed-out butts in beer bottles or bathroom wastebaskets. On most days, she ignored the smell, went noseblind to it, the way she’d gotten used to the broken smoke detector that had beeped for decades in the old Milpitas home. It was still beeping the day they left the Bay. She figured it was probably just a symptom of an undiagnosed stroke, so that was something to look forward to.

Dr. Shamsie, her bright young new Vegas GP, whose online bio said she “focused on healthy eating and preventative care” and “loved hiking with her husband and two dogs in her free time,” said no, it wasn’t likely to be a stroke, that it was probably either just dehydration or, at worst, olfactory hallucinations, which could be a symptom of early menopause—rarer, but not unheard of for women in their mid- to late thirties. Do you have hot flashes? Premenstrual cramps? Mood swings? Increased irritability before your period?

“Oh, you mean like hating everyone and everything around you and wanting to lie down in traffic instead of have a conversation?” Girlie asked, trying to make it sound like a joke.

Dr. Shamsie frowned at her. “Yes,” she’d replied evenly. “Like that.”

In the end, Dr. Shamsie prescribed calcium supplementation, deep breathing. There was a worksheet.

All in all: Girlie didn’t have a relationship to fuck up, a partner to cheat on with a coworker or three, a kid to come home to and distractedly parent while killing a bottle of red. She was a college-educated woman with no dependents, and after over a decade on the job— unheard of, for a content moderator—she showed minimal signs of acute mental distress, had accepted a first offer of twenty-eight thousand dollars a year, after tax, and after five years had accepted a raise to thirty-two thousand a year. It got a bit better after that. Moderators couldn’t get full benefits, being not full-fledged employees but “contractors,” under ever-changing contract company names. The one currently on her pay slips was calling itself Paragon; that name would change in a year. That was textbook traceability training for any Fortune 500 company. You didn’t directly employ the wet work.

She never took longer than a thirty-minute lunch break, rarely took her daily nine-minute wellness break, and used her two fifteenminute breaks to walk around the small campus and get her steps in, despite being otherwise physiologically and morally opposed to cardiovascular exercise (deadlifts counted as cardio). She recognized the chain of command, avoided the fights, never stole the toilet paper, never collapsed weeping at her desk. She hit her targets and kept to herself. She was, in short, the ideal employee. There was no better proof of her wellness, indeed her resiliency, than the fact that she was still there.

2

Anagolay, Goddess of Lost Things, Drops the Ball

The regular SDX bus was late, so Girlie ended up on a Deuce; there was no avoiding tourists if you took a bus to the Strip on any night of the week, but tonight a group of white Australians on a budget stag night was holding court, singing what sounded like an endless chain of football or rugby cheers about anal sex. When they started going around the bus trying to get people to join in, Girlie muscled past them, got off at the Mirage stop—she could walk the rest of the way to the Bellagio, where Maribel should’ve been nearly at the end of her shift at Dram. If she tried to take public transportation all the way home, it’d add another two hours to her commute. Using the Bellagio as her subway stop, and her younger cousin’s car as the solution to her lastmile problem, seemed a particularly Vegas state of affairs.

She stepped once more into the surround-sound din of the Strip, its eternal chirp of human need as high and sharp as lark-song: here, the Venetian, where gondoliers rowed tourists beneath the painted sky, singing “Nessun dorma” so it echoed all the way from the Rialto Bridge to the new McDonald’s; there, all the strangers she’d never see again—the lovers kissing in front of the Roman soldiers, Romeo’s hand extended to take a selfie; the laughing friends vomiting in the foliage in front of the Mirage, one holding back another’s hair; the millions of palm-size fliers of women in bikinis, advertising unforgettable nights at unbeatable prices. She’d never lived in such a big city before, and now she lived in at least ten. Hadn’t she, too, eaten crepes in Paris and won two hundred dollars at a Game of Thrones slot machine in the Luxor? And her, a kid from Milpitas.

Tomas, the security guard kuya at the entry to the main floor of the Bellagio casinos, recognized her and tipped his hat. He had insisted she call him kuya, even though she was pretty sure she was older than him, protracted youthfulness being a perk of her mother’s genes. There had to be at least one perk.

“Sup, fam,” he said as she passed. “Have a good night.”

“You, too, kuya,” she said. Thus were civilizations maintained.

Dram was at the other end of the hotel, past the steakhouses, past Hermès, past the Conservatory and Botanical Gardens where the seasonal display was still up, twenty-foot Christmas trees, crystalencrusted sleighs, shining green and red and gold baubles the size of a Kia Soul. There were three main bars in the hotel: one big caviar and vodka bar where rich Russian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern gamblers tended to congregate; an elevated tiki bar that was uniformly attended by the white over-fifty-five crowd, too poor for a Maui vacation. And then there was Dram, which was supposed to be the cool young person’s bar, industrial-Sinatra-mob vibes, the Bellagio’s concession to what might be expected of old-school Vegas, but for a Gen Z clientele. Because of this anxious and cluttered stab at brand identity, Dram attracted an unexpectedly catholic crowd— you could, it turned out, romanticize Sinatra at any age or class bracket.

The people who stumbled into Dram could be wealthy Singaporean tourists, or young self-appointed food reviewers from the East Coast sipping at black sesame cocktails, or drunk white women tourist groups out on last-chance benders, flashing their legacy-admissions damage at everyone like ID cards. The nightclub scene, on the other hand, was a completely different ecosystem, one which most Vegas locals Girlie knew either avoided or aged out of, whichever came first. Girlie had no patience for bottle service, VIP tables, thirty-strong groups of SoCal Asians taking ten to twenty Patrón shots apiece until some poor girl had to be stretchered out to the tune of David Guetta. She didn’t need a nightclub; if she wanted to see her community being a mess, all she had to do was track everyone’s credit score.

On her way to Dram, Girlie passed by the big Tiffany & Co. store, caught Sam’s eye through the window display, avoided the look on instinct, and kept walking—until she remembered.

She cursed under her breath, stopped in the middle of the walkway; thought about it. She could keep going, send a text to confirm the reservation, or just wait for the email, even though she’d been waiting for the email for a month (that was a Pinoy business owner for you). Resigned, she walked backward a little, rewinding herself through time and space, then turned around.

Sam was still looking at her, had seen the rewind move, a nice little really, bitch look in her eye, curtained by demi-wispies. Girlie steeled herself.

“How’d your mom like the earrings,” Sam was saying over her shoulder, walking Girlie toward her station near the Elsa Peretti displays, diamonds by the yard. “I saw them all over Facebook.”

“Says she loves them.”

“Does she actually wear these ones?”

Girlie shot her a heavy look. Sam laughed, because Sam had a mother who didn’t just preserve all of her daughter’s gifts in the amber of the Facebook wall; drank her Maxwell House instant coffee from Tiffany Blue bone-china coffee cups, well stained. “At least you know she drives the Tesla. Maybe you have to get her a car every year. Ha!”

Girlie had only dated Sam for two months, almost six years ago, so Sam’s tendency to be overfamiliar was something she knew she had to muscle through, to get to her ultimate goal. She couldn’t lead her on—though Sam wasn’t actually a person who could be led on, which Girlie respected—but if she was too mean during the encounter, even that could have an unwelcome erotic charge. Sam was still commenting on Girlie’s mom’s Facebook posts, wow auntie ang ganda!! Beautiful Goyard bag. What a good daughter you have. Happy Birthday and God bless.

That was how Girlie and Sam met, all those years ago; Girlie, there to buy some starter Tiffany for her mother, doing what every eldest daughter did with her paycheck: tithing. She’d been planning on a nice little Elsa Peretti heart necklace in sterling silver, but couldn’t help lingering by the more sculptural pieces, so that was how Sam had first laid eyes on her: out of character; looking for herself, for a second.

“You get enough money from me.” Girlie turned her back to the display. “Did you talk to your brother about the reservation?”

“I told you it’s confirmed for thirty people.”

“I didn’t get an email.”

Sam threw Girlie a look of her own. “It’s not my fault you won’t just DM him! You know what he’s like with email. You guys are the ones who keep changing the date.”

“Maribel’s got people from everywhere flying in, the Bay, East Coast, she wants to accommodate everybody, I just want to make sure it’s locked in—”

“Y’all can’t lock down the whole month of March. Tell your cousin to talk to my brother.”

“She said the date is final—”

“She said that two dates ago—”

“The date is final,” Girlie repeated, hard. “I’m vouching for it.”

“Fine then, confirmed, you already got it,” Sam said. “But if you guys change it again—”

“It’s on my head. Thirty people.”

“I said thirty people,” Sam huffed, appearing to remember why she and Girlie weren’t friends.

Girlie nodded. Objective secure. “Okay. Thanks, mare.”

Sam rolled her eyes. “Is that all, because I got actual clients waiting. Buy that cuff from me sometime, I need the commission. Support your community.”

“Two percent commission on an eighteen-hundred-dollar cuff makes a difference to your finances, that’s on you,” Girlie muttered, already walking back toward the door. There were no clients waiting.

Resuming the walk back to Dram, Girlie again put her collar up, arms crossed, chin down, face hard once more against the tide of the wondering world. For a time, she’d worn a fake wedding ring, but that had made a negligible difference to her would-be trappers, which in Vegas could be singletons with moxie, drunken bachelors and their reckless grooms, retirees flush with chips, or comp sci majors on spring break.

Girlie had no false modesty about her own beauty, found it stupid to be humble about it, pretend about it, to make it smaller so others—ugly men and fear-compliant women, particularly that racially diverse coalition of women with an ex-boyfriend who’d started dating an Asian woman, ever a reliable solidarity—could feel bigger. She was not a shy person—silently ever-judging, yes, but not shy— and would not pretend at shyness to make her beauty seem accessible, would not diminish herself to appear oblivious to it and therefore escape condemnation for it. A mere babe in the woods, a diamond in the rough, a cerebral virgin ignorant of lash curlers and mascara: this was the ideal posture of the beautiful, according to the traditional owner class of Filipina women’s beauty (suffice to say, the workers did not own the means of production).

But to simper and shrink and be coy about her birthright was contrary to Girlie’s fundamental nature (kingdom: asshole / phylum: know-it-all / genus: first-generation eldest daughter). She refused to be a tenant of her face, rather than its owner. The heirloom of this beauty had been her mother’s prize possession—sole possession, really—in her impoverished youth back in the Philippines; it was the only form of intergenerational wealth Girlie knew.

For a while she tried to share the beauty around a bit; she’d been pan, then bi, then queer—that was when she was still in college, where people said stuff like queer and quoted Judith Butler. At heart Girlie was nominally bi, but it was like a driver’s license she’d gotten as a teenager and had let expire; she could probably still drive the car but that didn’t mean she’d be safe on the road. A more relevant sexual identity: she’d been called a ho since she was eight or nine, the word aimed at the shape of her hips, the resting expression on her face, her indio mouth, too full of opinions.

When she was very young, she’d leaned into it—wore low-cut tops, short skirts, smiled with adolescent pride whenever she was catcalled by adult men on the street. Later she learned hypersexuality was a common symptom of sexual abuse. She hadn’t investigated further; she figured googling “hypersexuality as a ten-year-old” would probably put her on a list; probably one she’d have to moderate.

She stopped being so generous. That Girlie was the most beautiful cousin in their family, that she’d been beautiful even as a child—she would be more beautiful, her mom and aunts and grandma mourned like clockwork, if only she were light-skinned like her mother instead of morena like her father—was fact. But in the end, although perhaps it would have saved her family, she didn’t have the natural charm or interpersonal fortitude for a career as an IG model; go to Dubai and get shit on by oil sheiks for six figures and a Birkin 25 (leather: Togo / color: gris étain / hardware: palladium).

So ultimately, this beauty, this ancestral inheritance, this halfway holy thing, was just a natural commodity; a mine that had been tapped, here and there, and which she’d since chosen to close. The only way to survive hotness was to have clarity about it: both its reach and its limitations. She had it; it would one day dry up on its own; until then, she just had to live with it. And Girlie was honest enough to know that the day-to-day experience of living as a 24-karat hottie was, on the whole, pretty bearable.

• •

Maribel’s shift was almost over. Here she was now, sliding the rum cocktail to the East Coast–looking Asian girl—Midwest or East Coast presumably, because she was there with three white girls—then holding up a hand at Girlie, five minutes, and disappearing into the back room. When she came back out, still in her tuxedo trousers and shirt but without the bow tie and vest, old Aritzia puffer thrown over it, saying “Hi, ate!” in that sunny, culturally deferential way that Girlie pretended not to draw internal strength from, Girlie slid off the bar stool and began walking in step with her cousin, out of the bar. “You look so pretty!” said Maribel, who began most conversations with a compliment, appeasement being her preferred form of survival. “I need to find one of those jackets too.”

“I sent you all the eBay links.”

“Yeah, but I never find the same stuff! It doesn’t look the same.” Then Maribel made a theatrical crying motion, fist rubbing at the side of her eye. “Avery’s still a little sick! But she’s getting better. I brought her some pho before work. At least it’s not COVID.”

“I told y’all to get your flu shots early this year.”

“Night, Maribel,” said Joshua, the Pinoy security guard at Dram who’d been making eyes at Maribel for years, even after she’d finally broken up with the terrible DJ and, instead of falling straight into Joshua’s arms, ended up dating a white girl from Chicago.

“Night, kuya,” Maribel said brightly; Maribel, who was incapable of ever letting an iota of love, however pained or fledgling, go unthanked. Girlie watched the hit register on Joshua’s face. Innocent people were capable of anything, Girlie thought, looking at Maribel, almost impressed.

Once they were in Maribel’s car, a newish leased blue BMW Series 1 from a dealer in Henderson, Girlie watched Maribel check her phone, then frown at it. “What,” Girlie asked.

Maribel held up her phone screen to Girlie; it was a text from Auntie Stella, Maribel’s mother, on the family group chat: here late! Come by! was all Girlie could read before Maribel pulled the phone back, slumping back into her seat. “They’re at the Orleans if we want to join them,” she explained glumly.

Maribel’s parents Stella and Dodo had cottoned on to the local wisdom that the jackpot chances at the Strip were next to nothing, geared as they were to tourists—there were better odds at the smaller, more rundown casinos off the main Strip, the nicest of which was the Orleans on Tropicana. First it was just a sliver off Stella and Dodo’s mortgage contributions, going to the blackjack table (Dodo) or the penny slots (Stella). When it started to be nearly half, Girlie and Maribel had to intervene. Stella and Dodo had finally gotten the habit down to only a couple days before payday; abundance mindset.

“I’m good,” she said, dry as a bone.

Maribel squeaked out a distressed laugh, still reading the text thread, her mouth turned down.

Now Girlie really looked at her. At the end of the day, Maribel was your classic youngest daughter with two brothers in the military and an absentee mother: all she wanted was an older girl to solve her problems, fight the bullies, take her to Sephora. Sometimes it was hard to look at Maribel and not see the infant whose diapers Girlie had changed when she herself was still in grade school; the ocher-yellow color of her newborn shit.

Girlie began to prepare herself for the night’s possibility, the old routine of swinging by the Orleans under the pretense of being in the mood to play slots, just to peel away Maribel’s parents with as little friction as possible from the dulling opiate haze of some Buffalo Instant Hit Machine that Auntie Stella kept insisting was about to burst. She took a deep breath. “You want to go pick them up?”

But Maribel shook her head, put her phone away. “Nah. Let’s just get some food and go home.”

As they drove down the strip in silence, Girlie could see Maribel drawing up her courage to ask a question; opening her mouth, then closing it again; taking in a breath, then saying nothing. Girlie grimaced—so that’s why they weren’t going to the Orleans; something else on the docket.

“I actually wanted to talk to you—about my birthday party,” Maribel began.

“I just got the confirmation from Sam, we’re on for Rocky’s at the date you said, it’s all taken care of,” Girlie said, before Maribel could do something typical, like change the date again. The party wasn’t going to be for a couple of months, but—Girlie shrugged internally— Pisces culture. Maribel had been obsessed with this birthday since she turned twenty-nine, having decided to use the occasion of her thirtieth birthday to do something no one in the family had done since they’d all escaped to Vegas: throw a big Filipino party. Girlie hadn’t been particularly excited by the idea from the beginning, but early on Maribel had asked her for ideas for cool places in Vegas that they could maybe rent for a party, “not necessarily a fancy place, but like, nice, and cool, something you’d like.”

“What do I know about cool places,” Girlie had retorted at the time. “You ever see me go out?”

“Yeah, but you know about these things. Like which places are overrated. You read reviews.”

“Just go on the Vegas subreddit once in a while, you’ll know things too.”

“But I don’t have your taste in things. Nice things.”

“I don’t have a taste for nice things,” Girlie had argued, despite the fact that she was wearing a vintage Rolex Prince Elegant on her wrist, a Canadian eBay score for less than six hundred dollars, someone who was selling off their dead grandpa’s belongings and didn’t know what they were selling, i.e., a relatively rare 1930s Art Deco doctor’s watch, rhodium-plated, now so battered and worn you could see the cloudy stainless steel starting to peek through. The manualwind movement, when she finally set and wound the watch, was fucking loud as hell, sounded like a tractor, its harsh post-Depression tick-tick-tick slicing time into portions like a butcher.

Girlie was in denial, but Maribel was right: it was known that Girlie had taste, that she had an instinct for things that were—a word Girlie hated from her marrow—classy, but not just classy; cool, sensual, vibey, things that smelled of a soul: the actually decent modern restaurants owned by progressive, second-gen Asians reclaiming their once-reviled grandmother’s recipes; which dealers were basically giving away anything that wasn’t a Pepsi GMT, like a skinny 14k gold Jaeger-LeCoultre manual-wind watch with a ribbed integrated mesh bracelet, the case so tiny it might have the historic Calibre 101 inside, if Girlie ever worked up the nerve to go into the Jaeger-LeCoultre store and get it serviced. She knew the right places to score vintage Helmut Lang denim jackets from the ’90s, or old Belgian army quilted jackets for ten dollars that looked like the ones being sold by Scandinavian contemporary brands for five hundred, if you could just get over the fact that the person who wore it probably murdered a bunch of Congolese people on the job. The special thing about vintage clothing was that it came with history. Lots of Vogue articles said so.

“And you still think Rocky’s is cool,” Maribel said tentatively, a question in her voice, but not forward enough to commit to the punctuation of it.

“Yes,” Girlie said, making her authority-figure approval very clear so Maribel could extract the requisite validation from it. Sam’s brother, Rocky, had worked at some Michelin-starred establishments before opening his wildly successful ode to Pacific barbecue; they used the word decolonial on the website but had a sense of humor about it; the prices were bourgeois aspirational, not flat-out oligarchic. “Yes,” Girlie said again, more gently. Maribel closed her eyes and nodded, nearly consoled.

Maribel, almost a decade younger than Girlie, had forever been overawed by her eldest cousin, but as they all got older—and particularly after the family’s move to Vegas—Maribel’s worship began to run deeper, sing keener, bruise-tender. Girlie knew Maribel was proud of her, proud to be warmed beneath her great sturdy wing, proud of Girlie’s beauty like it was a shared family asset, proud of the way Girlie had paid off twenty thousand dollars of her mother’s IRS debts within the first two years on the job, then bought her mother a Tesla Y after her first raise, financed, while Girlie herself still took the bus.

“Okay, so— okay. There’s another— bigger part— that I wanted to run by you,” Maribel was saying now. Girlie felt her body go into fight or flight.

“It’s—okay, you’re the first person I’m telling this to, but: I want to propose to Avery at the party.”

Girlie’s brain briefly went offline. “Okay,” she began, rebooting, and Maribel, as expected, started freaking out, glancing over at her with a fraught sort of beseeching energy.

“Wait, okay, I know, ate, I know what you’re going to say—”

“This is not a good idea.”

“I know, I know, and that’s why I haven’t told anyone, and I’m not—I’m not completely decided on it”—that meant not only that Maribel was indeed decided on it, but it was the thing she wanted to do most in the world—“and if you think it’s a bad idea obviously I— obviously I’m not gonna do something stupid—”

“Public proposals are always stupid, and a form of coercion—”

“Okay, yes, but! But!” Maribel was still taking her eyes off the road with a frequency Girlie did not enjoy. She’d had nearly ten more years of life than Maribel; if only she’d enjoyed them before they both died here. But on the bright side, at least Girlie wouldn’t have to help plan a proposal dinner. “I knew you were going to say that, and totally, you’re right, but—but—Avery and I had this exact conversation, about public proposals, and I brought up that some people think they’re coercive, and I can see that—like don’t ask your girl to marry you at the Olympics, fam—but! But then Avery said she actually thinks public proposals are really romantic. ESPECIALLY”— Girlie considered telling Maribel she was becoming hysterical, but Maribel had recently been educated in the white feminist history of witch persecution via Avery and some Marxist Italian texts, and Girlie, already trapped in one argument, didn’t need to borrow credit for another—“for queer women, because a public showing of queer love is radical, especially now. Okay? So it’s not my idea, it’s because Avery said, herself, that she thinks public proposals are romantic. And then she showed me a bunch of TikToks of guys getting engaged and crying.”

“Okay,” Girlie said.

Maribel waited. Then: “Okay?”

“Far be it for me to hold the movement back. What does that have to do with the restaurant reservation?”

“What—I—okay. That’s it? I thought you were gonna fight me for longer.”

“I’m old, I don’t have the cardio for long fights,” Girlie said. “You want the setting to be proposal-worthy, that’s it?”

Maribel finally started smiling. “I was thinking the outdoor terrace. Too much?”

Girlie sighed. The restaurant had a very nice terrace full of tropical plants, Kentia palms, birds of paradise. She started calculating how much more it would cost per hour to reserve the whole thing; she was already imagining the conversation she was going to have with Rocky, let alone Sam. She sighed again.

“Budget’ll go up.”

“I could work days.”

Girlie waved her hand, silently indicating that she’d take care of it, but Maribel shook her head, “No, no. You’ve done enough”—Oh have I, okay then, Girlie thought blankly—“I’m gonna work days. I already decided.”

Girlie put that skirmish aside for now. “Guest list still twenty?”

“Well—if I tell Avery she should invite some of her Berkeley friends—I’d want them to be there for a proposal—”

And this was why Girlie had reserved for thirty. Clown car. “How many?”

Maribel winced. “Could we do thirty? Would they do thirty? Would they do specific Filipino dishes if we special order, you think? I know we already got them to do the pancit for long-life thing but Avery loves ube brazo, we had that on one of our first dates, and I thought it’d be nice if—on the proposal evening, she has some—but I know it’s not on their menu—”

You, bitch, are also in possession of Google and an email address is what Girlie should have said, but then what would her use value as an ate in this community be? She sighed again, heavy, recruiting everyone from dead ancestors to circumstantial acquaintances to sworn enemies into the sigh, Igorot headhunters, Hokkien grandmothers, the Spanish and the English and the Americans, hell, even Dutch pretenders from the Battle of Manila Bay in 1646, get everybody in there, build bridges for once, look at this dumb bitch. “I’ll ask Rocky. If not, we can just bring it from Goldilocks.”

Maribel beamed. “We should bring at least two!”

Maybe it was because Maribel’s ilk were the post–search bar generation; they didn’t have to search for things anymore, algorithmic benevolence having already figured out what they were looking for just by the scent trail of their fingertips, the crumbs they left around the world for someone else to vacuum up, a million undying lights in the gloaming. Or maybe it was just because they weren’t eldest children; learned helplessness being one of the more malignant comorbidities of being a family’s last born. It did seem like a skill, maybe even a valuable one: Knowing what you wanted. Knowing how to look for it. Knowing how to recognize it, when it appeared.

• •

They stopped to pick up dinner on the way home, two bobas and the All-In Bundle at Wingstop, which Girlie paid for, as usual, after Maribel put up an impassioned protest, also as usual (“I just got paid” was tonight’s futile campaign), with Girlie, deadfaced, muscling past her to the register, gently elbowing Maribel’s battered old Coach Outlet wallet out of the way, saying “Her money’s no good here” to the girl behind the register, who knew the whole routine by heart, clearly found the entire family annoying as hell. There was not yet a universe in which Girlie was going to allow any of her food to be paid for by a younger cousin. Civilizations, etc.

From there, they drove quietly toward the gated community on the west side of Enterprise, the part that hadn’t been incorporated into Henderson, squeezed at the foot of Desert Hills and Buffalo Rock, bordered to the east by Paradise, to the north by Spring Valley. All of it Paiute land; long before the railroad workers, the gypsum miners, the twenty-first-century California refugees fleeing financial illiteracy. Which Maribel and Avery both made sure to honor, with bumper stickers on their cars that said YOU ARE ON NATIVE LAND, bought from Puha, the Native-owned weed lounge downtown they regularly frequented, more often toward payday— further away from payday, beer was cheaper than Orange Sherbet pre-rolls.

It was time to say hello to the last Filipino security guard of the night. Tito saluted them, military perfect, uniform too big for his frail body. He worked in the entrance booth next to Dominic, younger Guatemalteco cat, heavyset and a little browbeaten by daily life under Tito’s martial confidence, who pressed the button while barely checking them over. The gate lifted.