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man. Sorry to hear it.”
    “It’s cool.”
    It made me a bad person, but I could have done cartwheels right about then. Ian was not only single, he was rebounding, which boded well for random, bumbling hookups with career-minded young women such as myself. Hopefully he didn’t think I was gross. I wasn’t ugly or anything, but I knew I was rounder than I should be, and in comparison to the normal standards of beauty—a la Julie who had everything going for her ever, the douchebag—I seemed plain with my brown eyes and brown hair. Ian was a good-looking guy, and though I’d known him for all of five minutes, I’d pinned my hopes on him being The One, but that hinged on him deciding I wasn’t a swamp beast from Hell.
    The good news for me? He alternated between drinks and blatant peeks down my shirt. Shaved head guy kept talking to him, and Ian would shrug or nod answers here and there, but he focused on me pretty hardcore. Julie noticed it, too. She caught my eye, grinned, and gave me a wink that would have done my mother proud.
    That should have been my first sign that I was screwed, and not in the way I’d planned.

CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
    B Y ELEVEN O’CLOCK , Ian walked me around the house with his arm slung over my shoulders. I discovered something important that night: the ratio of alcohol consumed would, over time, equate to willingness to engage other human beings in conversation. His answers went from one and two words to four and five words, eventually evolving into full sentences and dialogue. The strange part was none of it was directed at me , but he lugged me around with him anyway, every once in a while pulling me into his conversations with a well-timed “Right?” or a “Hey, meet Maggie. She’s pretty cool.” He had no idea if I was cool or not because he hadn’t actually talked to me, but whatever, I wasn’t picky. This wasn’t Romeo and Juliet. It was ‘drunken shenanigans and you won’t respect me in the morning.’ I hadn’t set my expectations very high.
    Over the next hour, he drank some more, and then more after that, socking beer away like it was the nectar of life. When he high-fived random dudes—basketball teammates, Julie said when she swept by to check on me—I knew we’d gone from ‘a little buzzed’ to full on drunk. This assertion proved itself when he ran over to some guy whose name started with L and dry humped him from behind while making woo woo noises.
    Yeah, I knew how to pick ’em.
    Apparently making L-guy his bitch put him in a mood. When he came back my way, he bent down to whisper into my ear that I was pretty. It seemed so random; one minute he butt slapped some dude, the next he told me I was pretty. A glib part of me wanted to point out exactly what a leap that was, but that wouldn’t win me any points, and as Imaginary Head Janice said, “Listen more, talk less.” So I shut my mouth and smiled, which he must have taken as encouragement because he took my hand and pulled me towards the stairs. He weaved around his guests, nodding at some, “’sup”ing others, and pausing only once to take a shot of whiskey with the team captain.
    The next thing you know, we climbed towards the great unknown. It was weird; the whole night I’d hoped for this, planned on it, really, but now that I went somewhere alone with him, I felt nauseated. It wasn’t a shame thing so much as a worry that he’d find me lacking, and oh God, what would he think if he took off my shirt and saw two black bras instead of one? I should have realized taking fashion tips from Snooki would result in disaster.
    She’s Snooki, for Christ’s sake.
    I cast a frantic glance behind me to look for Julie and saw her sitting in some guy’s lap in the corner, talking to six people at once. They laughed and smiled and drank, acting like kids ought to act, and for a moment I wished I was over there next to her, hanging out and being normal. The fact was, though, I wasn’t normal. I was a