Still, I’d always been the oddball out, plastering my bedroom walls with old black-and-white fashion photos, collecting art books from yard sales, boycotting the affordable path of UConn for the debt-inducing NYU. I was constantly veering off the course of what was expected of me.

So while these looming DNA test results felt like an intrusion into my mom’s past, they also seemed a potential doorway to my own. I checked my email again. Nothing.

Have we met this date? I asked, changing the subject, digging around for dirt.

Nope! was all she offered.

Well at least something good came out of that nightmare, I wrote back, cringing as I remembered the look on Hayes’s face when I’d made that dumb sex joke.

Cleo chimed in with a GIF of Kevin from The Office laughing.

It was also no surprise that Lola was being somewhat coy with the details. She was often tight-lipped about her sex life, and her day-to-day in general. She fed off other people being open books—and she’d made a career of it—but sharing someone else’s drama gave her cover to hide her own.

OK so you guys will come bail me out if this date is a bust? she wrote. I’m meeting her at Firefly at 7.

Yes. The period at the end of Cleo’s reply hinted at her irritation. “Duh,” it seemed to say.

We all know the drill! I added.

Here’s how our friend code worked: First, we texted each other the locations of our dates, because safety first, obviously. Then, a postdate check-in, mostly just to review the levels of awkwardness that ensued, with the occasional hot make-out story mixed in. And if things were truly going to shit, we always bailed each other with a text or a phone call, or hell—both.

Back in the day when we all lived together, we’d slide into a booth at the dive bar down the street from our fourth-floor walk-up, order a round of tequila shots, and share the gory details about what had gone horribly wrong. Which—let’s be real—first dates often did. Throughout the years, we’d even gone so far as to check on each other in person, peeking our heads into bars and clubs, coffee shops and parks, just to make sure everything was cool. This, after all, was what friendship was about.

Teaching until 9, will check my phone on my break, Cleo texted.

I’m about to meet Grant and Nate in Soho re: nursery, I wrote back. I was headed to meet Lola’s coworker and his husband at Cafe Gitane, a tiny café off Prince Street. She’d connected me with them over email, because they were looking for someone to design a bedroom for their new baby. It was my first real meeting about a job after getting laid off, and I felt giddy with possibility.