So he did his best to clean the house, scrubbing at the filthy baseboards, vacuuming inefficiently with a monstrous Oreck he’d found deep in a closet, gathering up months’ worth of magazines and dumping them in the recycling box (though he would wait until he’d had a chance to go through them again one more time before actually putting them outside for collection). He sent two self-deprecating reminder emails to the group and bought hummus and Brie and baguettes and two cases of decent beer, then sat staring at the pages they were supposed to be discussing while he waited for it to be seven o’clock. Leslie arrived first, at 7:15, looking stoned and bashful, clutching her gigantic paperback to her chest like she was going to use it to try to stop a bullet.

“Oh no, did I restore your faith in humanity?” she said, peering into the empty apartment. “I swear I just came to be polite, not because I like or respect you.”

“More beer for us, am I right?” Derek said. He assumed she would understand that his reliance on a tedious cliché was intentional.

“Oh, I’ll drink your beer,” Leslie said. “Just don’t expect me to know anything about Spy vs. Spy over here. Maybe I need a different translation. One with pictures, and sound. A movie, you might call it.”

“We could try to find the Audrey Hepburn one online if nobody else shows up,” Derek said.

“Ooo, I’m gonna tell Violet you suggested we watch a movie together,” Leslie said. “She is gonna freak.”

“Or we could just skip right to seven minutes in heaven.”

“More like twenty seconds I bet,” she said, her head deep in the refrigerator. “Is this pizza slice, like, up for grabs?”

A perfectly unremarkable number of people eventually showed up, Vivek and Kyla and Jonathan and, hallelujah, Violet, who glanced around at the bare walls and deeply gouged wood floors and declared the place “not as bad as I’d assumed it would be.” Jonathan went on and on about Irving Berlin and hedgehogs, while Derek tried to look at Violet without being obvious about it. At one point, while Leslie and Vivek argued about Watch the Throne, he accidentally caught Violet’s eye, and she performed an extremely slow-motion and detailed pantomime of vomiting down the front of her shirt. He wished Leslie would try to incite jealousy in her. It certainly couldn’t be any worse than this semi-public but unacknowledged pining.