I needed immediate assistance with this one. I called Lauren to see if she could meet me at AOC for drinks before dinner. Michael was out of town, so luckily she was free to meet up.

I hated to rely so much on Ina and Lauren to decode my dating life, but I didn’t have much choice. Not counting Rachel, my imaginary friend at work who came in handy whenever I didn’t want to see Lauren and Ina, I had few other girlfriends. Most of the women I knew had tons of girlfriends they’d known since they were all cheerleaders at UCLA, all of them still best friends forever. Now these BFFs loaded their strollers into their SUVs and met up for Ice Blendeds at the Coffee Bean on Sunset to complain about their husbands. Or they dragged themselves in a posse all the way to the Valley to take that Cardio Barre class that was supposed to be the best class in LA, the one they thought would get them an ass like Jessica Biel’s. But at UCLA I had been a loner girl determined to leave Arizona and my messy mom and dysfunctional dad behind to make it big as a writer, and I didn’t have time to hang around tossing my hair with sorority sisters. No checks came from home to pay for school and all the partying. With the people I did know, I had one rule, then and now: no intermingling of the friends. There were no weirder people than your good friends’ other friends.

Meeting Lauren at AOC was a smart call. Wine, cheese, and warm bread were exactly what I needed. The place was always packed, but Lauren knew Caroline, one of the owners, and she was always cool about getting us a table. The dark wood bar was polished under the crystal-stemmed wineglasses. I searched for my friend’s strawberry blond head above the late-afternoon drinkers packing the bar area. Lauren was easy to find; she was almost six feet tall and always turned heads. People always thought they knew her. “Did you go to Beverly High?” someone would come up and ask.

“No, I didn’t go to Beverly,” Lauren would answer.

“I know you from someplace . . .” the person would push.