Fizz

Fizz’s lemonade stand sits right at the entrance to Thirst Street, exactly where the city still can’t decide between heading home sensibly and getting up to no good. She’s the one who picked the spot, freckles and all: you need an airlock, she used to say, you can’t dive into the glamorous night without a decompression stop. She started out with three syrups and a chrome seltzer siphon inherited from a carnival-worker uncle. The siphon got famous. She followed close behind.

You stop by Fizz’s on the way in, stop by again on the way out, and in between you tell her everything. She runs her counter like a queen: regulars get their glass marked, newcomers get the full show — a burst of cheerful machine-gun chatter, a squirt of seltzer drawn like a gun in a Western, a nickname handed out on the spot, for life. Secrets fizz right along with everything else, and every so often, in the flow of passers-by, she sniffs out a really big fish and nudges it gently toward the right Marquee. A well-placed bubble always rises to the top.

Playfulness, all the time, everywhere: Fizz doesn’t work, she plays at working, which is exactly why she never burns out. Her pranks are logged, dated, sometimes even insured. But behind the siphon, the eye is dead serious: she watches the whole of the city’s youth pass by, and she knows before anyone else who’s got the spark and who’s only got the thirst. The Houses send envoys to ask her opinion; she sells it for a good laugh, which is her official exchange rate. She has no downtime: she’s replaced it with dress rehearsals.