“You got it! What’s up?” she asks me now, in response to my SOS.

“I need to bag the bad boy.”

She screams on the other end of the phone, and I have to pull it away from my ear. When it’s safe to resume holding it by my head, she says, “Rachel Perez, are you going to do something that’s not in the plan?! Say it isn’t so!”

Louisa and I are opposites-attract friends. She has never had a plan in her life, and I have rarely moved a muscle without one. It works, somehow, the way these things do. But we make fun of each other a lot, which is probably how we cope with how impatient we make each other. Like, Louisa is basically never on time. Ever. And I pretty much won’t say yes to anything if I don’t have twenty-four hours to plan it.

“You have to tell me everything. Everything!”

“It’s a long, zany story.”

“I’ve got time.”

It’s hard to know where to start, but I tell her about my mom breaking her foot and about the first girls’ night out.

“Wait, what?” Louisa demands. “You? You’re selling sex toys? How does that even happen? Was that in the plan?”

“No,” I say. “It was definitely not in the plan. But I kind of love it.”

I tell her about the parties I’ve done. How the women talk to each other, the confessions they make, and the healing they do.

“That’s really cool. But what does this have to do with the bad boy?”

“I told you it was a long story. The bad boy?”

“Yesssss?”

“He has a boat.”

“Okaaayy?”

“And, long story, but the gist is, his family owns an outdoor adventure business—you know, it’s the Pacific Northwest—and they’re trying to get more business from spa-and-wedding tourists, and he asked me to do a girls’ night out on his boat.”

“And you said yes?” she demands. “To selling sex toys on his boat?”

I can’t exactly claim credit for that decision. I explain about how I didn’t know it was sex toys. And neither did Brody.

“But then I found out and I did it anyway.”

I tell her about the women at my first party and how they inspired me with their bruised but brave sex lives and their honesty.

“Holy shit, Rush Creek Rachel is incredibly badass.”

She kind of is, I think.

“Yeah, well, she needs to be even more bad…tushy.” Gopher butt, I’m talking about myself in the third person. “I need to be even more badtushy. I need to seduce him.”

I could swear Louisa is cheering.

I start to explain about Jack Buddy and she jumps in. “Oh, my God, I used to love that thing when I was dating this guy who was totally obsessed with hand jobs!”