a pillow at the door and grunt until Miles’s whining gets too high-pitched to ignore. Not so today.

Dogs are either really annoying alarm clocks that you can’t throw against the wall or the greatest get-out-of-bed-because-this-man-is-going-to-laze-about-your-house-all-day excuse ever invented. Sorry, I have to take him out now. Mood. Killed.

In truth, this was sort of the reason why I wired a woman in Arkansas a small fortune in the first place. Miles would become my furry Freud. Screw socializing: couldn’t I just sit on my Ikea couch and complain my way into a relationship? Miles, unable to tell my ego from a chew toy, would never judge. FWIW, dude, please invest in some actual therapy. I hate Gina. She knows I don’t have insurance. Also, the pound—what desperate pet adoption agencies have renamed the animal shelter—doesn’t take any, which is probably a good thing. So instead of springing Spot from Alpo Alcatraz, I Googled “black pug puppy” and clicked “submit payment.”

Getting a “dawg” had been a recurring dream of mine since sleeping in my first “it’s just me” apartment—as in Soooo, where are your roommates tonight? Nope, it’s just me. Ma’am, if you get a second pound of tilapia, you save thirteen and a half cents. Nope, it’s just me. You’ll probably need two people to put this bed together, so…NOPE. It’s. Just. Me. Yet when I told my mother my plan to get a dog and she cooed, “Awww, are you lonely, little girl?” I was caught unawares. Lonely? I’m single, not psycho. Since loneliness is an early warning sign of schizophrenia, I decided to go for the preventive medicine. And since cats, being the harbingers of a slow friendless death, are out, my only options were dog or date.

I got Miles the next day.

After less than a month, he was already barking for his dinner. Actually it was more like a whimper, but to me it sounded just as sweet. Especially when I needed a good made-up reason to run out on the good black man chillaxing to my right. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Or maybe I just didn’t care. Eight in the morning is no time for psychoanalysis. Jumping out of the wrong side of bed, I threw on my (new) dog-walking outfit—sweatpants I stole from Gina, a PHS hoodie, and fake Uggs. Cooper was muttering something about the Federal Reserve when I slipped out the door.

“She stay walking that dog,” said the kid who worked on the front porch across the street. He was talking to me without talking to me. Ignoring me out loud like I usually ignore him out on the streets. His tail going off like a rudder, the dog vroomed over the asphalt. Parallel-parked his nose between the kid’s boots and breathed in deep.

Six

A BRIDGE TO NOWHERE

In the end, it was her hair that did it. Siren-songed me with its “bohemian” accent. Kind of a mix between Freddie’s from A Different World (before the last season, when she discovers a comb) and that black girl’s in The Craft. Brown with blond streaks that went every which-a-way. Unruly. Made my first suit—H&M with the pockets still sewn shut—look like it was trying too hard. Brown-noser. I sat with my back arched, feet crossed right over left at the ankles. She levitated for a moment above her chair, using its arms and her triceps to suspend herself in midair like a gymnast before sticking her landing on the seat Indian style. Barefoot. I could work for this woman.

Turns out, even sociopaths sometimes go shoeless.

“Oh, my God, Helena, go get the new Elle Décor.”

“Jeanne?”

It’d been two years, three temp jobs, and four quarters of grad school since I’d heard her voice, but I knew it right away, just like I knew exactly why she was calling. Or more specifically, whom she was calling about. We had a Super Glued bond, Jeanne and me. The stuff survivor’s guilt and horror-flick romances are made of. Suffering together through something so horrendous, the two of us had nothing left to do but fall for each other and be secretly ashamed. For less than six months, we had both worked for a Manhattan interior designer with manic hair and personality to match.

“Whyyyyy…” I needed to hear Jeanne to bitch-slap me back to the time when we triple-fact-checked fax cover sheets and examined e-mails as if they were trace evidence against us. Back to the forty hours a week when we traded in the four elite years we’d