I froze. The receipt was from last night. Dave had told me he was working last night and couldn’t go out with me. But he had gone out, and he’d paid his bill at 10:42 PM. I felt the blood rushing into my face and tears started to gather in my eyes. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I yelled out to the empty house. Yellow Alert.

FIVE

FIVE

I left the receipt and grabbed my clothes. Dave was probably halfway home by now and I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t ready to face him and start a fight.

Banging out of his place, I was in my car and heading down the hill within sixty seconds, verging on being totally hysterical. Dialing my friend Ina from my cell, I prayed she would answer. Ina would have some good advice. She was crazy, but she knew about this kind of thing. She picked up on the fourth ring.

“I’ve got a Yellow Alert with Dave—are you around?”

“What? What’s wrong—are you okay?” she asked. “Of course I can meet you. Do you want to go to Alcove?”

“Yes, it’s close. I’m on my way,” I answered tightly.

“Okay, relax, Dani—I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

Ina was the only friend I had whose personal situation was even more pathetic than mine. Ina was my Hot Asian Friend, as I liked to call her. I always brought up the Asian part because she didn’t drive and I was never sure if it was because she had grown up not driving in Manhattan or if she fit into that stereotype of being a bad Asian driver. I’d asked her once and she’d looked at me funny and, shruggingly, told me, “Kind of both.”

Ina told me over the phone that she had been out running errands with her boyfriend, Larry, who was going to drop her off. I always thought of Larry as a l-o-s-e-r. They had been together for a year and a half and lived in a huge run-down house above Universal Studios. The paint was peeling off the clapboard siding and they couldn’t have pets because all the shrubs in the backyard were poisonous, but the place was big. I never knew where the money came from to pay for the house every month, but somehow they came up with it. I knew the two of them didn’t have a lot of cash, because last Christmas Larry wouldn’t let her get a Christmas tree because he said they couldn’t afford the lights.