I was looking in particular at Tom, infamous for drinking sixteen bottles of Rolling Rock one night freshman year.

"I saw her doing coke in the bathroom," Keith said.

"So what's a little coke?" I said. "Come on, Keith, man.

I remember in college, you used to make runs into the city all the time for coke and 'shrooms."

"That was the eighties," Keith said, as if that explained everything.

"We're doing this for your own good," Mike said. "We think the girl's got some serious problems and you're gonna get hurt."

"You have no idea what you're talking about," I said.

"You're hiding from yourself emotionally," Jane said.

Phil and Jane had been going out for about six months, and I barely knew her. She was going for her Ph.D. in psychology at the New School, so of course she thought she had all the answers.

"Oh, am I?" I said.

"You haven't fully dealt with your emotions about your sister's death," she continued. "You're only in this relationship with Rebecca because it's a convenient place to hide. You're very vulnerable right now, and you're probably not even aware of what you're doing."

"You don't even know me," I said. "Who the fuck do you think you are?"

"Chill, my brother," Phil said.

"I appreciate your concern," I said to everyone, "but I think you're all a bunch of assholes."

I stormed out of the restaurant. The next day, Keith left a message for me at work, apologizing for organizing the intervention, but reminding me that it was for my own good. I didn't bother returning the call.

Over the next couple of months, I fell out of touch with most of my friends, but I stayed with Rebecca. Freelancing wasn't working out, and supporting Rebecca was seriously depleting my bank account, so when I was offered a job at Manhattan Business for roughly half of what I'd been making at the Journal, I had no choice but to take it. Rebecca went about her routine shopping during the day and going out with her friends at night, and I went about mine working during the day and into the early evening, and hanging out in my apartment the rest of the time, or occasionally going to a movie alone. Once in a while, Rebecca and I went out to dinner together or hung out in the living room, watching TV, but otherwise the only times we saw each other were when we were having sex. Our romps became even wilder and more adventurous.

Sometimes she left me tied up to the bedposts for hours while she went out shopping, and I often wound up with cuts and bruises.

Occasionally, after one of our early-morning sessions, Rebecca got very intense and melodramatic, telling me about how traumatic it was for her when her father left her mother just packing up one day and leaving without any warning and how she'd always been terrified of men abandoning her. Whenever Rebecca talked like this I couldn't help feeling trapped. I knew that Rebecca and I had no future together, and I began to dread the inevitable day when I would tell her it was over.

Then, one night in bed, Rebecca started nibbling on my ear playfully and asked me if I could see the two of us getting married someday. Of course the answer was definitely no, but, caught off guard, I changed the subject. The next day, she didn't mention marriage again, but I decided that things were starting to get a little too serious and it was time to call it quits.

When I came home from work, I told her there was something important we needed to discuss.

"What?" she asked.

In gym shorts and a sports bra, doing crunches on the living room floor, she looked especially hot. As usual, rap was blasting on the stereo.

When I turned down the throbbing music she said, "Hey, that was my boy Jay-Z."

"Last night," I said, trying to avoid eye contact, "you said something about us getting married."

"I did?" she said, acting surprised.

"Yeah, you did," I said.

"That's so funny, I was probably half-asleep." She held up her head and chest off the floor, her face turning pink as she tightened her abs for several seconds, and then she relaxed.

"What I'm trying to say," I said, "is at this point in my life I don't think I'm really ready to»

"Don't worry, I didn't mean it," she said.

"You didn't?"

"Of course not. Why would I want to be somebody's wife?" She made the idea sound ridiculous.

"Oh," I said, "because last night you»

"You shouldn't believe everything I tell you," she said.

We continued to live together and nothing really changed. She went out to hip-hop clubs and bars at least a few nights a week and we hardly spent any time together. She made more passing comments about marriage usually when she was drunk or on whatever drug was fashionable that week, but sometimes she was completely sober. Whenever I confronted her about it she always claimed that she didn't remember saying it or that she didn't really mean it.

Then, one night, I overheard Rebecca in the living room bragging to her friend Monique about how I was "a little puppy dog," and how well she had trained me. She said she could get me to do anything, even paint her toenails, and she predicted that by next year we'd be engaged with a joint bank account and her name on the lease.

I felt like an idiot for letting Rebecca use me and take advantage of me for all of these months. When Monique left, I marched into the living room, prepared to tell Rebecca to move the hell out. But when I was about to. speak, I imagined what it would be like if she left I'd be alone again, wandering the streets.

Rebecca asked me what was wrong and I said, "Nothing. Coming to bed soon?" And a few days later I was ordering her credit cards in her name.

I typed the first sentence of my Byron Technologies article and continued outlining the rest of it. In the opening, I'd describe Robert Lipton, the CEO, as «desperate» and describe how he had "irresponsibly deceived investors by pursuing an unrealistic business plan." Then I'd go on about how the company had been rapidly losing market share and was likely to file for Chapter Eleven by year's end.

While the article wouldn't be totally inaccurate Byron did have some major financial problems, and I had some serious doubts about the long-term viability of the company it still bothered me that I couldn't write a fair story, outlining the negatives and positives and letting the readers reach their own conclusions. But Jeff Sherman hated lukewarm articles and insisted that in order for the magazine to stay "edgy," reporters had to write strongly opinionated articles no matter what. The other day, when he'd called me into his office and reminded me that I'd written three "puff pieces" in a row and that my Byron Technologies article had to be negative, I told him that I didn't think, in this case, a negative article was justified. He told me,

"You don't like the rules? Maybe you'd be happier working someplace else." I would've loved to tell him to go fuck himself, but the job market was tight and, especially with the way Rebecca had been spending my money lately, I couldn't afford to be unemployed.

I was typing so hard my wrists hurt. I took a break, flexing my hands, and then patted my front pants pocket where my wallet had been. A sudden, sickening emptiness overtook me, and I rushed down the hallway to the bedroom. I spilled out the contents of the top drawer of my dresser onto the bed and searched through everything, hoping by some crazy chance it would be there. But after looking through the stuff for the second and third times I realized I was just deluding myself my favorite picture of Barbara, that I'd taken when she was sixteen, was gone.

I started crying. Not just crying bawling. Everything the stress of the whole night, my screwed up relationship with Rebecca, missing Barbara more than I had in months was hitting me at once. As I sat on the bed, sobbing, taking short, erratic breaths, I imagined that Barbara was with me. She was sitting next to me on the bed, putting an arm around my shoulders, telling me, Don't worry, Davey. Everything's gonna be okay.