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She’s always trying to one-up me. I was taking a while to post last week and Moira was on my ass, and of course fucking Molly chirps at her, ‘I could have a post for you in five minutes!’”
    “Totally annoying,” I say.
    Tina’s visibly uncomfortable with our dislike of Molly. “We’re losing the thread here,” she says. “We need to try to figure out who’s behind this hate site.”
    Rel pouts for a second—she clearly wanted the smack-talking session to continue—but before she says anything obnoxious I help bring the conversation back to Breaking the Chick Habit.
    “They seem to know a lot about us,” I say.
    “Maybe it’s some disgruntled commenter?” Tina says.
    “That would make sense,” I say.
    The three of us ponder this in awkward silence for a moment. The sea of commenters is vast, and their anonymity means it could really be anyone.
    “You know, I just decided: It’s a waste of time for us to sit here and speculate about who this bitch is,” Rel says. “We just need to start tracking her down.”
    We decide that our next move is to find out who registered the Breaking the Chick Habit URL and what her—we assume our hate blogger is a girl, because who else would care so much about the content of a women’s website?—IP address is. Unless our hate blogger is completely green, she will have hidden this information. But Tina says she knows a way to figure out who registered the URL, even if she’s trying to mask it. That’s another Tina revelation: that she’s a secret Internet ninja.
    Once we’ve decided on our plan of action, Rel tells us she has a surprise for us in her purse. “We need to go outside for me to show you,” she says. We tromp out of the tiki bar together, leaving $40 on the table to pay for our bowls and for Amber. Even though she was a preening narcissist on Top Model, seeing her in person made me feel warmly toward her. I hope she’ll use some of her tip money to pay for some new headshots so she can stop serving booze bowls to NYU students.
    I haven’t been this drunk on a weeknight since I moved in with Peter about nine months ago. When we first combined our mismatched tablewear in that small basement apartment, we entered a deep nesting phase, one that made me feel surprisingly relieved and relaxed. I had become self-destructive in the immediate aftermath of my father’s death: carousing to an unhealthy degree, drinking mirthless whiskeys while covering mediocre bands for Rev at various seedy concert venues around New York City.
    Cohabitating made that life seem even less desirable. Peter took pride in watering our meager backyard garden; I read Mark Bittman cookbooks and started making healthy meals that usually involved quinoa. But more than that: At the beginning of this year, Peter went from being an associate at a small firm to an analyst at a big one, and I started working at Chick Habit. Both of our jobs are nearly impossible to do with a hangover—forcing myself to have a smart take on Michelle Obama and the latest mommy blogs is unbearable unless my brain is at full capacity.
    Yet here I am, about to get even more smashed: The “surprise” turns out to be a small plastic bag of weed, which Rel proceeds to furtively pack into a one-hitter that looks like a cigarette. “We’re already wasted,” Tina says, swaying on those four-inch heels. “Is this going to turn out well?”
    Rel hands her the pipe and I guess Tina convinces herself that it’s a fine idea, because she takes a long deep pull and her face relaxes instantly. She hands the pipe over to me. I take a deep pull just like hers and end up sputtering and coughing, and while I’m trying to breathe I fall backward into a potted tropical plant.
    “ Ahahaahaha the pot made you fall into a pot! ” Rel can’t stop laughing, and she says it over and over again like an autistic child: “Pot pot pot pot pot.”
    Tina and I are laughing, too, though the edges of my vision are starting to get