Lena didn’t stop to greet me as she passed my desk on the way to hers, as so many others had. Instead, she glided down the aisle of white desks like it was her wedding and she didn’t have a care in the world. I’d looked her up, obviously—I’d looked everyone up—but she was the one. Lena Cunningham. Twenty-seven. Graduate of the Yale School of Drama. Wrote an award-winning play that dramatized William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” She and her ex-boyfriend were arrested two years ago for getting drunk, ripping down a stop sign on Lafayette Avenue, and then attempting to install it onto the top of a police vehicle in protest. She donates to three abortion rights organizations, grew up in SoHo, and lives in the West Village.

When I was researching this PR agency and I saw her photo online, smizing like she’d invented the form, I immediately recognized her. She’d help me live in this world. She’d help me become one of them.

When I moved to New York, I got an apartment in the East Village, a hole-in-the-wall studio on the second floor above a Chinese food place with a Roman bath in the back room. It was a piece of shit—holes the size of my fist stuffed with browning mouse filler, roaches under the oven that had been dead for decades, a radiator that screamed bloody murder in the middle of the night. It wasn’t what I had pictured for myself in the Big Apple, but it was all I could afford—I scraped together all the money I’d made in college and after to pay for it until I got the PR job. It would do for the moment.

And it was all mine.

The exterminator I called was my first friend in New York. He was a broad, ghoulish man named Fyodor who was bald and looked like he might have a side hustle as one of the gargoyles on the side of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Every Sunday morning at 7:15 a.m. he’d knock on the door yelling “exterminator” as if I didn’t already have our weekly date scribbled into my calendar. As if I hadn’t started looking forward to it. Week three I had coffee waiting for him on the counter. He took it with heavy cream, which I kept on hand for this purpose only. Week four, he brought me a greasy bag of paczki his wife made fresh that morning.