ASHLEY: 

      "Well, this is less horrible than what you guys usually pick," Macy says as we all sprawl out on their living-room floor. "At least this one has some funny to make up for the gross stuff."

      "That's for sure!" Jazy giggles, then shifts her voice into a thick Southern accent. "I mean, seriously? 'Get that day-um screwdriver outta the haid!' That thing makes Paula Deen sound like a Yankee!"

      "Never mind accepting the idea that a decapitated, mostly decomposed head could still talk," Markie snickers.

      "Or still have eyeballs," adds Johnny, who joined us shortly after we got here, after calling Markie to let her know he was done with practice.

      Steph, who is sitting next to me holding the pause button on the remote, says, "C'mon, guys! Settle down and pay attention, there's even better stuff coming up."

      "Yeah, what she said," I chime in. "I wanna see if this is actually as entertaining as she made it sound. So far, I see some potential, but it's a bit too soon to tell."

      She resumes the movie and we all settle in to watch, basically forming clusters around the room. Lylah and Macy are lying side-by-side on their stomachs in the floor, with a bowl of honey mustard pretzels in front of them, while Johnny is propped up against an overstuffed chair with Markie sitting between his legs, holding a bowl of microwave kettle corn, her back against his chest. I'm leaning back against the front of the couch, with Steph and Jazy on either side of me, and we're passing a package of parmesan Goldfish back and forth as we watch the movie.

      We all crack up when the mismatched group of characters wind up playing a rather frantic game of "Hot Potato" in a moving car with a dismembered zombie hand which grabs one dude's crotch, and then, when they manage to toss it out, flips off the car as it speeds away. There are several more very amusing scenes, along with the requisite amounts of gore, which have Macy and Markie squealing and hiding their faces while the rest of us munch our snacks and critique the action.

      And as I watch the movie, my earlier question swims back up to the surface of my mind: When was the last time I enjoyed myself this much? Usually, my idea of a good time is spending most of the night getting shit-faced at some club or another, and hopefully going home with a hot chick at the end of the night, but this is almost the complete opposite of that. Yeah, I'm surrounded by attractive women, but we're watching movies and eating junk food, I've had precisely one alcoholic drink the entire night, and I have a snowball's chance in hell of getting laid. So how the fuck am I having so much fun?

      Jazy lets out a snort and says, "Seriously, girl? Have you lost your damn mind!?" This pulls my attention back to the movie, where I see that one of the newly-zombified characters is trying to convince his girlfriend to let him eat her brains, claiming that "They smell so rich, and spicy." She seems to actually be considering it, which is the apparent cause of Jazy's outburst, and Steph reaches out to pat her hand, laughing.

      "Well, I'm pretty sure that all of us have done something completely idiotic for a significant other at least once in our lives. At least now we can feel a bit better about ourselves, right?" she chuckles.

      Then, from the speakers, we hear "Oh, okay, okay!", and a loud crunching sound as the dead dude apparently bites right through her skull, which earns a gurgling noise of disgust from Macy. But the girl's reaction to the event causes the others, except Steph, to gape in disbelief, and even I nearly choke on a Goldfish cracker.

      "Tell me I did not just see what I think I just saw," I manage to sputter. "She did not just fucking cum when he cracked open her damn skull, did she?"

      "I'm pretty sure that was they meant to imply," Steph snickers. "The first time I saw that, I laughed so hard I shot iced tea out of my nose."

      "That's because you have a weird sense of humor," Lylah retorts.

      "That she does, but at least that's a lot better than having no sense of humor at all, like that walking snoozefest she almost married," Macy declares. "Honestly, I don't know how you two got along for a solid week, let alone almost two years."

      Steph opens her mouth to respond, but then reaches out to grab her phone off of the coffee table when it goes off. After looking at it for a second, she quickly types a reply, says, "Excuse me for just a sec, okay? I'll be right back." then pops up from the floor and dashes down the hall.

      "Should we pause the movie again?" I inquire, letting my hand hover over the remote.

      Macy replies "Yeah, prolly." So I stab the button, freezing it in mid-scene as two of the characters toss cold animal brains out of the back of a meat-packing truck to a horde of zombies following along. A few seconds later, Steph comes back, carrying a laptop, which she sets up on the coffee table. I sit up a bit straighter, and manage to see that she's setting up a Skype session.

      She sees me looking, and says, "My friend Talia just texted, cause she wasn't sure if I was still up, and asked me to call whenever I got the message, so i just texted her back and told her we should just do this." She finishes tapping the keys, and a few seconds later, the screen fills with the image of a thin, petite blonde woman, about the same age as Steph. "Hey there, Tal," she practically chirps, and the blonde smiles and waves.

      "Hello there, love," she responds. "If I'd known that you were still up, I would have just rung you up. Working on a deadline again?"

      "Nope, we've got some friends over for a movie night, so I'll probably be up for at least another hour or two."

      "Oh, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to interrupt," her friend exclaims, but Steph immediately starts shaking her head.

      "Don't even worry about it," she responds. "You know you're welcome to call or text me anytime, that's what friends do. And with the time difference, you don't actually think I'm gonna pass up a chance to talk to my favorite guy, do you?"

      The other woman laughs, and says, "Speaking of which, I suppose I'd better let you get at it. I'll never get him ready for school otherwise. Here we go, then."

      Her face disappears from the screen, and is replaced by the image of a small green-eyed boy with sandy hair, who seems to be roughly around the same age as Shane. "Auntie Steffy!" he exclaims, bouncing in his seat and almost upending his glass of milk. "Auntie Steffy, I miss you awful much! I wish you could come home for my party!"

      She smiles, but there seems to be a touch of sadness on her face, too. "I miss you too, Lovebug. And I wish I could come, too, but I just can't right now. But I'm mailing you a box of presents first thing Monday morning, so you'll have them to open at the party. And tell your mom to let you open the one in the blue paper the night before your birthday, because it's a book for your bedtime story. I have one, too, so we can talk on the computer again, and look at them together, okay?"

      "Did you hear, Mummy?" he shouts. "It's awight Auntie Steffy can reads my story for bedtime? Please, Mummy?"

      "Of course it's all right, sweetie," his mother assures him, and he turns his attention back to the screen, beginning to look a bit worried.

      "I can asks you somefin'?" he questions. She nods, and he continues, inquiring, "Since yours not gonna get married with Unca Pill, does that means you can't be my Auntie Steffy no more?"

      She actually blinks a couple of times, and I get the feeling that she's trying not to cry, but she manages to reply, "Jamie-love, your mommy is one of my very best friends in the world, she's almost like my sister. So even though I'm not marrying your uncle, I still love you to the moon and back, and you can call me Auntie Steffy for as long as you want to."

      "Goody! I loves you lots, too! And I don'ts get to play with Unca Pill no more, he don'ts come to see us. And Mummy and Daddy won'ts let me go play at his house. But I don'ts want to, anyhow, because I wants to still be a boy."

       This is a rather odd statement, and Steph looks very confused as she asks, "Why would going to Uncle Phil's house keep you from still being a boy, sweetheart?"

      "Because I heared Mummy tell Daddy and Unca Charlie that the new Auntie person ams a witch, and I don'ts wants her to make me be a froggie or sumpin'."

        She manages to stop herself from laughing, and shushes the rest of us, then informs him, "Jamie, when Mommy says that she's a witch, it just means that she's not a nice person, so you don't have anything to worry about."

      "Truly?"

      "Yes, truly. You know I would never lie to you. And I'll tell you a little secret: She's not smart enough to be that kind of witch, so she couldn't turn anyone into a frog or anything else. If she could, I'd already be one."

      "But she's a meanie!" he declares. "Unca Pill used to was my bestest mate, but now he don't likes nobody but her, and she maked you go 'way, so I don'ts like her nohow. I wish she would just go 'way and leave!"

      After he makes this statement, everyone hears his mother, who's offscreen, say, "So does everyone else, my love."

      They talk for a few more minutes, until his mom tells him that he needs to start getting ready for school, and he reluctantly says goodbye, after insisting that she repeat her promise to read to him before his birthday. She talks to her friend for another couple of minutes, then promises to call again later in the week and ends the session.

      She leans her head back against the couch cushions for a few seconds, not saying anything. Then, finally, she exhales loudly and mutters, "Wow. She's really got her hooks into him big-time. Philip adores Jamie, I never would have thought that he'd let her or anybody else cut him off from that little boy. But I guess that's what I get for thinking."

      Markie, Jazy, and Johnny all look a little puzzled, but obviously don't feel comfortable asking about the conversation. But she notices this pretty quickly, and with a bit of help from Macy and Lylah, explains the situation.

      After hearing their description of the girl, Jazy looks over at Markie and says, "Gee, that sounds kinda familiar, doesn't it?"

      "Are you referring to Shell, or Ash's ex?" Markie responds.

      "Pretty much interchangeable, I think."

      "Geez, rub it in, why don'tcha?" I grumble, pretending to be offended. "So I'm flypaper for freaks, sue me."

      "You said it, we didn't," Lylah retorts. "But to be honest, I still think that Loose Lucy probably still out-crazies your exes, at least the ones I know of."

      "Ooh, lovely nickname there," Markie teases.

      "Yeah, I know," Lylah sighs. "Now, y'all know that I'm not down with all of the double standards and 'slut-shaming' and the rest of that sort of bullshit. I don't want other people trying to dictate my lifestyle, so I'd never try to do it to anyone else. But there's not really much else you can say when someone has this much of a history of deliberately breaking up relationships and cheating on her own boyfriends."

      "No shit!" Macy chimes in. "She's been like that for as long as I can remember. She'll get a boyfriend, use him for whatever she  can get, and be fucking around with some other dude before she even dumps the first one. Then she does the same thing with the next guy, on into infinity. Kinda like that old Jeff Foxworthy bit about breakup lines, where he says, 'If she tells you, "I think we should see other people," she has cut a pony from the herd. And if she ain't already ridin' him, she has pulled a saddle from the barn.' Only with her, there's no advance warning."

      She pauses for a second, then smacks herself in the forehead, turns to look at Steph, and says, "Damn, I almost forgot until just now! I actually got a very weird message on Twitter from her a couple of days ago. Not too sure what kind of bullshit scenario she's trying to set up this time, but she insisted that I tell you to stop emailing her. As if you even were."

      Steph's response has all of us turning to look at her in utter confusion. "Yeah, actually I do, on a fairly regular basis. I've done it for years, and I don't have any plans to stop. Actually, I'd say we're just about due for an uptick in the activity."

      Lylah's mouth is opening and closing silently, like a landed fish, and Macy has gone almost cross-eyed, so I decide to broach the topic. "Is it okay to ask why you'd want to communicate with someone who I've gotten the impression that you don't even like?"

      "Sure, not a problem," she answers. "The last time we were in the same room together - prior to the day she showed up with Philip, that is - Little Miss Can't-Be-Wrong said something so brain-numbingly stupid that the only response I could come up with was to laugh in her face. Since then, her idiocy has been proven many times over, and I get a rather significant degree of amusement out of rubbing her nose in it."

      "You do have a bit of an evil streak, don't you?" I chuckle. "I'm impressed."

      "Glad you approve. And in all honesty, I think she deserves at least that, after all the shit I had to put up with from her for the first sixteen years of my life," she states. "But we can go over that some other time. Right now, we should probably finish the movie, before everybody starts falling asleep."

      I'm sort of getting the feeling that she's trying to change the subject, so I instantly restart the movie, to sort of cut back on the possibility of anybody pressing for details that she doesn't want to talk about. We finish up the film, and after it's over, Macy says, "Okay, I have to admit that was pretty good, for a horror flick. I notice that they left it sort of open-ended, was there a sequel?"

      "Two of them, actually, but we don't want to get into that," Steph tells her. "Both of them sucked like an Electrolux. I'd rather stare at a screen saver than watch either of those again."

      "Worse than that thing we saw the time you visited us on campus?" Lylah asks.

      "You mean 'The People Under The Stairs', right? Pretty much equally as bad as that one, and slightly better than 'The Devil's Rain'."

      Lylah makes a face, shudders, and says, "Oof, I'd almost forgotten about that one. It made me wanna find out who I needed to see to get back the hour and a half I wasted on that piece of crap."

      "I've never heard of that one, where did you find it?" I inquire.

      "It's an old Seventies flick we found on late-night TV once," Steph explains. "It had William Shatner, Tom Skerrit, and John Travolta in his 'Vinnie Barbarino' phase. Plus, Ernest Borgnine spent a sizable portion of the movie running around in a so-called 'demon' costume that made him look like a were-goat with mange. Not something I'd expect any of them to be proud of having in their resume."

      "I might have to look that one up, just to see how bad it really is," I reply, causing Steph to roll her eyes, and Lylah to snort.

      "Well, if you end up in a coma from boredom, you can't say you weren't warned," she tells me.

      A few minutes later, Johnny and Markie announce that they need to head home, and Jazy decides that she should probably do the same, so we all say goodbye to them, and I hang back for a bit longer to talk to Lylah about a shoot that's coming up in a couple of weeks. She and Macy decide to bail on us a few minutes later to go to bed, so it's just me and Steph hanging out in the living room.

      "I guess I should probably go home and let you get some sleep," I tell her, pulling myself up from the floor. "But I had a blast tonight, maybe we can do it again sometime."

      "Sure, we can do that," she replies as she gathers up the snack containers from the floor. "And I had a great time, too. I'm probably gonna just stay up for awhile and read or something, but don't let me keep you if you have something else to do."

      There's something a bit off with her tone of voice as she says this, and it finally dawns on me that some of the earlier conversation upset her more than she wants to admit, and that maybe she doesn't really want to be alone right now. "No, I don't have any plans for the rest of the night," I answer. "So if you're not tired, we could hang out and watch another movie. Or we could just talk, if you'd rather."

      She looks a bit uncertain, so I sit down on the couch and pat the cushion next to me. After hesitating for a few seconds, she sits down next to me, and I put my hand on her shoulder and say, "Steph, I can tell something's bugging you. Now, you don't have to talk about it if you don't want to, but if you do, you know I'm willing to listen."

      "Thanks, Ash, but I really shouldn't dump my problems on you. It's..."

      I hold up my hand to cut her off. "Hey, stop right there! Like I said, you don't have to talk to me, I'm not gonna push it, but don't even worry about 'dumping' anything on me," I tell her. "You've kept me from going out and possibly killing myself, or somebody else, and you were right there to help out when my Pop died, so what kind of friend would I be if I wasn't willing to return the favor? So was it talking to the kid that upset you, or talking about your ex, or your cousin?"

      She lets out a big sigh, and says, "Kinda all of the above. I love that kid to bits, and I miss him like crazy, so it's always kind of a mix of happy and sad when I get to talk to him. Truthfully, that was one of the few things that Philip and I ever actually agreed on: Jamie was the greatest kid ever, and we wanted at least one just like him in a couple of years. I just wonder if Philip has figured out yet that he's pretty much kissed his chances of that goodbye, at least for as long as he's with her."

      I decide to take a risk, and inquire, "If you two had that much trouble agreeing on things, why did you get engaged in the first place?"

      Another sigh, then, in a very low voice, she admits, "I've asked myself that same question probably a hundred times since that day, and I don't think I even know the answer. I thought I was in love with him, obviously, or I wouldn't have agreed to marry him, but now I have to wonder. It might sound kind of horrible, but I've actually wondered if I didn't just latch onto him because he was the first guy to ever say that he loved me, and I was dumb enough to think that he really meant it. Or since I love his family so much, maybe I just convinced myself that I was in love with him so I could be a real part of it when I married him. I just don't know anymore, and it bothers the hell out of me to think I might actually be that damn shallow. Or stupid, however you wanna look at it."

      "I don't choose to see it either way," I reply, sliding my arm around her and pulling her into a hug. "I may not have known you for a long time, but I'm pretty damn certain that you're neither stupid or shallow. At the worst, I'd say that you might have been a little bit misguided, because you wanted to believe that he meant what he said. And who knows, maybe he really did at the time. But I have to think that there's nothing terribly wrong with that, because if there is, then I'm a bigger idiot that you could ever dream of being."

      "How do you mean?"

      "Because we're basically what my Nan would have called birds of a feather. We both have a failed engagement under our belts, and I don't know what else you might have had going before, but aside from that, Jo was something like my tenth crappy relationship since I moved out here. So don't beat yourself up over it, okay? Because I firmly believe that one of these days, we'll both find somebody who really appreciates us, and when that happens, none of the other shit that's happened in the past will matter anymore."

      She looks up and gives me a smile, then throws an arm around me to return the hug. "I hope you're right, Ash," she mumbles into my neck. "Because I think we both deserve it."

      We sit and talk for another hour or so, until I realize that she's falling asleep on me. So I carefully get up and arrange her on the couch, just like she did for me the night she took me home, and cover her up with an afghan from one of the chairs. Then I go out to my car and head home to try and grab a couple hours of sleep myself. And as I drive toward home, it occurs to me that I feel better than I have since before Pop passed, and I realize that it's because, for the first time in quite awhile, I actually believe what I said to Steph: There is somebody out there that I can genuinely be happy with, who will love me for who I am inside, and not for what I do or how I look.

      She's out there. Now all I have to do is find her.