Free What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman Page A

minutes. “So I don’t know his name! You saw me come in two hours ago with that guy, you know I was with him in his room, just let me in!” She was clearly much more attached to this earring than she was to her dignity.
    N ow, let’s not get distracted by my sexy night with the gay Mauritian. I was in Europe because I invited myself on a trip across oceans so that I could have a wildly romantic New Year’s with the man of my dreams. The man who, even if we hadn’t fallen in love
yet
, after months of knowing each other, was still ensconced in my little head as my besthope for finding someone who would make me want what everyone else in the world seemed to want. This is a lot of pressure. And that pressure built up mostly about two inches below my left eye, on my cheekbone, in the form of an enormous, painful, tumorlike pimple. The kind of pimple that even Emma and Sally had to admit was the kind that makes you skip prom, the kind that stars in a Stridex commercial.
    Our first night out in Paris, I carefully put spackle on my face, trying my best to look less like an awkward teenager, and we went to our first Ferris-organized dinner.
    I’ve now shared a hundred group dinners with Ferris, and they always go the same way. He introduces everyone, making every member of the party sound like the most incredible person in the world. He does all of the ordering while everyone gabs. He’s a perfect orderer. The tables are boisterous, people feed one another from communal plates, there are often performances of the singing or trick-performing or toast-making variety, attractive strangers at adjacent tables are usually brought over to join the party, and the waiters or chefs or restaurant owners often end up sitting with us, sharing a bottle of wine and handing over their phone number to Ferris so he’ll invite them to his next party. It’s magical. And as the person who normally takes responsibility for the success of any given dinner party, I am always both impressed and vaguely displaced.
    Ferris is better at what I’m great at.
    So we walked into the private room that held this first dinner, excited to see what Ferris had cooked up. It turned out that Ferris had flown to Paris from Berlin, where hehad seen a beautiful blond stranger in the terminal. She was in talks to be the next Bond girl, and had a part in the next Batman movie. She was that kind of blond girl. On the plane, he was in business class and she was in coach, and so he ran champagne and warm nuts back to her during the flight and discovered she would be staying with some model friends just a couple of blocks from his brother’s cathedral! So lucky! So she and some Latvian models were now part of our party. And were the center of attention. I didn’t need to worry about my pimple being noticed … or any of the rest of me.
    “God bless how many beautiful women Ferris always rounds up,” one male guest said to me, not implying I was one of them.
    Now, despite my focus on Ferris, it was also impossible not to notice how many other attractive, funny, single men were in this group. The seeds of many crushes I would have over the next few years were planted on this trip. But what I didn’t understand yet was that few of these guys were available to me, really.
    They were all Peter Pans, and, as I had yet to accept that I was a Pietra Pan myself, I didn’t see it. Over the years, more than one of them would eventually give me some speech that added up to the notion that I was “not one to be trifled with.” That you didn’t kiss someone like me if you didn’t want to marry her, and that was far, far too scary a proposition. This “compliment” frustrated me many a night, in the face of chemistry with one friend or another who just wouldn’t kiss me.
    But somehow I didn’t learn all of this at that first dinner … despite it being under my nose, right next to my pimple.
    We did ultimately have a great night. We went out dancing, and I met all of