The party lasted three weeks.

It began on a Thursday in June, when Julian West III woke up in the grand ballroom of his father's Long Island estate to find that the music had stopped and the guests had vanished and the champagne had gone warm. He pushed through the double doors and stepped onto the terrace and saw that the world had changed.

The gardens were full of children.

Not his friends. Not the children of the servants. Children from everywhere—children from the villages along the railroad, children from the tenements in Queens, children who had simply appeared, drawn to the light and the music and the open doors of a world that no longer had any doors to close.

Julian stood on the terrace and watched them. He was seventeen, handsome in the way that wealthy boys are handsome—soft-featured, well-fed, with eyes that had never had to squint against anything harder than sunlight on water. He wore a white suit that his mother had bought him for his birthday, a birthday that had been three days ago and that he now understood was the last birthday he would ever celebrate.

The adults were gone. Not dead—gone. Vanished. As though they had been erased by an eraser held by a careless hand. The cars sat on the driveways with the engines still running. The telephones rang in empty houses. The newspapers on the doorstep carried headlines about stock prices and political scandals and the weather forecast for the weekend, as though nothing had happened.

But everything had happened.

---

By the second week, Julian had named it Free City.

It was not a city. It was a mansion with a library, a tennis court, a swimming pool, and three hundred acres of garden. But Julian called it Free City because that's what it was—free from rules, free from parents, free from the weight of a world that had decided, for reasons no one understood, to remove itself from the equation.

Daze Montgomery arrived on the fifth day.

Her real name was Daisy, but everyone called her Daze, which was short for dazed and also short for dangerous, because Daze had a way of making people feel both things at once. She was sixteen and sang jazz in a basement club in Manhattan, where the smoke was thick and the lights were low and the people who came to listen were the kind of people who believed that music could save them.

It couldn't. But it could make them forget that it couldn't.

Daze came to Free City because she had nowhere else to go. Her father had been a jazz musician—a good one, the kind of musician who could make a piano weep—and he had vanished on the same day as everyone else. She had been alone in their apartment in Harlem, waiting for him to come home, when she heard about the party on Long Island and decided to go because why not, and because she had always believed that magic happened to other people, and she wanted to see what magic looked like up close.

She found it in Julian.

Not the magic. Julian. He was not magic. He was something else—something more dangerous, because he was real. He was a boy who had never had to grow up suddenly finding himself grown up, and the look on his face was the look of someone who had just discovered that the world was not a playground but a battlefield, and he had no weapons.

Daze gave him a weapon. She gave him a song.

She sang every night in the ballroom, beneath the crystal chandeliers and the string lights that the children had hung between the columns. She sang songs about love and loss and the impossibility of holding onto anything in a world that was constantly slipping away. And the children listened, and for three minutes at a time, they believed that everything would be all right.

It was not enough. But it was all they had.

---

The Professor arrived on the tenth day.

His name was Arthur Finch, but everyone called him Professor because his father had been a professor of literature at Columbia and because Arthur had inherited his father's library and his father's belief that books could explain everything. He was eighteen, thin, bespectacled, and desperately idealistic—the kind of person who believed that if he read enough Plato, he could build a utopia.

Free City was his utopia.

He organized the children into committees: food, security, education, entertainment. He created a constitution, which he read aloud every morning in the ballroom, standing on a chair so that everyone could see him. He believed in order. He believed in reason. He believed that if he could just explain things clearly enough, the children would understand and everything would work out.

Julian believed in parties. Daze believed in music. The Professor believed in ideas. And for three weeks, these three beliefs coexisted in Free City like three different religions sharing a temple—tolerating each other, arguing with each other, and occasionally combining to create something that was neither of them but was, for a moment, beautiful.

The food lasted twenty-one days.

It started with the pantries—full of imported cheeses and fine wines and chocolates wrapped in gold foil. Then it moved to the gardens—tomatoes and cucumbers and strawberries that the servants had been growing for years. Then it moved to the village—canned goods and flour and sacks of potatoes that the children dragged back from the general store in carts pulled by horses that had been left untended.

By the third week, the food was running low. By the fourth week, it would be gone.

The children knew this. They did not talk about it. They talked about music and books and the stars and the way the light hit the water in the late afternoon. They talked about anything except the empty pantries and the dwindling supplies and the fact that Free City was dying.

---

The Last Party was held on a Saturday in July.

It was Daze's idea. "If we're going to die," she said, "we might as well die dancing."

Julian agreed. The Professor disagreed. But the Professor was outnumbered, and in Free City, democracy was the only form of government that worked, and it was a messy, inefficient, beautiful form.

The party was everything a party should be. The children danced in the ballroom beneath the chandeliers. Daze sang until her voice was raw. The Professor sat in a corner with a glass of champagne he did not know how to open and read poetry aloud—Fitzgerald, because of course it was Fitzgerald, because the man had written about parties that ended and summers that died and dreams that slipped through your fingers no matter how hard you reached for them.

Julian danced with everyone. He danced with Daze, whose hands were warm and whose voice was honey and smoke. He danced with the Professor, who moved awkwardly and laughed for the first time in his life. He danced with children he had never met, children from villages and tenements and places he had never heard of, children who spoke languages he did not understand and smiled at him with teeth that were white and bright and full of a hope that he could not share.

At midnight, he stepped onto the terrace and looked out across the water. The opposite shore was visible in the moonlight—a green glow that pulsed and flickered and reminded him of something his father had once told him about the American dream: that it was always just out of reach, always just beyond the water, always just beyond your fingers no matter how hard you reached.

He had spent his whole life believing that the glow was on his side of the water. Now he understood that it had always been on the other side, and he had been reaching for it his entire life without knowing it.

---

The next morning, Free City ended.

Not with a bang. Not with a party. With children packing their bags and walking away, one by one, carrying what they could carry and leaving the rest behind. The mansion stood empty by noon, its doors open, its windows reflecting the empty sky, its chandeliers catching the light one last time before the dust settled and the silence took over.

Julian stayed until the last child had left. Then he walked down to the shore and sat on the beach and watched the water move in and out and in and out, like the breathing of something vast and indifferent and beautiful.

Daze came to find him. She sat beside him and did not speak. She did not need to. They had shared three weeks of music and dancing and belief and loss, and that was enough. More than enough. It was everything.

"I thought it would last," Julian said.

"I know," Daze said.

"We were going to build something."

"I know."

"Did we build anything?"

Daze was silent for a long time. Then she said, "You built a summer. That's something. Summers don't last. That's what makes them beautiful."

Julian looked at her. She was right. She was always right. That was the problem with her.

She stood up and brushed the sand from her dress and said, "I'm going back to Manhattan. There are kids there who need someone to sing for them."

"I'll come with you," Julian said.

"No," Daze said. "You have to stay here. You have to figure out what comes next. That's what summers are for—they teach you how to survive the winter."

She walked away. Julian watched her go. Then he turned back to the water and watched it move in and out and in and out, and he thought about tomorrow, and how tomorrow was a word that belonged to people who believed in it, and how he was starting to believe in it, even a little, even though he knew it would disappoint him, even though he knew it would break his heart.

We beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

But he beat on anyway.

---

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