Big Bite Of The Apple
I travelled to New York to obtain my social security number, hoping it might eventually allow me to earn money with the O-1 visa I received for what seems like my waning modelling career. Visiting New York often serves as a stark reminder of the challenges of entering a new market, yet it’s always enjoyable, thanks to a remarkable group of girls in Manhattan.
They’re like the real-life, twenty-something cast of Sex and the City mixed with the quirkiness of Girls—each with her own defining quirks and unforgettable personality. They have it all: college degrees, thriving careers, supermodel looks, razor-sharp wit and a charming touch of awkwardness. Four single girls just trying to figure it out in the Big City: Alison, Jasmine, Sav, and Lily. But of course, you can’t have everything. The universe might’ve blessed them with brains, beauty, and ambition, but it definitely held back on one thing: a decent dating scene.
Jasmine is DJing at one of those Fashion Week events I love, mostly because you get free stuff. This time, they’re serving bites and free-flowing martinis, an important detail, as you’ll soon see. As always, before even stepping out in New York, I spiral over what to wear. There’s this weird pressure I put on myself in this city, I never quite feel like I’m enough. Not rich-looking enough, not cool enough, not like I belong.The girls’ social circle is filled with successful young people, many from powerful families or with careers most dream of at twice their age. And naturally, I’m afraid to stand out, in the wrong way.
After eventually giving up and settling on an outfit, I head out, walking north on Elizabeth Street toward Prince. The evening is buzzing. Sidewalks are full, restaurants overflowing with energy. My favourite thing to do in New York is walk around with my headphones in, pretending my eyes are a camera filming filler scenes for a movie. I walk faster than usual, I’m running late. I text Alisson to see where she is: eight minutes away. I wait across the street from the restaurant, nervous to walk in alone. I spot a few social media personalities I’ve seen on my For You Page more times than I can count. It’s such a strange feeling seeing them in the wild. Even stranger is watching them perform for the camera in real life. Their presence feels so much smaller, almost underwhelming. Jasmine sends me a photo of myself from inside and urges me to come in, so I do, awkwardly telling the door girl that I’m with the DJ.
I make my way to the booth where I join Jasmine, Alisson, and Lily, turns out, I’m the tardiest one. I’m immediately handed a dry martini and a baby slider. As we wait for Jasmine to wrap up her set, the rest of us sit outside, downing a few more drinks as we talk about their recent double-date trip to Turks and Caicos, funded by a finance bro who didn’t even make it on the trip due to last-minute work stuff. Alisson is realising that the boy who invited her there in the first place might not be the kind she should be seeing, he’s not ambitious enough and a little too vain for her liking while Lily thinks she might have fallen in love with her guy, ignoring the fact that he might have a major substance problem. A true hopeless romantic.
I’ve grown to love martinis ever since my first sip in Dime Square just a year ago, it’s been the only cocktail I can truly enjoy since. Sav has a date later tonight but offers to grab a drink beforehand at Lucien. Jamie wraps up her set, and we all spill out into the night. Lily can’t join us for the rest of the evening, she has an early trip to Philly for work, so we kiss her goodbye before hopping into a car bound for the East Village.
As expected, the place was jam-packed. Speaking of the devil, the Turks and Caicos boys were stood outside, smoking cigarettes with a group of friends. Despite what Alisson said about him earlier, she seems completely smitten and greets him with a tight hug.
Luck strikes when the cute hostess tells us there’s a free table in the back. We squeeze through the narrow path, the noise levels almost unbearable, though I’ve noticed that’s just the American way. Their voices carry, and it’s always easy to spot them in Europe. I slide into the booth. Next to us sit two older men and two young women, a sight far too common in this city. The men take the booth while the women sit on the chairs, which I find incredibly unchic. Jasmine orders a single tentacle of octopus, and the rest of us stick to martinis.
Sav arrives with a friend I’ve heard about through the girls, an incredibly talented photographer who captures beautiful images that resemble movie scenes. That’s the thing about New York, you’re constantly crossing paths with these brilliant creatives, and I can’t help but wonder which of them will become the icons of our generation, the ones whose work people will look back on forever.
Sav still hasn’t heard from her date, apparently, he had a show at the gallery he works at. Now he’s stuck at a gallery dinner, and it would be distasteful for him to leave. “Then why say 8:30? If he knows he can’t make it in time. Ugh, they all suck.” They all suck, but like everyone screaming this, we still put up with it. We’ve all ordered the Uber to his house at 1 a.m. at least once, even though the date was supposed to be much earlier. We finish our drinks. I’m feeling a little tipsy now, everyone is, and no one’s ready to go home.
We run out in our little heels. The weather is pleasant, it’s September but it feels like a summer night. Someone hails a cab, and we stuff all five of us inside. Like all roads, ours leads to Bar Oliver.
Here we order some more, there are no hard liquor allowed as they are situated right in front of a church, which I did not know was a rule. Bummer. Because as much as I probably do not need it, I’d love another martini. The younger server that Jasmine has been crushing on lately is not working today so we may not be lucky enough to have a free drink this time around. They have a lovely beer I enjoy, so I’ll just get that, to my drunk brain logic because it is less strong somehow it’ll sober me up. We stand because there are no seats available, so we put our drinks on this yellow box that looks like a mailbox but isn’t. It’s been our “table” a lot of the time as Bar Oliver has been really busy. Our little comfort spot before we get moved to a table. We mingle with the people who are already here, some faces I have started to recognise over time and can now comfortably have conversation with. This night, I feel like I belong a little more, it’s starting to feel like Martin Boire et Manger for me, my favourite bar and my second home in Paris. But as always, us girls gravitate towards each other.
Once seated, Lily’s boy is sat across from us, as we are swiping through Jasmine’s hinge, swiping “no” to most of them. He tries to give his input, however Jasmine is just rolling her eyes at him, we don’t care for male opinion, especially not from him and not for this. We find out that although Lily has a work trip early tomorrow, she had been texting with him and he is going to head to her place after drinks at the bar.
She waits in her apartment and grows more and more frustrated before ultimately telling him that if he didn’t leave now, he was no longer invited. We see him get in a car as he says his quick goodbyes to everyone at around 1 am. When he arrives at her place, they have the polite 20 minute hang out before ultimately getting down to it. It was sloppy and lazy before he collapsed next to her and fell asleep too fast.
Alison is across from us, intertwined with her pretty boy. They look in love, “it’s too bad he is the way he is,” Jasmine whispers, “they look quite cute together”. The funny thing is that Jasmine had made out with the pretty boy before, a couple of times but that’s New York for you, a really big incest pool. Sav is going back and forth with us about if she should text her date, or if she should leave it. But if she were to text, what would she say? We settle on something “passive aggressive but chill”, because we want him to get the impression that “he low key fucked up but we don’t really care”.
As the night unfolds, we lose a few soldiers along the way, but the core troops still refuse to go home. The war against the alcohol running through our veins isn’t over yet. Why waste a perfectly good drunk on a night that ends too early? What’s the point of a hangover so brutal, so unforgettable, if not to stretch out the thrill of balancing on that fine line between drunk and blacked out?
Jasmine calls a car and punches in the address for the Nines—a bold move, though Sav knows the owner; they were neighbours or something like that. Her upbeat energy and that slightly intimidating insistence of hers can get you far in the city that never sleeps, so I’m not worried, if someone’s going to make something happen, it’s her. The car arrives, but we suddenly realise one of our troopers is missing. She’s locked in a bathroom stall. Sav rushes in to check and comes back out, breathless: “She’s screaming at him in there.” Pretty boy’s been taken hostage, facing the lethal cocktail of Lexapro and alcohol. The clock’s ticking, our buzz is fading, and I’m sent into the battlefield to rescue the hostage and retrieve our trooper, so we can make it to the next bar before the night slips away. “Alison, c’mon the car is here.” I knock gently, “Coming!”. I run out again, but the car is here and the meter is running, by the time Alison is out, we all know that we have lost a soldier, we must continue on without her. “I’ll meet you guys there, I promise.” All we can do is hope that she’ll be back on the journey with us, but we know that this usually means it is over.
We are so little compared to these buildings, sometimes when I think about it too much I get frightened at the realisation of how massive everything is, how insignificant we all are. So small, I almost don’t matter, the world feels too big. But I have to stop spiralling on my own in the back of this cab or I am going to be sick. I should listen to the French song Sav is playing out of her iPhone as her silhouette dances in the dark car, her face gently lit at a red light. We collectively wonder where Alison could’ve gone or why the hell she was screaming at the boy, before we arrive to the Nines. I am nervous, I fear the I am going to hold my friends back when the bouncer takes a good look at me and tells me that well they all can get in apart for me, why is it that my brain always imagines the worst scenarios possible. I need to compose myself. The people before us are dressed to the nines (pun intended) yet they are turned away by the bald door man. Jasmine and I push Sav to the front because she knows how to do the talking and we cannot let our awkwardness ruin it all for us. As expected, Sav works her charm and her amazing people’s skills, casually pulls out a first name and the doorman is charmed, his tone went from professional to casual quite fast and in the moment, I knew that I could be wearing a singlet, board shorts and flipflops I would’ve still gotten in.
“Mid White Boy is coming here,” Sav announces, “it’s like midnight,” I say “I know but he’s coming straight from the dinner.” Knowing Sav I’m surprised she even let him come.
We are sat in the booth and surprise surprise, order another martini. Jasmine has been texting with a new friend of hers, that happens to be a breakout artist, recently finding superstardom. Her and a group of friends finally join us, and at this point, I do not remember much. Just snippets of the conversation I had with this girl asking her how it feels like to experience fame suddenly the way she has, how it feels to be recognised a lot. We were pleasantly surprised and overcome with joy to see that Alisson honoured her promise and ended up joining us after all.
So did Sav’s Mid White Boy. Sav seats at the bar to have some one on one time with the boy. She couldn’t really capture his aura, on one hand he’s sexy talking about alligators in the south and driving his truck, yet on the other he’s in the Nines with a backpack. The conversation got a little dull so she suggested that they join our group outside for a cigarette. She gave me “the look” before asking me in French to talk to him a little and ask him questions please, just to break the ice”, so that he wouldn’t understand. I did, and as expected from a mid white boy, he gave me very mid white boy responses.
Next thing I know, I am sat in a very crammed car heading to a club that according to Jasmine is a no-go for many New Yorkers. But we were a bunch of people that do not know how to call it a night. We stand outside and stared at the building, still contemplating if we truly have it in us to go. At this point, it was Jasmine and I and the superstar and her friends.
Meanwhile, Alisson and pretty boy made it home. It came to a point where her body couldn’t handle it anymore and decided it was time for it to cleanse itself from all the poison she had consumed that night. As she was kneeling over the toilet, she drunkely asked the pretty boy to hand her her phone. When she handed it back, he took advantage of the moment to keep the device unlocked. When he finally put her to bed and she was sound asleep, he proceeded to go through her phone and type in his name in her messages. There he found an array of messages she had sent to her friends, belittling him and calling him all sorts of things. He sat there for hours scrolling and reading through all of the realisations she has had about him and feeling more and more emasculated after each message. He cried himself to sleep that night next to the very person that caused it.
As we finally gathered the courage to go into the building, the superstar expressed that she needed to go pee before entering. She insisted to do so outside because she really had to go and refused to wait in line for the loo. We agreed and told her we’d wait for her. After a good 20 minutes, she still hasn’t returned that’s when we started to worry. We circled the block and no sign of life whatsoever. We imagined the worse, what if she was kidnapped? I envision what the headlines would say.
Her friends called the hotel multiple times to see if she’d been seen entering, no confirmation. I smoked a cigarette as we all try to figure out what to do. I regretted it instantly. I was hit with the nausea you get when you’ve had one too many cigarettes and too much alcohol sloshing in your belly. I crush the rest with the sole of my shoes in hopes it’ll go away, yet it persists. I couldn’t stand still as I was gradually getting sicker and sicker. The superstar’s friends decide to go directly to the hotel to see if she’s back, I try to keep my calm as I hug all of them goodbye.
Jasmine and I start walking back towards Soho, when I finally admit to her that I don’t feel well and I really need to throw up. I tell her how scared I am to vomit. She looks at me deeply in the eyes and says “I am here for you.” In that moment, I have never felt more connected to someone, feeling safe and embraced by those 5 words. I nod, before spreading my legs wide as I yack in the middle of third avenue.
I lift my head up and am hit with a feeling of pure clarity and lightness. How beautiful the city is at night, the gentle summer breeze as we walk our arms interlocking looking up at the twinkling lights of the massive buildings that now don’t seem to scare me as much anymore. Nothing compares to the company of a sister you have chosen, heels clicking on the sidewalk and your laughs echoing through the quiet streets.
When we finally reach the cobblestones of Soho, we both agree that the night is not over. To the Submercer we go. We do not know how we made it into that elevator and how security did not stop us, but as we arrive on the right floor, all lights were on. The kind of light that paints you ugly the moment you step beneath it, your pores look like they’re breathing, your eyes sunken, as if you’ve been sleep-deprived for days. Never having gone there before, I think that maybe there is a reception area before the club but turns out we are standing in the middle of the dance floor. One of the staff members politely tell us that the party is over and for some reason I feel like I was caught naked. Mortified, we both ran out of there. We decide that our journey has finally come to an end but you’d be crazy to think that it would end without a stop at the bodega.
We order our usuals, a chopped cheese for me and a BLT for Jasmine to go. We hang around the place to flirt with the cute bodega guy before stumbling back to the apartment. We seat on the dining table half dressed, makeup running down our faces, barefoot as we hover above our meals and chow it down like we haven’t eaten in years.
The next morning, Sav steps out of the her Mid White Boy’s building and ran into his slightly hotter older brother. She could’ve sworn that he did a double-take and checked her out. She thought that maybe being siblings gives you the same taste in women and maybe she slept with the wrong one.
Lily made it to the train on time and was on time for the job barely awake, sat in the makeup chair wondering if coke dick is ever worth feeling like this.
Pretty Boy left while Alison was still sleeping. When she finally wakes up, she checks her phone to see a missed call from him. She calls him back and could hear in this voice that something was up. He asks her if she remembered anything, she said no, he asks if she remembered the fight at all, still no.
She offers to come see him at his studio.
They seat across from each other. He asks her if she thinks that he is a bum and all these other things, and she denies them all. He tells her everything that happened, about the bathroom hostage situation and all the things she said to him. She is greatly confused by it all. He takes a deep breath before finally admitting that he went through her phone and read her messages. She sits there in disbelief as she slowly realises that this is, in fact, really bad. She doesn’t even have the time to be angry at him for not respecting her privacy before the feeling of guilt washes over her. She apologises for being mean, and I guess he liked her enough to stay around for a couple more weeks before she ultimately ends things with him. I guess she couldn’t ignore his flaws anymore.
The discussion ends with him showing her the video of Charlie Kirk getting shot in the neck, making her hangover worse and her stomach churn.
Jasmine and I wake up in her bed, grateful that we do. We have very little time of peace before I spiral over texts I send to my almost boyfriend at the time. Updates are pouring in in the group chat from all parties. We laugh in disbelief.
I have lived life with complete freedom, a coincidence of being born into a family, beneath the right flag, and into a time that allowed me to be. I have been gifted with pure luck, that is all. As I grow and realise that unlike myself many of the sisters have never known such weightlessness and have not been given the same chances to simply be. While I laugh, dance, love and dress as I please, I can’t help but feel how fragile this all truly is, for it is not promised that tomorrow will be a breeze. Freedom is fragile and not a choice one can simply make, it can be easily taken away for the benefit of some ideology or by small men on very high pedestals. As thoughts of an unpromised tomorrow, and of the world I have always known slowly disappearing, consume me, all I can do is assert my inner sovereignty and aggressively exercise my freedom while a happy tomorrow still feels at reach.
Vahine Blaise, New York, United States,
March 2026
