I was at work on Monday morning, an editorial assistant in an office in downtown San Francisco, and I wasn’t clean. I had spent the weekend on an impromptu road trip that started with digging fresh-baked pies out of a bakery dumpster and ended with sleeping in a Mitsubishi Diamante on the side of the Interstate 5 and now I was sitting in my cubicle wearing the same outfit I had been wearing when I left the office on Friday afternoon.

“No one will notice,” I told myself, “if you skip one shower.”

1.

“There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste,” states Jane Austen’s Lady Catherine in that favorite of females the world over Pride and Prejudice. “If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.”

Four Years after The Party: A Prelude

Lynnie shared notes and aghast looks with me during French and geometry. We had overlapping circles of friends, subsets of the nerdiest, quirkiest, and smartest kids in our high school. She lived not only outside of the school district’s boundaries but also the city limits. Because our school had a gifted program, she didn’t have to go to the less challenging institution closer to home.

She lived in the boonies, BFE, on the rural edge of a small town. Not that I’d been there. This had come up in conversation a few times.

She invited me to a party at her house. I was most certainly non-committal when I accepted her handwritten driving instructions. I had plenty of reasons why I didn’t think my attendance was a good idea. The most consciously unsettling one–a boy I liked, far more than I wished to admit, might be there.