The Overlap Read Online Free Page B

that the time had come to break up. It wasn’t a particularly tearful scene, but I was surprised when about two days later the “shock” of not being in that particular relationship anymore hit me one morning just as I woke up, and I spent almost an entire month feeling like total crap. I was moody, and snapped at everyone in my family almost any time anybody said something to me. It didn’t have to be about Andrew; if my mother asked me what I wanted for dinner any particular day in June I would find some reason to yell at her just for asking that question.
    Finally, my sister Lauren, who is three years older than me, made me go to dinner with her one night up in Scottsdale right before the Fourth of July, to this new place that had just opened by Fashion Square, my favorite mall in all of the Phoenix area. We sat outside on the patio even though the sun was still high in the Arizona sky at 6:30 and the temperature was still around 102 degrees, but underneath the water misters we were actually fairly comfortable as we watched the sun slowly slide downwards while we plowed through not only martinis but various gourmet flatbreads until we were both more stuffed than either of us had been in a long while.
    Basically, over the course of two hours Lauren told me again and again to get over myself; breakups happen all the time, and this one in particular with Andrew was not only months in the making but was the best thing in the world for me at this point in my life. She talked me through the other alternatives I had considered but dismissed, such as following him to Philadelphia or trying to have a cross-country long-distance relationship while he was in grad school and I was starting my new career out in L.A. Or even (putting everything on the table for the sake of completeness) getting married! By the end of dinner (and three martinis later for each of us) I was feeling much better that I had indeed made the right decision. We left her car there and called a cab to take us home since neither of us was in driving condition (Lauren lived about ten minutes away from my parents’ house down in Chandler, so the one cab would work for both of us), but halfway home we abruptly had the cab pull off the highway to take us to one of the bars near the main Arizona State campus. Lauren had decided that a hookup was just the thing I needed to complete my “healing” and as buzzed as I was, I was inclined to agree. It didn’t happen; for me anyway, though Lauren did meet some older guy who was around thirty, and went home with him. So after she left I grabbed another cab back home, gave my mother (who was waiting up for me) a sort-of-apology for being such a bitch the past month, and did my best not to throw up before passing out.
    I did hook up with two other guys at various points during the rest of the summer. Everyone agreed that I needed some rebound sex to wash away any remaining misgivings about breaking up with Andrew and to help keep me from backsliding and getting back together with him, and who was I to argue with them? (“Everyone” except my parents, that is, though I’ll bet if I weren’t their daughter they would have made the vote unanimous.) The first guy was a one-nighter I met in mid-July at that same bar near ASU that Lauren and I had gone to a couple of weeks earlier, and the second guy I met at a baseball game in early August and besides me staying at his downtown loft the night I met him, we also spent one more night together the following weekend; but then that was it.
    Throughout August I did a little bit of preparation work for the upcoming new college hire program every time the firm e-mailed me new information (and I was getting at least two e-mails every day from someone there). I managed to get in a lot of pool and tanning time, both at home in my parents’ backyard as well as at least once a week with a couple of my girlfriends at one of the resorts that offered day packages. I had received a $7,500