Cleo made it over after class with two bottles of wine in hand, I changed into sweats, and we moved to my blue velvet couch to discuss how to handle my newfound fame. As we talked, BuzzFeed published “SubwayQTs Is the Love Story We Didn’t Know We Needed but Now Can’t Live Without.” I locked my Instagram account, deleted my already dead Twitter page, and deactivated Facebook. We opened the second bottle of wine.

“I swear this will all be over soon,” Lola said reassuringly from the floor, where she sat on the giant gold throw pillows that doubled as chairs in my tiny space. “No one will remember this in a week.” She was using one of my hardcover books of Italian Renaissance art as a tray for a plate of crackers and cheese. My head was in Cleo’s lap, and she stroked my hair gently, raking her fingers along my scalp as if she could massage my infamy away.

“It’s just so embarrassing,” I moaned, shifting onto my back and pressing the heel of my palm against my forehead.

“Which part?” Cleo asked.

“Um, all of it?” I said rhetorically, as if it should be obvious.

“But I mean, what’s really upsetting you?” she pushed, shifting into lawyer mode. “Is it being fired, the fact that your ass was on full display, or slow-dancing with Hot Suit?”

“Losing my job, of course,” I replied honestly. I was out of work, and I basically lived paycheck to paycheck. I was screwed. “I know it’s just a job, but it felt like such a big part of my identity. Of who I am. And you know I already struggle with that stuff.”

Over the years, Cleo and Lola had listened as I worked through the challenges of not knowing much about my birth father. He was a vague entity, a tense subject with my mom, captured in one photograph I kept in the drawer of my bedside table. For my whole life, half of me had always felt like it existed in the shadows.

“And also,” I started, and I saw Cleo raise a brow in Lola’s direction. “Yes. Hot Suit. It’s never fun to be completely humiliated in front of someone, much less a person you’d ogle at in a normal situation. And I told him about that time I peed myself outside Cherry Tavern.”

Cleo winced. She’d been there to see that happen in real time.

“I mean, you all have seen every guy I’ve dated for the past ten years. None of them were ‘I carry a briefcase’ level of hot.”

“Nick the Graffiti Artist was hot,” Lola said.

“Nick who gave me a framed picture of himself for Valentine’s Day?”

“Oh, right, I forgot about that part.” Lola’s lips curled in horrified laughter.