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harder to get than I ever could be. Lex had mentioned his crush on her before I left, but I had assumed it was like his crush on so many others.
    It didn’t bother me when he’d spoken about them or her, because they were passing fancies, while I was the one that stuck. Because his feelings for me ran so much deeper, I had been promoted from crush to best friend. I understood: Lex was a lifelong playboy who could never love only one girl. But as he enumerated all the ways in which she was different from the rest, I realized I had understood nothing. He just didn’t love me.
5
    In autumn I began dating someone, too. It was the start of my senior year at NYU, and I had taken an internship at The New Yorker where I met Jed, with whom I thought I was falling in love (again), and about whom I began, in detail, to tell Lex.
    Lex was much less receptive to discussions of my relationships than he had been about his. Indeed, the sophisticatedly comprehensive terms of our friendship, which had always included frank conversations about his intrigues, seemed to come apart on the occasion that I had my own. “I think I’m falling in love,” I told him, on the drive down to Atlantic City. Lex said Jed sounded like a loser, popped a cassette into the stereo, and turned up the volume.
    Since Lex dropped so much money in the casinos, he was regularly sent comps to all sorts of casino events. And since his girlfriend couldn’t go on account of her having school in the morning, Lex regularly took me with him. Together we saw Don Rickles, Tony Danza Live! and watched Bob Dylan from the comfort of our own private booth.
    We’d get a big suite, order milkshakes and grilled cheese sandwiches and French fries to eat in our room, before going downstairs to gamble before the show. “What do the Caribbeans know about poker?” I said supportively, after he lost a few hands. We moved on to the roulette table, his favorite, where he sometimes asked me to pick his numbers.
    I’d think hard about what numbers were important to me. “Sixteen,” I’d say, because I had been that age once, and according to the Sinatra song I’d sometimes sing at karaoke, “It was a very good year.” Or I’d calculate the difference of years between us: “Fifteen!” Or I’d choose the age at which I wanted to be married: “Thirty! No, twenty-eight . . . I’m not sure.” “Fourteen!”—how old I was for my first kiss. Or I’d think hard and choose a number based purely on a feeling. Why not? It was the same way I chose my boyfriends. I’d close my eyes tightly and ask myself, “Which number do I love?”
    After the show, Lex would continue gambling and I’d sit beside him happily, playing with his chips, ordering screwdrivers from the Caesar’s Palace waitresses clad in their short white gold-trimmed skirts. The drinks were free, but Lex would slip me chips to tip them. Smoking my cigarettes and cheering him on, I’d pray for him to win so the fun could continue, so I could be hailed as his good luck charm. On the other side of that prayer was the fear that he’d lose and, hating me by association, would scowl as he asked me to pay for our chicken tenders at the Burger King near the highway leading back to New York.
    It was on one of these trips to Atlantic City that I first met Justin, Shawn, and Richie. Lex and I were on the boardwalk on our way to the beach one Saturday morning when Richie and his model girlfriend flew past us on a rickshaw. They stopped after a few feet, having recognized Lex. They were going to see Stevie Wonder that night, Richie said.
    “Cool. We’re going to the Alfonso Ribeiro convention,” I interjected.
    “This is Iris,” Lex said. “She’s really into Silver Spoons .”
    I smiled and offered my hand.
    Later that night, they found us at the roulette table. Wearing anti-wack baggy pants and baseball caps pulled low in order to fend off the bright glare of wackness in others, they approached with their entourage