Anna heard something in her brother’s voice that made her realize it was time to deal with his massive screw-up. She pushed all thoughts of dead dogs and blue-eyed heroes from her mind and turned toward her brother in the dark of the backseat. This was not the first time she had come to his rescue, and she knew it was far from the last. She had been covering for him since they were little kids. “Okay, I’m ready,” Anna said. “Tell me everything.”

And Steven did. He told her how he met “Brad,” whose real name was Marcella, a seventeen-year-old public-school girl from the South Bronx who had approached him at the Union Square Starbucks a few days before Christmas on a dare from her friends. “She walked right up to me, smacked me in the chest with the back of her hand, and said, ‘Gimme twenty bucks.’ When I asked her why me, she said I looked rich and bored. Then she…” He trailed off.

“I need to know everything Steven, just tell me. I’m not a baby.”

Steven continued, “She told me I looked like I had BDE.” He paused and then finished. “You know, Big Dick Energy.”

“I knew that,” Anna lied, but then let out a small laugh. “Okay, I didn’t. But she really just walked up and said that when she didn’t even know you?” Anna tried to picture herself ever doing such a thing, but it seemed impossible.

“Marcella gives zero fucks. She’ll say anything to anyone.”

Anna’s eyes widened at her brother’s admiring tone, but she didn’t say anything. Steven went on to say he gave Marcella a twenty to buy coffee for her friends but found himself asking her if she wanted to grab dinner. She accepted on the spot, abandoning her friends, and the two of them ended up at Joe’s Pizza where he watched in awe as she ate half an order of garlic knots and two slices of pizza, finished the end of his calzone, and washed it all down with a large pink lemonade. “And she did it without once talking about carbs, calories, the evils of refined sugar, or apologizing for her large appetite. It was baller AF!” Steven explained he was further entranced with Marcella because she seemed so much freer than any girl he had ever met before. She wasn’t polite or perfectly dressed. She laughed at all his jokes and kept telling him he was funny for a rich dickhead.

“Lolly thinks you’re funny, too,” Anna reminded him.