Robin Goldberg met Virgil Keller the night that Robin graduated from Hodges University.

Robin was wearing a royal purple one-piece bathing suit. She’d ordered the swimwear from the official Omikron Epsilon Delta merch catalogue. Robin didn’t like how most swimsuits looked on her pale skin, but dark purples brought out the chestnut in her hair. The collegiate gear felt appropriate since her Brothers and Sisters were the ones that had brought her out to celebrate in the first place.

That evening was Robin’s first trip to Jardin, and the disco throbbed in lavender and rose eternity. The nightclub’s walls were mirrored, and the mirrors had built in strobes. The lights were arranged as blooming, lush flowers. The night was just finding its own rhythm, and the lights embedded in the walls were creeping up to a frantic pace. Jardin‘s ceiling and floor were also mirrored as were all sides of the elevated bar seating that crisscrossed the dance floor in a spider-web of reflection. Fractal, electric Kool-Aid lighting suffused every molecule of the room, and getting stoned for the light show and tunes at Jardin had been a burner rite of passage for decades.

On Jardin‘s more architecturally conventional evenings, a large dance floor dominated the center of the club. A cozy, plush red bar rotated in the middle of the dance floor. Arsene liked to call the bar their Rosebud. Most of the lesbians that haunted the place called it “the Clit” instead. Arsene had never corrected them.

The evening that Robin started to fall in love with Virgil, Jardin had embraced an aquatic décor. The polyamorous, pansexual party traded in dresses and suits for speedos and bikinis… and less if you weren’t shy. Few were by the time they left Jardin.

The dance floor had been replaced with sprawling hot tubs and more raised, glass walkways between the tubs. There were open areas of blanketed glass with pillows, lubricants, and prophylactics, of course.

The tubs were steaming. Between the mist and the reality-shifting haze of pure color, Robin’s slow descent into disassociation was, perhaps, understandable.

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