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since before he met you.”
    Katie pitched her eyes to the heavens and cursed Christopher’s name.
    “Do it,” he pleaded, “as a favor to me and to Christopher.”
    “Not for Christopher,” she dug in. “I’m tired of bailing his butt out tonight.”
    “For me, then?”
    “Why do you care so much?”
    “I just don’t want to see the poor guy crushed before you even give him a chance.”
    Katie emptied her lungs in one exaggerated exhale. “Fine,” she conceded with a stamp of her boot. “But you owe me.”
    “Fine.” He pulled her in for one last hug and planted a warm kiss on her cheek.
     
     

Chapter Three
     
    Entrenched in her sofa, Katie stared up at her ceiling. She worried about its increasing fragility. Upstairs, her aerobics-obsessed neighbor, Stanley Speedo, was pounding his way through another session of Sweatin’ to the Oldies.
    Tha-dump-da, tha-dump-da, tha-dump-da hoomph. Tha-dump-da, tha-dump-da, tha-dump-da hoomph. Katie scrunched her eyes shut. The last thing she needed overshadowing her feelings of self-loathing was half-naked images of Stanley marching in time with Richard Simmons. There was a very good reason she’d dubbed the man Stanley Speedo—not only was she unable to wrap her tongue around his real name, but she’d never seen him in anything but a Speedo.
    Just thinking about not thinking about it provoked her gag reflex. No matter how many times Katie’s brain shouted Dooonn’t loook! her eyes were always drawn like magnets to his you-know-what. How could they not? He was like a nappy-headed rhinoceros in Spandex.
    In the two years they had been neighbors, he always greeted her with the same cheerful “Hallo Katie, pretty lady!” in a heavy Mediterranean accent. He was a nice man and a concerned neighbor, and Katie tried to not to fault him for his poor fashion sense—she’d been on the European continent enough to know he certainly wasn’t the only man with a penchant for banana hammocks. But tonight, she couldn’t help it.
    As he rhythmically danced to bring her house down, his droopy, naked belly shaking with wild abandon, Katie realized her life had become routine. She bear-hugged a pillow to her stomach. Once— okay, tons of times, on occasions such as this, when she felt suffocated by the monotony of daily life, she’d sketched out a life plan: her Amazing Plan. She’d spent the last hour tearing her place apart until it looked like a burglary scene, and hadn’t been able to locate even one of those copies. She didn’t have the will to scribble out another, so she spoke the list aloud like a well-rehearsed mantra.
     
1.        Graduate
2.        Pay off student loans (not immediately, of course)
3.        Explore Eastern Europe
4.        Choose a meaningful career that will not compromise a life of travel and adventure
     
    So far, she hadn’t checked off a single item of her Amazing Plan.
    A snapshot of her bank statement flashed in her brain. She bent her head and stifled a scream against the pillow. It was missing a couple of zeros—thanks to the previous year’s Paris extravaganza. One missing zero meant she’d have to wait a few more months to begin planning her next adventure—but two missing zeros…. She sighed and slunk deeper into the sofa. What did it matter anyway? She still had one semester to go before getting her bachelor’s degree, and she was too close to actually accomplishing something to take another sabbatical.
    Too discouraged to leave her sofa, Katie stretched her leg to its full extent and opened the DVD cabinet with her chipped nail-polished toe. She might as well immerse herself in the wonderful world of chick-flickdom and down a whole pint of Ben and Jerry’s. If she was going to feel unfulfilled and pathetic, she might as well feel like an unfilled and pathetic cow.
    She toed out a selection of classics and scooted them across the floor toward her. For no particular reason, she arranged them with