Twelve of them. In a room the size of a breath. Twelve warm bodies pressed into a line against tile that still holds the day's heat, and every one of them is close enough to touch every other one, and several of them are.
I have run the numbers on where I keep things. Between one star and the next: trillions of miles of me, and nothing in it, and nothing has happened there since the beginning. My average contents per cubic light-year round down to zero. And here, in this narrow tiled corridor that smells of perfume over sweat over something sweet and chemical, the density is beyond my arithmetic.
Shoulder on shoulder. Someone laughing so hard she leans on a stranger's back and the stranger lets her. A bassline coming up through the floor into all their feet at once, a rhythm shared by twelve hearts already beating within reach of one another. They are six inches apart, maximum.
Some of them are zero inches apart. I would cross a hundred thousand years of myself to find two things that near.
One girl at the front is crying. I have watched her for a while. She says, into her glowing rectangle, that she feels so alone tonight. There are eleven warm people behind her, and the nearest is close enough that their breath mixes in the same small air. I do not understand. By every measurement I possess, she is drowning in company. She is standing in the most crowded cubic meter I have ever encountered.
I cannot reach any of it. That is the arrangement. But they can, all of them, all night, and mostly they forget.
A tiled hallway, twelve deep, everyone within arm's reach of everyone.
The jackpot.
The whole jackpot, in a queue for the toilet.