“Decision time, O’Connor. What’ll it be?”

I looked at the pile of same-ish black t-shirts again. And the two sitting before me. I held one up, then the other, bringing the soft cotton uncomfortably close to my face.

The whole concept, I suspected, was bullshit, so I approached it like those standardized tests, back in high school when plaid flannel dinosaurs roamed the earth: process of elimination. Half the shirts smelled like the inside of a gym bag left in the hot sun for a week. No. Half of the remaining ones I ruled out because they’d tried to cheat the assignment by adding cologne. If all I can smell is Axe body spray, I’mma assume you have the same depth and personality as a can of that.

That’d left three, and one of them had B.O. that I wasn’t about, which left two. Whoever owned these, I thought, gave a halfway fuck about hygiene. One was, I guess, a little more ramen-y and the other a little more garlic-y? I was splitting hairs by now; these were notes so faint I might be imagining them. Guess I’ll go with Mr Garlic.

I turned to Jessa, and with exactly the same confidence with which I’d have read tea leaves, I proclaimed, “This... one. Yeah. This one!”

My peers in the circle gleefully chanted: “O-pen it, o-pen it!”

“Arright, arright.” Tucked in the shirt’s breast pocket was a scrap of paper. Rather buzzed myself, it took a while to find the crease, and unfold it one, two, three times...

“A. R. We gotta A. R. up in this bitch? Oh... right,” I said, trying not to look crestfallen. “It’s you.”

Let me back up a bit, though.

When I was in high school in Asheville, NC, I went through a mean girl phase. Neglectful but well-off parents, check. Pink velour tracksuit, check. Trailed by one or more hopeless suitors and enjoying it too much, check. And honestly I wasn’t even a first tier hottie. I was just normal good looking and played it up well, thanks in no small part to my precocious skill and boundless imagination for makeup.

One of those would-be suitors was Adam Rzeznik. I appreciated Adam. He was kind of all over the place—social climber one semester, trenchcoat mafia the next. He had a winning smile. He was on the track and swim teams, so he had a decent build. Unfortunately for him, he also had serious social awkwardness and a tendency to run his mouth.

Sophomore year, some footballers got a hold of a little poem he’d written titled “Ode to That Ass.” Knowing he was into me, they took the liberty of renaming it “Ode to Millie O’Connor’s Ass.” And putting his name on it. And printing lots of copies.

Our entire graduating class could smell blood in the water. Adam and I both braced ourselves for the shitstorm.

Predictably, kids ragged on Adam incessantly. They tried multiple times to scam him into going places to meet me out for a supposed date, and got the nicknames “Ass Pirate” and “Dread Pirate Rzeznik” to stick. His response to this coordinated abuse was atypically subtle. He blank-face ignored the teasing, answering only when necessary, with benign or vaguely snarky answers that gave the vicious social climbers little to grab onto. Years later he explained that he was already in therapy, and his psychologist had taught him this strategy, which he referred to as “gray rock,” to deal with the narcissists in his family.

Only once, when someone publicly tried to drag me into it, did Adam lose it. He threw a single well-placed punch that got him suspended for a day, and shut up the offending kid. Then, when the initial hubbub had died down slightly, he surprised everyone by showing up to lunch in a pirate costume, complete with tricorn hat.

At a well-picked moment when most of our grade was coming to or from the cafeteria, his antics drew a crowd. “The trenchcoat mafia is dead!” he declared. “Long live the tricorn mafia!” He even had nonsensical flyers that advocated “redistribution of booty” and mocked some of his bullies in limerick form. In one moment of bizarre spectacle, Adam got on top of the narrative.

Meanwhile, all the mean girls had stumbled all over each other to feign sympathy for the embarrassment I must no doubt be feeling. Nobody asked how I was feeling. I was feeling a lot of different things. I’d been quietly a fan of Adam’s poetry for years—we were both contributors to the Jr. and Sr. high school lit mags—and when I read that poem, I got all kinds of red in the face. I hadn’t seen any Internet porn at that point. The things he was offering—very politely—to do with my body were shocking.

If I weren’t so mortified by the public scandal I might have said it was sweet, in a typically fucked-up Adam sort of way. But admitting this would be social suicide. Being anywhere near him was social suicide.

So, I made a spectacle of my own. I politely and very publicly turned him down.

I went on to date a boy at school who also wanted to play with my ass, and wasn’t gentlemanly about it. Whether fair or not, I blamed Adam: the bullshit had rolled downhill, and I had become typecast as “backdoor Millie.” I told that boy to go fuck off. In response, he tried to assault me. So I decided all boys could fuck off. Stupid and rapey and presumptuous and you can never be too guarded around one. I drifted away from friends who didn’t understand my plight, and made connections instead with the queer girls and the weird girls.

Alexandra Carson, for instance, with whom I bonded over make-up stuff. Alex identified as a radical bimbo. She fought unsuccessfully to make her senior quote “Hoes can do anything.” So it shocked nobody in our circle that she got full-ride to Chapel Hill for computer science.

It wasn’t until college that I found people to date who treated me and my body with respect, who helped me to open up and grow into my hoe self.

College was, among other things, a great palate cleanse after the disgusting drama of primary school. My makeup and art portfolio won me a scholarship to the highly exclusive Vitesse Institute in NYC, my folks paid for an apartment in Bushwick, and the City did its thing to my parochial southern brain. Not only did I learn I was bisexual, I learned that I was a leftist. Honestly I couldn’t tell you which was a bigger shock to the folks back home. At any rate, I could tell the Apple was a little too big to be my permanent home, so ultimately I jumped at an offer I received to work on the Atlanta production of RENT.

At a mere 3.5 hours from Asheville, Atlanta was perfect for me. It had all the things I held dear as a southerner, and as a makeup artist, but with a population of four hundred thousand, a modern urban vibe, and politics to go with it. Plus I was at advantage with my family. I could jump in my Civic (or later my old Yamaha PC800) and see them any old weekend, but it was a little more involved for them to gather up my baby sister Christine and their Yorkshire terrier Phyllis, and pile into the Town Car.

So long as it was on my terms, though, I did love to visit. I liked the music scene in NC and neighboring Tennessee, and I still had some friends in the area. Most people my age who’d stayed had become insufferable neoconservative little shits. But some turned out alright. A few had never really bought the bullshit, they’d always been out ahead of me on the road of political self discovery.

One of those was Alex, who by now had emerged with a master’s degree in network engineering (after exchanging Matrix or Ghost in the Shell-inspired looks with me on our webcams all through undergrad). She quickly scored a high-paying remote job and got herself a gorgeous house in the quiet suburb of Marion.

It was Alex who convinced me, one sunny day in April, to drive up from Atlanta to meet her, not in Asheville but in big city Charlotte. I love Char, she has a special place in my heart as well. While not the famous theater hub that is Atlanta, Charlotte is actually a much bigger city, the second largest in the southeast. It’s a place where you can find and do anything in the space of a day—shop big label, eat a fancy lunch, go to a museum, shoot rifles at the range, and then score some tasty barbecue and a milkshake.

We were on our way into the Queen City Outlets that day, to look at dresses for a club opening that night. Alex had raved about it, and I’d used my theater industry connections to get us spots on the list. (I was getting a little old to drive multiple hours and cross state lines in the hope a bouncer notices me.)

As we rounded the corner of the mall entrance, a man passed by us. He was our age, kind of in the gray area of being my type or not, and I wouldn’t have said I was instantly attracted to him. But there was something jarring about him. I couldn’t figure out what.

He looked like your typical metal and punk guy, for the most part. He had straight-fit black jeans and Docs, despite the 90 degree heat; a white-on-black band shirt with the name in unintelligible demonic scrawl; square rimmed black glasses; a smattering of visible tattoos, most notably the “bXe” on the back of his left wrist; a clean shave, and short jet-black hair. He had a hint of a gut, but his arms were jacked. His face radiated health and joie de vivre.

I didn’t even realize I was staring until he hit back with an ambiguous grin. Then he was past us, and it was over. Or so I thought. Alex had latched onto my forearm and was shaking it insistently.

“Mil! Oh my god, do you realize who that is? That’s Adam!”

“Son of a b—I thought he looked familiar.” I turned and watched him go around the corner.

I hadn’t thought about Adam in a couple years. I had to admit, gut or no gut, the kid had glowed the fuck up.

Thus, I was vaguely aware that Adam was out there kicking around southern NC. But we didn’t cross paths again for another year and a half. Once again, the blame lay with Alexandra.

On a rainy Thursday morning, I was going over some concept art in my Atlanta studio when I got an inscrutable text message from her:

“Two words. Pheromone party. U in bitch y/n”

I called her half an hour later. “Phero-what-now, bitch?”

“Girl, remember how we said this is the year we level up our hoe game? Welp opportunity is knockin. You remember Jessa Pickens?”

“Lemme think. Ah, yes, I remember Jessa Pick-Me, vice queen of the pick-mes. A real horse’s ass.”

“She’s better now. Honest. And she’s throwing one of those parties, where the guys all throw their worn t-shirts in a pile, and you gotta pick one out that smells right to you. And whoever that shirt belongs to, you go home with!”

“Alex, that is a terrible idea. Like scientifically shaky and practically ill-advised.”

“It would be, but I’ve seen the guest list and FB-stalked every man on it. They’re all hot. We can’t lose!”

And so it was that against my better judgment, I found myself filing into the living room of one Jessa Pickens, whom I once hated. And to my astonishment, also filing in, along with a host of other well-built men our age, was Adam Rzeznik, incidentally the main reason I’d hated Jessa. She had been so unkind to both of us that year in high school, all in hopes it would benefit her station. From what I could tell, it hadn’t. But ultimately, thanks to family, she had landed on her feet back in Asheville, where she managed at Trader Joe’s and owned a lovely flat.

I strode up to her and said, “Seriously Jessa? Him?” I’ll admit, I was feeling uncertain and it made me at least 50% more surly than usual.

Jessa rolled her eyes, a motion she’d elevated to an art form long ago, and said, “Nice to see you too, Millie. And since you asked. Yes, Adam and I have some mutuals now, and when I saw his picture, I messaged him to apologize for being such a godawful bitch in high school. By the way, Millie, sorry I was such a godawful bitch to you both in high school... But I mean Jesus, look at him, he’s swoony!”

I nodded. “Not bad, I guess, if you’re into core kids. Look, I’m sorry, that is no way to greet a hostess. I’m glad we’re reconnecting. Glad you seem to be doing well. That said... if I were Adam, I’d never trust you after the shit you pulled in school. I gotta know. How did you bury the hatchet?”

In response, Jessa flashed her trademark yokel grin. Years of braces had straightened it out quite neatly. She leaned over to me conspiratorially.

“We hooked up last fall. I sucked his dick, hee hee hee hee hee! It’s nice.”

Bless that girl and her dorky disarming laugh, it always feels like a breath of fresh air.

I moved on through the room, to where Alex was standing. Her look tonight was a vague homage to Dr Frank N Furter, unless I missed my guess.

“Oh Alex dearest, you forgot to mention one little thing,” I said. My anger was melting away, but I still felt I had to at least make note of my annoyance.

“What. Him?” she said, cocking her head vaguely in Adam’s direction. “Sorry not sorry, bitch. He’s hot, and hot does a hoe good. For what it’s worth, I earnestly hope you do not get Adam. Because I want him. I’d let that poet fuck me in the ass in a heartbeat.”

“What if I do get him?”

She shrugged. “We’re all adults here. If you’re down, you’re down. If not, I’m sure you’ll find somewhere to let him down discreetly. Oh, shit. Girl, I’m sorry, you know I didn’t mean anyth—”

“Don’t worry about it, let’s just do this thing. Hoe goals, right?”