“Perfectly fine,” I said, half wanting them to go away. I could foresee the whole thing: the hotdog eater would go for Maxine, who was objectively prettier and funnier than me, and I’d be stuck with the fisherman. “Can we help you?”

“We just wanted to come by and invite you to a barbecue,” the fisherman said. He tilted his head toward the parking lot, where a group of people were gathered around a charcoal grill.

I was hungry and bored and had a deep love for barbecues, but I wasn’t about to accept an invitation from strangers. Luckily, Maxine had an inherent affection for strangers—yet another quality that drew men to her. She once drove all the way to Aspen with a guy she met in a yoga class. She invited me along but I told her we’d both end up dead in a ditch. As it turned out, the guy was related to a famous screenwriter and the three of them—Maxine, the guy, the screenwriter—spent the weekend drinking cognac in an outdoor hot tub. She hadn’t even had to kiss anyone. “Actually, I’m starving,” she told the fisherman, and began to gather her things. She looked at me, eyebrows raised. “You coming?”

Not wanting to be alone, I put on most of my clothes and followed her to the parking lot.

In our defense, we had not come to Clinton Lake to meet men but to escape my apartment, which was filled with poison. I’d fallen victim to a rather bad flea infestation and, after weeks of scratching and telling myself they’d eventually go away, I’d caved and set off a bug bomb. Before leaving my apartment, I watched as the metal canister released a cloud of toxic white fog. There was something pretty about it—an amorphous poison genie slithering from its lamp. Safe at the lake, I dreaded going back home, where I would have to clean every surface with a hot washrag, as well as wash any clothes, bedding, dishes, and towels that may have come in contact with the fog. Even the doorknobs would be coated in poison.

Worse than the fleas was that I didn’t own an animal. It seemed an injustice, like a born-again virgin getting struck down by an STD. The fleas had come from the cat of an art history professor who was twice my age and who, as soon as I mentioned meeting his parents, slipped away by such tiny increments that I was suddenly shocked to find myself single. One day he was there—his books on the coffee table, his brown bottle of men’s thickening shampoo in the shower—and the next he was gone, leaving behind nothing but a sea of invisible flea eggs, courtesy of the overweight, walleyed calico he often brought over because he couldn’t bear the thought of her sleeping alone.

Exactly two days after he left, the fleas exploded in a grand display of evolutionary fine-tuning. They jumped in great arcs from the carpet and left itchy pink bites along my ankles and thighs. In the mornings, I woke with wild streaks of blood across my sheets, from where I’d clawed myself in my sleep. “Look at me, I made a Jackson Pollock,” I whispered one morning. There was nobody there to hear me.