I’d been sleeping with one Arabella Wyeth-Goldstein, of the ketamine and sitar party. I had once been her history TA. She now wrote for a leftist East Bay community paper. We’d spent three months mostly smoking weed and fucking, and we’d just reached that sharing-of-trauma phase that marks a crucial milestone in my generation’s patterns of courtship. Arabella’s confessions were terribly normal—concerns about the shape of her breasts, were they too eggplanty, etc. When it came my turn, I spoke of academic and familial pressures and Asian emasculation. She’d nodded as I wrapped up the perfunctory revelations and told me that she “lived entirely with people who identified as hyphenated in college” and therefore “got it.”

Keya’s shoulders slumped genuinely, but then she shrugged. “Same old. Don’t tell your sister, but I’m on a mission. I’ve only slept with white men. Isn’t that fucked?”

“So, I would’ve been an experiment.”

Keya looked unabashed, which in turn made me feel unoffended. “Yeah, exactly.”

“Shouldn’t your app help with that?”

“Oh, I couldn’t swipe on my own thing. And I can’t be seen using someone else’s. I am”—she sighed theatrically—“an analog spinster in the era of digital soul mates.” She lifted an elbow in the direction of one smooth-skinned couple. “I’ve been to three bachelorettes in four months. Maya, with the huge rock? Hers was five days in Belize. I’m broke.”

Before I could open my mouth to offer Keya a better definition of the word broke, Maya caught my eye. She was lovely, with a lithe neck and short black bob. But it wasn’t her face or figure that I was looking at. It was her dangly gold earrings, which swayed like the pipes of a wind chime. I could not help it: I performed the assessment instinctively, with the intuition of an addict, though it had been nearly ten years since I’d tasted gold. But I wondered, as ever: What would those earrings yield? A tumbler of lemonade bearing… what? The power to found the perfect company? To pin down the perfect mate? No, remember, the lemonade delivered not just a boost for a single task, but an energy, a way of being that guided you toward your deserved future. The gestalt of Maya’s golden earrings, of my sister’s white-gold engagement ring, of the party itself: shaadi-shaadi-shaadi. Settlement. Well-adjustment.

(My father’s old aphorism: We are all still ad-justing to this place. It had turned out to be true, clinically speaking. I’d seen a therapist just after graduating UGA, certain I suffered some cocktail of anxiety, major depression, and ADHD. I’d left with no pills, just a cruelly ironic diagnosis of something called adjustment disorder.)