"Who said I'm going on a date?"

"Oh, puh-lease. Don't even start with that shit. You're going. (A) he is such a cutie. And (b) Rachel, no offense, but you can't exactly afford to be all picky, Ms. Haven't Been Laid in-what? Over a year?"

The store clerk looks up at me sympathetically. I glare at Darcy as I slide my tankini across the counter. Yeah, right-a year.

We leave Bloomingdale's and look for a cab on Third Avenue.

"So, you'll go out with Marcus?"

"I guess so."

"Promise?" she asks, getting her cell phone out of her purse.

"You want me to take a blood oath? Yes, I'll go," I say. "Who are you calling?"

"Dex. He bet me twenty bucks that you wouldn't go."

Darcy's right-I have nothing else going on. But the real reason I say yes to Marcus when he calls and asks me out is that Dex said I wouldn't go. And just in case he thought he had cast some sort of spell over me and I was going to turn Marcus down because I'm preoccupied with the Incident, I will go out with Marcus.

But as soon as I say yes, I start obsessing about what Marcus really knows. Did Dex tell him anything? I decide that I must call Dexter and find out. I hang up three times before I can dial the full number. My stomach is churning when he answers on the first ring. "Dex Thaler."

"So what does Marcus know about what happened last Saturday?" I blurt out, my heart racing.

"Well, hello to you too," he says.

I soften slightly. "Hi, Dex."

"Last Saturday? What was last Saturday? Refresh my memory."

"I'm being serious! What did you tell him?" I am horrified to find myself talking in the girly, whiny way that Darcy has perfected.

"What do you think I told him?" he asks.

"Dexter, tell me!"

"Oh, relax," he says, his tone still one of amusement. "I didn't tell him anything… What do you think this is? A high school locker room? Why would I tell anyone our business?"

Our business. Our. We. Us.

"I was just wondering what he knew. I mean, you told Darcy you were with him that night…"

"Yeah. I said, 'Marcus, I was with you last night and we had breakfast together this morning-all right?' And that was that. I know that's not how it works with you girls-women."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I mean you and Darcy share every exhaustive detail with one another. Like what you ate that day and what brand of shampoo you plan on purchasing."

"And like when you sleep with one another's fiances? That sort of detail?"

Dex laughs. "Yeah, that would be another example."

"Or like your bet that I'd say no to Marcus?"

He laughs again, knowing that he is busted. "She told you that, did she?"

"Yeah. She told me that."

"And did it offend you?"

I realize that I am starting to relax, almost enjoying the conversation. "No… but it made me say yes to Marcus."

"Oh!" he laughs. "I see how it works. So you're saying that had she not shared that piece of information with you, you would have turned my boy down?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" I ask coyly, hardly recognizing myself.

"I would actually. Please enlighten me."

"I'm not sure… Why did you think I'd say no?"

"Wouldn't you like to know," he retorts.

I smile. This is full-fledged flirtatious banter.

"Okay. I thought you'd say no because Marcus doesn't seem to be your type," he finally says.

"And who is?" I ask, and then feel instantly remorseful. Flirting like this is not the path to redemption. It is no way to right my wrong. This is what my brain tells me, but my heart is galloping as I await his answer.

"I don't know. I've been trying to figure that out for about seven years."

I wonder what he means by this statement. I twist the cord around my fingers and can think of nothing to say in response. We should hang up now. This is going in a bad direction.

"Rach?" His voice is low and intimate.

I feel breathless, hearing him say my name like this. The one syllable is familiar, warm. "Yeah?"

"You still there?" he whispers.

I manage to say, "Yes, I'm still here."

"What are you thinking?"

"Nothing," I lie.

I have to lie. Because what I am thinking is, Maybe you are my type a little bit more than I once thought.

Chapter 5

Maybe I don't have a type at all. When I consider my past relationships there is no composite picture. Not that the sample would be considered statistically significant-other than Brandon in high school, I have had only three boyfriends.

My real dating history began my first semester of college at Duke. I lived in a coed dorm, and every night we all gathered in the lounge to study (or pretend to), hang out, and watch shows like Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place. It was in that lounge that I developed a serious crush on Hunter Bretz from Mississippi. Hunter was scrawny and nerdy, but I was crazy about him. I loved his intelligence, his slow, smooth drawl, and the way his brown eyes fixed on you when you talked, as though he really cared about what you had to say. My roommate Pam, a Jersey girl with big hair, declared my feelings a "total fucking mystery" but still encouraged me to ask Hunter out. I didn't, but I did work hard at developing a friendship, cracking through his shy exterior to talk to him about poetry and literature. I really believed that I was making progress with Hunter when Joey Merola came in for the kill.

Joey was the opposite of Hunter-a boisterous sports guy with a loud laugh. He played every intramural sport in the book and was always strolling into the lounge all sweaty with a story about how his team came from behind in the last second to win the game. He was the kind of guy who was proud of how much he could eat and the fact that he could get by in literature classes without ever reading a book.

One Thursday night, Joey, Hunter, and I were the last three in the lounge, talking about religion, the death penalty, and the meaning of life, the stuff I had imagined discussing in college, away from Darcy and her more shallow pursuits. Joey was an atheist and for the death penalty. Like me, Hunter was Methodist and against the death penalty. All three of us were unclear on the meaning of life. We talked and talked, and I was determined to outlast Joey and end up with Hunter. But sometime after two, Hunter threw in the towel. "Awright y'all, I have an early class."

"C'mon, man. Skip it. I never make my eight o'clock," Joey said proudly.

Hunter laughed. "I figure I'm payin' for it, I should go."

This was another thing I liked about Hunter. He was paying for his own education, unlike most of the rich kids at Duke. So he said good night, and I wistfully watched him amble out of the lounge. Joey didn't miss a beat, just kept yapping, rehashing the fact that we were both from Indiana-just two towns apart-and that both of our fathers had attended Indiana (his dad had been a walk-on for the basketball team). We played the name game and got two hits. Joey knew Blaine, Darcy's ex-boyfriend, from reading the local sports page. And we both knew of Tracy Purlington, a promiscuous girl from the town between ours.

Finally, when I said I really must get to bed, Joey followed me upstairs and kissed me in the stairwell. I thought of Hunter, but I still kissed Joey back, excited to be getting some real collegiate experience. Annalise had already met her now-husband Greg (and lost her virginity to him), and Darcy had hooked up with four guys by my latest count.

The next morning I regretted kissing Joey. Even more so when I spotted Hunter hunkered down in the library stacks, his head bent over a textbook. But not enough to keep me from kissing Joey again that weekend, this time in the laundry room as we waited for our clothes to dry. And so it continued until everybody in our dorm, including Hunter, knew that Joey and I were an item. Pam was psyched for me-said that Joey blew Hunter away and had the cutest butt in the dorm. I wrote to Darcy and Annalise, telling them about my new boyfriend and how I was over Hunter (only partly true) and how happy I was (happy enough). They both had one question: was I going to go all the way with Joey?

I was ambivalent on the subject of sex. Part of me wanted to wait until I was deeply in love, maybe even married. But I was also intensely curious to find out what all the fuss was about, and desperately wanted to be sophisticated and worldly. So after Joey and I had been together a respectable six weeks, I marched over to the school health clinic and returned to my dorm with a prescription for Lo/Ovral, the birth-control pill that Darcy guaranteed would not cause weight gain. A month later, with the added protection of a condom, Joey and I did the great deed. It was his first time too. The earth didn't move during those two and a half minutes, as Darcy claimed it did during her first time with Carlos. But it also didn't hurt as much as Annalise had warned me it would. I was relieved to have it out of the way and happy to join my hometown friends in all their womanly glory. Joey and I embraced in my bottom bunk and said that we loved each other. Ours was a better first time than most.

But that spring, there were two red flags indicating that Joey wasn't the man of my dreams. First, he joined a fraternity and took the whole thing way too seriously. One night when I teased him about the frat's secret handshake, he told me that if I disrespected his brotherhood, I was disrespecting him. Please. Second, Joey became obsessed with Duke basketball, sleeping out in tents for tickets to big games and painting his face blue, jumping up and down courtside with the other "Cameron Crazies."