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side of the mattress closest to the wall. And then I felt something.
    When Jonathan finally hung up, checked himself in the mirror, and walked back into the bedroom, I was sitting there, cross-legged, with a pair of red satin bikini panties spread out on the bed in front of me. (I’d retrieved them using a Kleenex: like I’d touch them.) He came strolling in, all confident, and, seeing them, came to a dead, lurching stop.
    “Ummpthz,” he said, or something like that, as he sucked in a breath, surprised, then quickly steadied himself. “Hey, um, what—”
    “What the hell,” I said, my voice level, “are these?”
    “They aren’t yours?”
    I looked up at the ceiling, shaking my head. Like I’d wear cheap red, polyester panties. I mean, I had standards. Or did I? Look who I’d wasted the last six months on.
    “How long,” I said.
    “What?”
    “How long have you been sleeping with someone else?”
    “It wasn’t—”
    “How long,” I repeated, biting off the words.
    “I just don’t—”
    “How long.”
    He swallowed, and for a second it was the only sound in the room. Then he said, “Just a couple of weeks.”
    I sat back, pressing my fingers to my temples. God, this was just great. Now not only was I cheated on, but other people had to know it, which made me a victim, which I hated most of all. Poor, poor Remy. I wanted to kill him.
    “You’re an asshole,” I said. He was all flushed, quaky, and I realized that he might have even been a whiner or weeper, had things gone differently. Amazing. You just never knew.
    “Remy. Let me—” He reached forward, touching my arm, but for once, finally, I was able to do what I wanted and yank it back as if he’d burned me.
    “Don’t touch me,” I snapped. I grabbed my jacket, knotting it around my waist, and headed for the door, feeling him stumbling behind me. I slammed door after door as I moved through the house, finally hitting the front walk with such momentum I was at the mailbox before I even realized it. I could feel him watching me from the front steps as I walked away, but he didn’t call out or say anything. Not that I wanted him to, or would have reconsidered. But most guys would have at least had the decency to try.
    So now I was walking through this neighborhood, full-out pissed, with no car, in the middle of a Friday night. My first Friday night as a grown-up, out of high school, in the Real World. Welcome to it.

    “Where the hell have you been?” Chloe asked me when I finally got back to Bendo, with the help of City Transit, about twenty minutes later.
    “You are not going to believe—” I began.
    “Not now.” She took my arm, pulling me through the crowd and back outside, where I saw Jess was in her car, the driver’s door open. “We have a situation.”
    When I walked up to the car, I didn’t even see Lissa at first. She was balled up in the backseat, clutching a wad of those brown school-restaurant-public-bathroom kind of paper towels. Her face was red and tear streaked, and she was sobbing.
    “What the hell happened?” I asked, yanking open the back door and sliding in beside her.
    “Adam b-b-broke up with m-m-me,” she said, her voice gulping in air. “He just d-d-dumped me.”
    “Oh, my God,” I said as Chloe climbed in the front seat, slamming the door behind her. Jess, already turned around facing us, looked at me and shook her head.
    “When?”
    Lissa took in another breath, then burst into tears again. “I can’t,” she mumbled, wiping her face with a paper towel. “I can’t e-e-ven—”
    “Tonight, when she picked him up from work,” Chloe said to me. “She took him back to his house so he could take a shower and he did it there. No warning. Nothing.”
    “I had to walk p-p-past his p-p-parents, ” Lissa added, sniffling. “And they knew. They looked at me like I was a kicked d-d-dog.”
    “What did he say?” I asked her.
    “He told her,” Chloe said, clearly in her spokesperson role,