Milkrun. Sarah Mlynowski

slightly larger than our old one, on Carleton Avenue. Then when I was eight, Janie got pregnant with Iris, and the three and a half of us moved into a three-bedroom on Finch. (Iris, by the way, was encouraged to call Janie “Mom.”) When Iris was four, Janie decided she was sick of hearing neighbors on top of her, sick of feeling as if she lived under a bowling alley, sick of not being able to blast her Beatles CDs without the police coming and telling her to turn it down (yes, that actually happened), and that we were moving into our own house.

      We moved to Kelsey Avenue, and stayed there until Janie decided she’d had enough of not being able to happily wear her Birkenstocks without fear of deer ticks and that we were moving to Boston. Thankfully, we didn’t include me. That’s when I went to Penn. They lived in Newton for four years until Janie decided to move to Virginia because “everyone should be able to walk for less than fifteen minutes and dip her toes in the ocean.”

      In my twenty-four years on this planet I have had, to date, fourteen different bedrooms. To reach this number, I have to include university residence, my first apartment at Penn with Wendy, my second apartment at Penn with Wendy, and my own apartment at Penn after Wendy got her investment banking job in New York. I stayed, in principle to do my M.A., but really to be with Jeremy. This list also includes the apartment my parents lived in when Janie was pregnant with me.

      I don’t feel like calling Janie back just yet. I prefer to lie on my couch and watch some mind-numbing television. Click. Click, click. Nothing on but boring news.

      I decide to admire the black leather knee-high boots I purchased on Newbury Street on my way home from work today. Every newly single girl needs new boots. It is step one in the recovery process.

      There are actually five steps to recovery. Wendy and I wrote them up in college after she broke up with…what was his name? The economics major who cheated on her with the green-braces girl…oh, yeah, Putzhead.

      I find the list in my stuff-drawer, between a Valentine’s Day mix tape featuring classics like “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” “Lost in Love,” and “Glory of Love” and two New Kids on the Block concert ticket stubs. I think we were planning on sending it into Cosmo or something. The list, written in purple ink, smells like stale Marlboros. It was during our wannabe-smokers days.

      How to Recover from a Breakup

      1. Buy knee-high black leather boots.

      2. Get a new haircut. Find an extremely outrageous hair salon, where coffee is brought to you and gay men tell you that you have the most gorgeous hair they have ever seen.

      3. Call a female friend so that you can talk about how much you miss your ex, and the friend can remind you of all the times he pissed you off, admitting that she never thought he was nice or attractive, that you could do much better, that he was cheap, that he had a strange smell, et cetera. This step is best accomplished with a mediocre friend as opposed to a best friend, in case of boyfriend reconciliation.

      4. Call male friends so that you can be reminded of how desirable you are. Do not actually fool around with these friends. You’ll need them around or several months following your breakup.

      5. Buy chocolate chip cookie dough and/or a box of tremendously expensive chocolates filled with different types of pastel-colored creams, and eat the entire box.

      Amazing! Five years later and the steps are still (almost) valid:

      1. Boots. Check.

      2. Hair. I need to do some careful research before attempting this step. Nothing is worse than number two ending with tears and me having to wear that Red Sox baseball hat Jeremy bought me so that I would look like a native.

      3. Friend phone call. Check. Well, kind of check. Considering Jeremy and I have broken up five times in three years, I have already lost all my mediocre friends, and I refuse to take chances with the ones I have left.

      4. Male friend phone call. This one is a bit of a problem due to my lack of maintaining or acquiring male friends since Jeremy and I started dating.

      4.a. Make male friends.

      4.b. Call male friends.

      5. Chocolate. Check. Having emergency cookie dough in your freezer is as crucial as having an emergency twenty in your wallet. Not that I can ever save the twenty in my wallet. I have recently modified Step 5. Eat chocolates while watching Sex and the City or Ally McBeal to remind me that there are other attractive, successful single women out there, and that they, unlike me, are over thirty.

      Steps one through five should be repeated freely until girl is over breakup. Steps one and two should be slightly altered with each revisit, by the use of sexy sandals, leather pants, a backless tanktop, highlights, perm, layers…You get the idea.

      Tonight, however, there is no time for cookie dough.

      I shower, in hot water for a change (I even use the yummy-smelling soap sample I was saving for Jer’s return. See? I’m practically over him already), blow-dry my hair straight (it takes forever and I keep burning my fingers, but I don’t care because it makes me look very chic), put on my black knee-length skirt that has a slutty slit right up the thigh, a relatively new slinky red tank top and my new boots that right now feel so worth the 150 I can’t afford.

      Yup. I’m pretty hot.

      I find the smoky eye shadow page in Cosmo and try to follow the directions without poking my pupil. I will dazzle men with my hazel eyes, I will use lip liner to show off my smile, and I will smile to show off my dimples.

      I am even wearing a thong for good luck.

      I’m tired of waiting for things to happen to me. Time to get out there and grab life by the…well, you know. I am twenty-four, I am young, I refuse to sit around watching my butt get bigger while Jeremy runs around enjoying himself. Women are always waiting for men to come over to them, for men to ask them out, for men to kiss them.

      Wait, wait, wait! The first time I waited for a kiss was when I was in middle school. It seemed as if everyone else in the world had already been French kissed (I imagined French women all walking around licking everyone), including Wendy, who had played spin-the-bottle at her cousin’s birthday party. Ted and I had already been going out for two days, and we were sitting at a picnic table outside at a school dance, talking about nothing (warm out, isn’t it?), experiencing that sweaty-palmed, irregularly palpitating-heart, what-happens-if-I-pass-out-I-think-we’re-about-to-kiss feeling. Finally, his face just kind of fell on top of mine, and there we were, kissing. Well, not exactly kissing, since our mouths were closed and our lips just kind of bumping as if we were two people in a crowded subway who just happen to be sharing the same pole. Then suddenly we were kissing. Wendy’s instructions surfaced in my mind: just keep your mouth open and move your tongue around. His tongue was mushy and I could taste Clorets at the back of his mouth.

      Waiting never gets easier. After the first kiss, girls have to wait for their first love, and then they have to wait to lose their virginity. Or, if you’re tired of searching for your endless love, you can sleep with Rick the Deadhead, who called (and probably still calls) everyone “dude” and wore (and probably still wears) tie-dye. Yup, you can screw waiting, like I did.

      You know what I hate about TV and movies? People never just fool around. They either kiss or they have sex. A guy starts unbuttoning a girl’s jeans and the girl says, “I’m not ready to have sex with you,” and the guy says okay, and her pants stay on, and it just ends there. You never hear about any of the bases that everyone I knew went through before the idea of actually doing it even occurred to them. Well, I’m sure it occurred to them.

      I didn’t sleep with Rick right away. We went around all the bases, around and around and around, until the end of my first year at college when I finally got tired of the idea just occurring to me and decided that I wanted to do it already.

      Our first time was on a Sunday night, on his cramped dorm bed, with Skeletons from the Closet playing on the stereo. By the time we got to “Truckin’,” the second track, it was all over. My body felt as if it had been clawed open, as we sat on his bed smoking cigarettes. My hands smelled like rubber