adam loses a bet, so i make him watch season one of the oc. he thinks i’m still in love with seth cohen and maybe he’s not wrong, but really i miss marissa cooper and all the disaster girls on tv—what happened to them? beach-blonde, wild and doomed, abundant in sadness—did no one want them around anymore? where have they gone?

i was thinking of marissa the first time i downed vodka in a bathroom stall. i was thinking of her when i tried to shoplift, just that once, but didn’t have it in me and so returned the lipstick and got accused of taking it anyway. and remember when marissa said “first of all, you don’t know me, and second of all you don’t know me?”

some nights i think about how my last name can’t cozy neatly into a cute abbreviation like ‘coop’.

i want to ask adam what he thinks of the show, of the tv girls suffering horribly for our entertainment, but he has instead committed to pointing out every typo in the subtitles. “look,” he says, “it’s the wrong ‘its’.” adam doesn’t care that marissa is drinking vodka out of a flask in the bathroom stall or shoplifting on christmas day or that her mother will soon sleep with her ex-boyfriend or that marissa will die in a car crash by the end of season three. and it’s fine, he doesn’t have to.