In a New York Minute(25)

“She’s a big runner, like you, and she’s training for the New York City Marathon.” Her eyes lit up, excited by possibility. “She’s very into her job, and she does all this volunteer work. Real type A. She’s great. Also she’s hot and she’s blond. She’s like your perfect woman.”

Apparently, I’d given everyone in my life the impression that I only dated blond women. But still, she seemed interesting, and appealing in a way that calmed my swirling brain.

“One date,” I said.

“Don’t get too excited there, buddy.”

Her words were playful, but I took them as a dare. Okay, fine, I told myself. I accept.





Chapter Five

Franny



Thoughts?

A selfie of Lola in a short black dress and studded, heeled ankle boots popped up immediately after her text. Her bleached-blond hair was slicked back, her lips painted an inviting bright red. A rock star, this one.

Cleo responded with a heart-eyes emoji before I could finish typing my reply, which was a short and pointed YESSSSSS. And I meant it. Lola looked like a sex bomb. But she always looked like a sex bomb, even when she was on my couch in her NYU sweats and streaky day-old mascara, inhaling a Gatorade and an egg-and-cheese on a bagel after a raging night out.

Whenever we teased her—part in awe, part out of jealousy—that she looked sexy no matter what she was doing or wearing, she’d just offer, “I’m a Scorpio,” with a shrug. Cleo had helped her figure out her astrological chart a couple of years ago, and now that was her excuse for everything. Overdramatic? Scorpio. Quick to flip a finger at taxis that run through yellow lights? Scorpio. Fiercest, most loyal friend on the planet, who also holds a grudge like nobody’s business? Scorpio, baby.

So yeah, it was no surprise that she would stun on a first date.

Do I also look .4% French? According to my DNA test results I’m tres chic.



We’d all spit into the little DNA containers at brunch after my NYN appearance, and Lola had sent them off in the mail. It was shockingly easy; a few weeks after getting your sample, the company emails you back with DNA results, health predispositions, and any connections to relatives that may be in their database. Cleo’s results had come in a few days ago, and as expected, she was all Korean. Lola had just gotten an email and was apparently the tiniest bit French and now milking it for all that it was worth.

I still haven’t gotten anything, I wrote back.

Did you tell your mom yet? asked Cleo.

No. I’m operating on a need to know basis with her.



It was only fair, honestly. That was how my mom had always approached the info she gave me, especially when it came to the identity of my birth father. “I met him at a bonfire party, down at the beach,” she’d said when I first pressed her about it, around the age of twelve. “He was visiting family, from out of town. We only knew each other a week.”

She’d raised me on her own until she met my stepdad, Jim, at work when I was four. By the time I was six, he was a permanent fixture in my life, and they were married when I was eight. Jim was quiet and dependable, like a lighthouse, and he completed our little family unit.

Still, I’d always been the oddball out, plastering my bedroom walls with old black-and-white fashion photos, collecting art books from yard sales, boycotting the affordable path of UConn for the debt-inducing NYU. I was constantly veering off the course of what was expected of me.

So while these looming DNA test results felt like an intrusion into my mom’s past, they also seemed a potential doorway to my own. I checked my email again. Nothing.

Have we met this date? I asked, changing the subject, digging around for dirt.

Nope! was all she offered.

Well at least something good came out of that nightmare, I wrote back, cringing as I remembered the look on Hayes’s face when I’d made that dumb sex joke.

Cleo chimed in with a GIF of Kevin from The Office laughing.

It was also no surprise that Lola was being somewhat coy with the details. She was often tight-lipped about her sex life, and her day-to-day in general. She fed off other people being open books—and she’d made a career of it—but sharing someone else’s drama gave her cover to hide her own.

OK so you guys will come bail me out if this date is a bust? she wrote. I’m meeting her at Firefly at 7.

Yes. The period at the end of Cleo’s reply hinted at her irritation. “Duh,” it seemed to say.

We all know the drill! I added.

Here’s how our friend code worked: First, we texted each other the locations of our dates, because safety first, obviously. Then, a postdate checkin, mostly just to review the levels of awkwardness that ensued, with the occasional hot make-out story mixed in. And if things were truly going to shit, we always bailed each other with a text or a phone call, or hell—both.

Back in the day when we all lived together, we’d slide into a booth at the dive bar down the street from our fourth-floor walk-up, order a round of tequila shots, and share the gory details about what had gone horribly wrong. Which—let’s be real—first dates often did. Throughout the years, we’d even gone so far as to check on each other in person, peeking our heads into bars and clubs, coffee shops and parks, just to make sure everything was cool. This, after all, was what friendship was about.