About Last Night chronicles the adventures of a girl and her neighborhood. The girl is Carrie, the neighborhood is Manhattan's Lower East Side, and it's all very Curious George meets Chrissie Hynde in a barrel of crank. Or something like that.

I talk big game, but I don't go out with the intent to fuck. I prefer to make out on stoops, on car hoods, in a booth at the Odessa Diner while waiting for a grilled-cheese sandwich at 3 a.m. But when I go home with someone, I want it to be someone I know. This way, when some outside party calls me "a nausea-inducing hipsterette train wreck" and tells me that "insouciance and condoms alone are not protection from death and misery," I can call up the fuckee and make him be nice to me. Because sometimes things bother me even if they shouldn't.

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     You'd think a person who's prone to this kind of anxiety would just avoid it by confining sex to boyfriend-type situations. Listen: once I asked my friend Drew if I were the kind of girl he'd be afraid to take home to his mother. He thought for a second. "Well," he said, "my mother's very open-minded."
    She'd have to be. I'm not exactly girlfriend material. I have been before, but right now I have the capacity for commitment of a tweaked-out eight-year-old. This is why the casual physical relationship is ideal. No weighty obligations or behavioral restrictions, no birthdays to remember or best friends not to flirt with. But still, when the unease associated with sex becomes too much, I want to be able to call The Boy. He'll say come over, and when I do he'll make me chamomile tea or we'll watch tapes of Are You Being Served? until I'm feeling better. Then we might fuck again, or I'll give him a hug in the doorway, pick up a bag of Gummi Worms for dinner and go home to read Jane Eyre for something like the eighteenth time.

     He excuses himself to go to the bathroom. I'm left sitting with his friend. This guy is small and balding, and he's grinning like someone's holding his mouth back with fishhooks. He asks me if I'm here by myself. I say that I am. He asks why and I shrug. He keeps touching my arm and telling me we should hang out sometime, and I say, ok, but I don't want you to get the wrong impression, I'm gay.
Grinner narrows his eyes at me. "You're not gay," he says. "You used to date Tony."
    Shit. This is true. I used to date Tony, who is also at the bar a lot. Tony who is hot. We met right after his band played a show around the corner. They weren't very good. Tony's a bassist. But who isn't?
    Tony and I didn't really have much to talk about, but he is sweet and tall with a sharp-jawed face, which was enough to keep me around for two weeks. Then he played me the song he wrote about me. It began, "I forget corporate America's lies / When I stare into my baby's eyes." A couple of days later, I stopped answering his calls.
    "Yeah. I used to be straight," I say. "But then I was in a car accident."
    Grinner snorts. "Who do you think you are?" He's annoyed. "You can just be honest and polite like I'm a human being."
     "Right," I say. "I'm gonna go sit over there now." I get up and move back to the bar. I don't want to go home - home is dark and lonely and boring, but Out is uncomfortable and miserable. I want my friends. They're like all the good parts of home and all the good parts of Out mixed together. I scroll through my phone, trying to find someone whose presence is suitably comforting.
    Becky.
    I went to school with Becky and lived with her for two years. She is kind and tolerant and likely to be out on a Wednesday. In fact, she is. She shows up with Lee and Mike and Saria. A friend of Mike's is there too, some kid named Phineas. As soon as we've been introduced, he's got his hand on the bar behind me. It's a real smooth maneuver: his arm isn't exactly around me, but I can't exactly get away. It's always a good idea to physically restrain the girl you're talking with.
"Hi there, Carrie."
    "Hi."
    "Nice to meet you, Carrie."
    "Likewise."
    "How's it going, Carrie?" Obviously he's read a picking-up-chicks tip sheet that tells you to say her name in conversation. I feel like I'm doing online banking or something, where they save your personal data and when you sign on it's all "Welcome back, CARRIE! What would you like to do today, CARRIE? Can I help you with anything else, CARRIE? How's that rash doing, CARRIE? I like to watch you breathe, CARRIE."
    "I'm fine, thanks," I say.
    He asks the basic questions. My patience for this sort of thing having completely dissipated, I decide to tell him I'm sixteen and from Saskatchewan. I'm hoping that he'll either be hesitant to hit on a sixteen-year-old or, more likely, get that I'm making fun of him and leave. But Phineas has obviously just been let out of the basement he was raised in, because he's not picking up on these cues. He actually asks me:
    "So how're you liking the big city?" I may retch.
    "Oh, well, you know, it can be . . . it can be hard to, um, uphold my personal integrity," I tell him, trying not to smile. It doesn't work, so I have to pass my smile off as one of earnest enthusiasm.
     "For example?" As he says this, he moves around so that he is facing me and slides his leg between my thighs.
     "I guess the biggest difference," I say, "is that everyone in Saskatchewan is in these, um, these... I guess you'd call them celibacy clubs. You know, to help each other maintain our virtue. You don't really have anything like that here." He blanches and mumbles something, releases me from his leg-lock, and goes over to Mike at the other end of the bar.

     It's funny: staying virtuous wasn't a problem for me as a teenager. A certain kind of shyness resulted in my hovering at the edge of virginity, convinced that I'd never have the right boy, the right 40 oz and the right park bench lined up. I imagined that not only would I die without ever having done it, but that the coroner doing the autopsy would see my intact hymen and laugh.
    But here, now, with Phineas knee-raping me and the scent of hair gel and desperation thickening the bar air, I'd love to retrieve that time when sex was a distant option and not dominant social currency. I KNOW I'll wake up tomorrow free of these anxieties and annoyances, once again defenseless against crooked smiles and sinewy biceps, but right here, right now, at Lotus, I want no part of it.
     Still, I am Out, and being Out is a sport - or, no, "sport" implies a sort of visceral . . . fun. It's more like debate team, stylized tactics and time limits governing every interaction. It's a place where the chaos of personality is reined in, or at least ignored, where the rules may be complicated, but at least there are rules. And I've got these rules down, as evidenced by my interaction with Os Mutantes. I've gotten so adept with them I usually don't realize I'm employing , even enjoying them, and if I'm really trying to live in an asexual bubble tonight, Out is not the place to be. I should probably just go home before I talk myself into some sort of unsavory situation. "Excuse me," I say, as I slip around Hair Gel and over to Becky.
    I'm about to tell her I'm leaving when she asks "Hey, I'm starting a tab, can I get you a drink?"
    I hesitate for a second.
    "Yeah . . . yeah. Maker's on the rocks."
    Because really, unsavory situations are my favorite kind.  n°