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depend on the U.S. Postal Service?
    I’m pretty sure he got it, but Brian never responded to my letter. I waited five whole days for him to call me, and then I thought, You know what, maybe the letter sounded too desperate. Maybe I just needed to show him what a horrific mistake he’d made by dumping me.
    I thought about the way Aunt Zo said that eventually all of her exes came around. Maybe it was because Aunt Zo always looked so fabulous. Even though she’s a pit musician and you never actually see her onstage, she’s always dressed up.
    Unlike my mother, who owns about eighteen copies of the same black dress and then piles each of them with tons of ethnic jewelry, all handmade by some worthy woman in an economically deprived part of the world, Aunt Zo can really dress. Like when we went out to brunch last Sunday, she was wearing a cute little leather jacket with racing car patches, a black T-shirt, a cool purple skirt, and these knee-high Gucci boots. The whole time we were in the restaurant, guys were checking her out. Even guys my age.
    When I first introduced Brian to Zo, he said, “Damn, if you’re going to look like that in twenty years, Bee, we ought to get married.”
    How could I have forgotten something as important as that?!!!!!?? BRIAN was the first person to bring up marriage, not me. I had to fix whatever was wrong and I had to do it soon because I was losing my mind without him.
    Maybe if Brian saw me in a high-fashion outfit like Aunt Zo’s, he would change his mind. Maybe he didn’t want to date a girl who wore Peruvian ponchos and Himalayan yoga pants. In an ideal world, I’d just go over to Aunt Zo’s and borrow some of her clothes. But she’s like a size six and I’m like a size twelve; a size ten if I suck in my gut and don’t breathe.
    Borrowing Zo’s clothes wasn’t going to work. But what about the credit card that my dad had given me for “reasonable expenses”? Certainly , buying myself some decent clothes was a reasonable expense. I could pretend that I had an interview for an internship and that while my three-piece Nigerian boubou was considered perfectly adequate for tribal high holy days, it wasn’t going to cut it for a college student looking to intern at a major research hospital. That sounded like a feasible story, right? I mean, I planned on getting an internship at a major research hospital just as soon as I sorted out things with me and Brian.
    So I went to Forever 21 and bought myself a funky print skirt, a fake leather jacket, and a pair of high-heeled boots. I liked the way I looked in the outfit, but I needed to step it up if I was going to get Brian to take me back.
    Before a big event, like say the Tony Awards, which she goes to every year, Aunt Zo always goes to a department store and gets her makeup done. You have to buy some of the products they use, but chances are, you were going to buy some of it anyway. Zo said, “The Laura Mercier counter is good for a subtle French girl look. Nars is good for shimmer, healthy, bronze beauty stuff. And whatever you do, don’t go to the Mac counter; those guys always manage to make women look like drag queens.”
    So I made an appointment and hopped on the subway down to Bergdorf’s. The woman at the Laura Mercier counter was pretty. She had super-pale skin, jet-black hair, and ruby red lips. It sounds extreme, but on her, it was ethereal, like she was a character in an old black-and-white movie. Her name was Françoise, and she spent an hour painting my eyes the shade of lilacs and my lips and cheeks in this beautiful lush shade of gold.
    “You have amazing skin,” Françoise said. “Did anyone ever tell you that you look like a younger Savannah Hughes?”
    Yeah, like anyone would ever compare me to a supermodel. But by the time Françoise was done, it wasn’t such a ridiculous idea. There was a big billboard of “Savannah for Sephora” near campus, and Françoise had re-created the look in the ad to a