The Year of Yes by Maria Dahvana Headley

rented shoes was hooking his fingers into the stripper’s breast, and tossing it, girl and all, down the lane. Strike! I cringed.
    “Are you okay?”
    “Fine. Terrific!” I nodded like a convert. “Great stripper!” Great was a misnomer. She had rigor mortits, and looked maybe seventeen. I felt like my wine might have poisoned me.
    “MIND IF I GO GET A LAP DANCE? There’s this Russian girl here, Masha…”
    The Boxer thumped me on the back, like I was a buddy.
    My mind flipped forcibly to Chekhov. Moscow! Moscow! I yanked it back.
    “Not at all,” I said, much too loudly.
    Why would I mind? We were on a date. Sure, go and get some unknown Masha to squirm in your lap, and I’ll just sit here and fight off the fourteen-year-olds. Great! Exactly how I wanted to spend my evening! Unless, it suddenly occurred to me, we weren’t on a date? Maybe he really did want to be buddies. Maybe he wasn’t attracted to me at all! I could feel myself turning red. Oh God. I’d completelymisinterpreted everything. He didn’t like me. Obviously. Anyone who liked me would not leave me sitting at a wobbly little table in a room full of pubescents on the prowl.
    I watched the Boxer put his arm around the tattooed shoulder of a girl I’d noticed before, a skinny girl, with long black hair and iridescent blue eyes. She smiled, fake adoration appearing on her face. I could see the Boxer grinning. I could see him believing her.
    I put a handful of ice cubes in my mouth and crunched them until they melted away. I put my face down onto the sticky table and let my eyes overflow.
    SOME UNFORTUNATE SIDE EFFECTS of humiliation: Three drinks later, I lost my senses and went home with the Boxer. I climbed five flights of his stairs, and ended up in his bedroom, participating in some truly awful sex. The Boxer, startlingly, ended up crying on my neck. I thought I knew why. Who wanted this to be their life? Not me, and apparently not him, either.
    I thumped him on the shoulder. We were buddies, after all. But we weren’t. We were two people making a naked mistake. I called a car service at 5:00 a.m. Some knight came in a shining white car and took me home.
    I dabbed at my eyes the whole time I dressed for work. Things already sucked, and they got even suckier. I went looking for Vic, but she wasn’t in her bedroom. Her diary was open on her bed, though, and I glimpsed my name. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t pick the book up, but I readwhat was on the page, and it wasn’t pretty. I knew Vic was annoyed at my yes policy, but I hadn’t known she thought I was an irredeemable, arrogant slut. Apparently so. I walked to the train, sleepless and sad.
    That afternoon in class, the Boxer acted perfectly normal, and I was relieved. I thought maybe I’d been wrong about him. Afterward, however, the whole class went to the basement bar, ordered drinks, and got down to bitching about the state of the universe. Suddenly, the Boxer slammed his glass down and announced, in his booming voice, “Do I have a story for you.”
    I cringed. Somehow, I knew what was coming.
    “So, I was having sex with this girl last night, who actually came home with me after we went to a strip club…”
    Here’s the thing about sitting at a table where someone is telling a story about you, in the third person. It sucks. Not that I’d never done it, but I’d never done it in a kiss-and-tell vein. It had only been eight hours.
    Pause for a short discussion with the male members of the group about strip clubs in New York City, advantages and disadvantages of going to same, and a small story from an otherwise shy member of the group about the broken finger suffered by his brother-in-law while attempting to stuff dollar bills down the G-string of a stripper in New Orleans during a bachelor party. Pause for a short discussion with the female members of the group about feminism versus stripping, G-strings, comfortable or not, and, “What the hell kind of girl goes with a