Therefore, the next Friday night, I stood in front of the small mirror over my dorm-room sink and looked desperately at my reflection. Both Eva and Pilar were sitting in my room, and both were prettier than I was. Eva had a fairly typical Parisian look and so might lose out to me in terms of exoticism, but Pilar was half Thai, half Spanish, with a flood of black hair that fell down to her knees.

“You know, he’s probably gay,” I said, not for the first time. I would far rather he be gay than fall for Pilar. I would far rather he be gay than try to go out with him, too. I was still having trouble coming to terms with my intentions.

“Could be,” Adela said. “Ah . . . are you seriously thinking of wearing that blue sweater?”

“What?” I said, immediately paranoid. “I thought it matched my eyes.”

“Maybe something a little more . . . conservative.”

“Black,” Eva clarified, for the slow-witted such as myself. “You want black.”

I frowned doubtfully. “My father always said black rejected people, and that if I wanted to make people like me, I should wear blue.”

All three European women stared at me as if I had fallen off the moon.

“And heels,” Pilar said, while Eva pulled out a black spandex top that wouldn’t have qualified for legal in the U.S. “You do have shoes with heels, don’t you?”

I had thought I was wearing shoes with heels, but two inches apparently did not qualify. As item by item my own idea of what was attractive was dismissed, I grew increasingly insecure; but nobody noticed because I had been insecure ever since they met me. “Or he’s got a girlfriend. There’s no way someone that cute doesn’t have a girlfriend,” I added.

“True,” Adela said. “Here.” She had unearthed the four-inch stiletto boots I had bought in desperation after being unable to find any Parisian winter shoes with shorter heels. The stilettos made me feel like such a man-hunter I had been reluctant to wear them in the actual situation: that is, a hunt for a man. I was hunting a man. God, where was my dignity?

“Or he’ll be an absolute jerk and only interested in one thing and that for about an hour,” I said.

“What do you think about the skirt, Eva?” Adela asked, ignoring me as they flicked through my closet. “Do we want to go for classy or sexy?”

“Both, of course,” Eva said, and a few minutes later gave me a crumpled, puzzled look when she realized I didn’t have anything in my wardrobe that did both classy and sexy at the same time. This was not a situation in which a French or Spanish woman my age would have found herself.