Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from We Are Gathered Here Today by Bobby Finger, which releases on June 16th 2026.

At 36, Finlay Hightower has attended countless incredible, cringe-worthy, and disastrous wedding celebrations with his best friends. Their secret to surviving wedding chaos? The Hour of Disrespect—a pact to reserve judgement to one hour after the couple’s Big Day, protecting the wedding glow and leaving only with the good memories.

But this next wedding will test their decade-old tradition in more ways than one. Now, one of their own is getting married—Fin’s beloved cousin, Elaine—at a Wild West-themed venue in the sweltering Texas summer heat that is as meticulously itineraried as it is kitchy. Reserving opinions won’t be easy, and on top of that Fin has a secret that threatens his officiant duties: he’s just gotten engaged to the man of his dreams, and a sense of unease has him questioning if he believes in the institution of marriage at all.

As Fin joins the rambunctious and increasingly unhinged “queer table”, old friendships are tested and new relationships are formed. Will each guest hold back their particular views on love, commitment, and the wedding before Elaine can say “I do”? And if not, could those confessions ultimately give Fin the courage to uncover his truth?

Like any good wedding, We Are Gathered Here Today is funny, heartfelt, and full of surprises. Like any terrible wedding, it’s something you’ll never forget.

EXCERPT

THURSDAY

June 6

The frequency of receiving wedding invitations had slowed down just as everything else in Fin’s life seemed to be speeding up. Algorithmically recommended content displayed on every app in-
stalled on his phone constantly reminded him that time moved faster as you got older, not that he needed a stranger’s insistence for him to notice something so grimly, crushingly obvious. The planet was getting hotter more quickly. The threat of fascism was rising. Even the lines around his eyes were deepening over time, a fairly recent change that made Fin realize his own vanity was dwindling quicker than he ever predicted it would. So much was happening all of the time, so little of it could be ignored, and the gravest irony was how quickly everyone—himself included—was able to forget. Minds could only hold so much information, Fin often thought, and at some point in the past ten years the human brain had reached its biological limit. Old data was forcefully purged in order to make room for new entries, and in just under a
decade his and everyone else’s brains had transformed into perpetually revolving doors that took in new visitors as swiftly as they spit old ones out. There had to be a reason for the way everyone was feeling, he decided, and it might as well be that.

Well before the great quickening, weddings were a balm to Fin because they were a pause. A time to sit at a big round table with the past, present, and future, holding all three tight before they inevitably went back to where they belonged. That they were also a place to hear “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” in its most satisfying, hopeful context was the icing on the fondant on the cake. To Fin, leaving a wedding—even a terrible one—was always a moment of profound, all-encompassing sadness. A wedding bouquet ascended into a world at a standstill and was caught in fast-forward. But, oh, what it felt like for a wedding to
begin—especially a wedding weekend. The gift of stretched-out time was, to the wedding guest, greater than any KitchenAid mixer or honeymoon fund contribution could be to the wedding couple, and more meaningful than any speech or heartfelt, handwritten card. For Finlay Hightower, it was a one that opened itself the moment his plane touched down on the weekend of his cousin Elaine’s wedding. He’d spent the morning moving at five hundred miles an hour, and with the piercing screech of rubber on tarmac, he’d abruptly come to a complete stop.

The flight arrived ten minutes early, after one full The Devil Wears Prada and roughly one-third of The Fugitive—post-bus crash but before anyone actually believes Dr. Richard Kimble’s wife was killed by a one-armed man. Fin transferred the unopened novel he’d bought at a LaGuardia Hudson News and the
empty notebook he’d packed—with the sole purpose of filling it with his officiant speech—from the seat pocket to his backpack.  He quickly disembarked the plane, grimacing at the instant oppressiveness of the central Texas heat he’d escaped over fifteen years ago that pierced through the gaps of the jet bridge before inhaling it deeply and deciding it was, actually, not that bad every once in a while. He pulled out his phone and sent a text to Jacque, his closest friend, who’d also been forged in fire.

Here! No bags! Terminal A!

I think I literally watched your plane land. Leaving the cell phone lot shortly. Pee now if you have to. I come bearing snacks and drinks for the ride so we won’t have to stop.

Fin smiled at her thoughtfulness. Jacque Aguilar. Funnier, smarter, sillier, kinder, and easier to love than he; she was his favorite person to be in a car with. He didn’t miss driving, and often pointed out New York City’s mostly efficient public transportation system as the fundamental reason he could never see him-
self living anywhere else, but he did miss riding shotgun with Jacque at the wheel. During their time in college in the mid-aughts, back when gas was cheap, they’d often just hop in her Chevrolet Cavalier and go for a drive. From Austin to New Braunfels and back, stopping for snacks and soda somewhere in
between, or toward Johnson City in the Hill Country. Sometimes they’d just loop around the city, from I-35 to Ben White, north on MoPac, and 183 back toward the highway. It was a time for them to relax and to catch up on the day, divulge their latest unrequited crush, and with any luck, grab dinner at the end of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a busy intersection in Austin’s east side with their favorite fast food filling every quadrant. A little Popeyes, a little Taco Cabana, a Frosty from Wendy’s, eaten together in the final choice’s parking lot before returning to the apartment complex where they shared a staircase and a wall, tucked into a million sprawling live oak trees that, he figured now, had probably been ripped out of the ground to make way for a high-rise.

When the window rolled down he saw the Styrofoam cup first; Jacque held it over the passenger seat, shaking it slightly, tauntingly, as if it were a beverage he was forbidden from ever tasting. She was in a T-shirt and shorts, the same as he, and her long black hair was pulled into a crisp, shiny ponytail held by a white tie. “Welcome to hell,” she said, finally revealing her face from behind the cup as the cold escaped through the window. “I got it sweet, because I knew you wouldn’t have ordered it that way yourself.”

Jacque was right about the sugar because she tended to be right about everything involving Fin. Since they’d met due to a militant tenth grade English teacher’s unwavering semester-long seating chart, during which they began passing notes back and forth to each other with sleights of hand that made them both feel like David Copperfield, she had him all figured out. When he came out to her the following year, while thumbing a wall of DVDs at Hollywood Video and desperately avoiding any and all eye contact, she congratulated him for finally working up the nerve, and then, to his shock, proceeded to come out herself.  “But what about Manny?” he said after she used the word “lesbian,” referring to her on-again/off-again who graduated the previous year.

“Manny’s just a dildo with a disgusting man attached,” she said, pulling a copy of Under the Tuscan Sun from the wall. “Plus,the only other dykes around here don’t know they’re dykes, and
I don’t want to be any closet case’s first. Second, sure. That’s fun. But not first.”

Just before heading up to Austin for college, he came out to a second person: his beloved second cousin Elaine, with whom he shared a sibling-like friendship that, while close, lacked the un-
burdened freedom that he could have with someone outside of his family—someone like Jacque. It never felt worthwhile to tell his parents, whom he assumed already knew, or his other high school friends, none of whom he cared about all that much. They were straight women, most of them, and he feared the conversations that would ensue from any kind of dramatic sit-down event. They would be too excited, perhaps grimly so, and worse, they may even make it about themselves. He feared the why didn’t you tell mes or I always suspecteds and every reaction in between, so he swerved himself away from such conversations entirely. In college—ninety miles away in the liberal, notably “weird” city of Austin—he would be gay from the jump, a man crisply, confidently defined, and his life would finally begin. Not anew, exactly, as Elaine and Jacque would be right there beside him, perpetual reminders of his past, the only friends who had the privilege of knowing his prologue, and the only ones who seemed to give more than half a shit about all the chapters that would be written later.

He made other friends in college, of course. Good friends, though no other bond ever quite matched the one he shared with Jacque and Elaine, and Fin barely kept up with any of them after leaving town. It wasn’t codependency, exactly, but it was profound, unwavering comfort. They were each other’s home base.
After every hookup—good or bad—party—good or bad—and most days of classes—always awful—they relied on each other to listen, usually briefly, and then, simply, to be there. Fin’s decision to move away after college came as a shock to both of them, but was never discussed with bombast or fear. The two most important women in his life had no interest in joining, but the invitation was more than enough, and Fin was confident that they knew that Fin knew the two of them would always be around if and when he were to return without ever saying the words out loud.

“Be safe and be happy,” Elaine said to him as he lugged his two rolling suitcases into the airport more than fifteen years earlier. Then Jacque tearfully yelled, “I love you! Make good choices!”

“T love you too,” he said right back, eyes on the doors sliding open with a whirr before he was in range of their sensor, beckoning him in and far, far away. He and Jacque had never used the word “love” to each other until that very moment—it was never their little clique’s style—but once released into their personal lexicon it became the closing assertion of their every conversation. The love had always been there, something totally opaque hovering in the space between them, but it just hadn’t ever felt like something worth addressing until the space was about to become as vast and painfully stretched as it felt like it would then. Since then he couldn’t remember a conversation they’d had that didn’t end with a “love you.”

Jacque waited until they headed west to ask the question. As the surface beneath her tires transitioned from the smooth, recently repaved Interstate 35 to Highway 90’s lighter, coarser grit—the kind that made the spinning of a car’s wheels suddenly, almost violently apparent—she turned down the radio and cleared her throat. “So how’s Mark? WillI ever meet him or should I start worrying that he’s a figment of your imagination?”

Fin took a long sip from his cup, sucking the remaining ounce or so of tea from the bottom until making a noise he’d wished could act as the entirety of his response. Thinking of Mark then, that rattling, cacophonous whoosh of a straw’s last gasp for liquid was just about representative of how he felt. “He’s good.  We’re good. Living together is surprisingly good. But I’d rather talk about you,” he said, sipping from the empty cup with even more force. Jacque shook her head and made Shania Twain’s voice louder than either of them could ever hope to overpower.  When she rolled down the windows, Fin reached his hand out and grabbed the upper part of the passenger door, where it met the roof. Country music sounded better in the country—the actual country—and all music sounded better on the open road.  With what looked like miles of long, nearly empty highway in front of them, he tapped his fingers to the beat and realized that even though he’d heard this song a thousand times before, it’d never sounded better than it did right then.

“What’s there to say?” Jacque said. “Work is busy and depressing, just like it always is.” Jacque began working at the public defender’s office immediately after graduating from law school,a job she took for its security as much as she did for its virtues. She explained that it offered her little free time to do much at all, let alone date, but that she’d been going to the gym every morning for the past year, which had done wonders for her mental health.

“How’s your mom?”

“A total mess, as usual,” Jacque said. “But ultimately fine, also as usual. My dad ended up giving her some money so the threat of her moving in with me has been lifted. At least for the next six months.” She kept her eyes on the road as she spoke, the joy in her voice suddenly absent now that her parents had been brought up. “He’s still an asshole and so is his girlfriend—he’s back with Monica, by the way—but he’d never let my mom down. I do believe that. And if he dies first, she’ll still get money, despite Monica’s resounding objections.”

“How do you know for sure?”

“Because I drew up the will,” she said proudly. “It’s so fucking funny that he didn’t take his wedding vows seriously until after breaking them. Or maybe it’s just tragic.”

“Well I’m glad she’s okay. I wish we had time to see her.”

“You just wish we had time for her to cook menudo for you.”

“Of course I do.” Growing up, Nora and Samuel offered Fin the closest glimpse into the intricacies of marriage apart from his own parents. Their marriage was the polar opposite of his own parents’ in every possible way—they were divorced, outgoing, talkative, and honest—and he’d been fascinated by their relationship from the moment Jacque introduced them. They’d only been married for the first five years of Jacque’s life. After the divorce, caused in part by Samuel’s affair, and in part because they finally understood they weren’t the right people for each other, there was a simmering period where they co-parented from afar, taking the time they each needed to lick their wounds.

By the time Fin came into the picture they had eased into a life of being, simply, best friends of one amazing daughter they created together. When Fin came over to watch a movie, as he did most weekends, Samuel would usually be there, milling about in the kitchen, eagerly accepting a meal, and talking about work and, eventually, complaining about his relationship with Monica, the woman he’d had an affair with. They kissed each other goodbye on the cheek, then the moment he was out the door Nora would collapse on her recliner and vent to both Jacque and Fin about whatever he’d said that had annoyed her. Nora and Samuel spoke more to each other as a divorced couple than Fin’s own parents did as a married one, and when alone in his own bedroom listening to the rustlings of their wordless evening routine through the
crack under his door, he wondered if they’d be happier divorced.  They never fought, but Fin always interpreted their silence as pain. How strange that, in those moments, neither of the fullest examples of marriage in Fin’s young life seemed to make any damned sense.

From WE ARE GATHERED HERE TODAY by Bobby Finger, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Bobby Finger.

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘We Are Gathered Here Today’ by Bobby Finger appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Bobby Finger’s Four Squares, which is out June 18th 2024.

Artie Anderson wouldn’t call himself lonely, not exactly. He has a beautiful apartment in the West Village, a steady career as a ghostwriter, and he has Halle and Vanessa, who—as the daughter and ex-wife of his former partner—are the closest thing he can call family. But when the women announce a move across the country, on Artie’s 60th birthday no less, Artie realizes that his seemingly full life isn’t quite as full as he imagined. To make matters worse, a surprising injury strips Artie of the independent lifestyle he’s used to and pushes him into the hands of GALS, the local LGBTQ senior center down the street.

Since the death of his ex-boyfriend, Abe decades ago, Artie’s intentionally avoided big crowds and close friends. So, he’s woefully unprepared for the other patrons of GALS, a group of larger-than-life seniors who insist on celebrating each and every day. They refuse to dwell in the past, but Artie, who has never quite recovered from Abe’s death and the loss of his dearest friends, can’t shake the memories of his youth, and of the chances he did, and didn’t, take.

Stretching across the 1990s and the present day, Four Squares is an intimate and profound look at what it means to create community and the lasting impressions even the most fleeting of relationships can leave. With Bobby Finger’s signature warmth, humor, and wit, it is touching reminder that it’s never too late for a second chance at truly living.

1.

1992

The man at the computer felt like he’d been writing different versions of the same sentence his whole life, but it had only been eight hours in the middle of his thirtieth birthday.

• Cookie Squares. They’re anything but.
• These cookies aren’t square. They’re Squares.
• These Squares aren’t square.
• Can you Square it?
• The shape of cookies to come.
• Cookie Squares.
• It’s hip to eat Squares.
• The first Square meal of your day.
• Your first Square meal is anything but.
• Now you’re square.
• Now it’s square.
• Get square.
• Get squares.
• Cookies: part of a square meal.
• Part of a square meal.

Artie Anderson turned away from his computer screen, squeezed the back of his aching neck, and looked at the clock above the corkboard to his left. It had just turned 4:58 p.m., according to a second hand that turned with an unnerving, stealthy smoothness. Artie believed a second hand ought to tick, that time should be delineated by an infinite parade of percussive seconds that could be drowned out but never entirely quieted, so that when you shut up, there it was, that mechanical ticking and tocking, reminding you of everything that could or couldn’t be. He gave a quick massage to the muscles along his spine, the ones whose tightness seemed to radiate and made his head ache every weekday around this time, then went back to the word processor.

In the past eight hours he’d written 298 potential taglines for a new sugary breakfast cereal targeted at children precisely one-third his age. Though he didn’t much enjoy the sample that Pearl Mills had FedExed to the office earlier in the month, he did feel like Cookie Squares deserved better than the nearly three hundred lines he’d written so far. “Quantity leads to quality,” his boss told him his first week on the job, baring his mouthful of glistening, eerily perfect teeth. “The most reliable way to write one great tagline is to write a thousand bad ones first.” Over the past two years, Artie had found the pithy advice to be more or less correct. Though a successful line could be written in mere seconds during a brainstorming session with coworkers—in fact, no fewer than ten creatives in his office still claimed credit for Video Gallery’s beloved “Bring Hollywood Home Tonight” line—most of them were trees sprouted from the seeds of a dense, healthy forest. It was a forest whose perpetual creation brought him a sense of actual calm, since the more time he spent alone writing copy, filling page after page with every possible expression of a single idea, the less time he spent thinking about how profoundly uncomfortable he felt around his coworkers. Today, there were no standouts on his list of four- to ten-word phrases meant to convince petulant children to demand colorful boxes of die-cut sugar from their miserable parents, but there were enough of them that he felt as though work had been done. Artie sent the document to the printer, ripped off the perforated edges, and marched down the hall to Joe’s office in the building’s southeastern corner.

He knocked gently, then pushed the half-open door enough to see Joe squinting at a pile of paper on his desk and rubbing his scalp. Joe was in his mid-forties, dressed like he was in his mid-thirties, and played music as loudly as someone in their mid-twenties. He had a wife and three kids and a dream job but was proudest of his hair, which was long and thick and jet-black without the aid of Just For Men. When he noticed Artie in the doorway, dressed for the part of copywriter with his starched blue shirt tucked tightly into a pair of khaki pants, Joe lowered the volume on his stereo and waved him in with a gesture that, if performed by almost anyone else, would have been welcoming.

“Cookie Squares stuff,” Artie said stiffly as he handed the taglines to Joe, who just tossed them on the only bare spot on his desk. After a pause, Artie reminded Joe that today was his birthday, that he’d already worked with Annette on layouts, and that he more than made up for the hours he’d be gone today elsewhere in the week, since he had to go home right at five to bake his own birthday cake in time for a dinner. He was overflowing with unnecessary excuses and used a defensive tone for no reason, as usual, but Joe eventually shut him up with a flap of the hand.

“I remember,” he said. “What the hell are you still doing here? Go home. Have a great birthday.”

“Thanks Joe.”

“I pay you enough, right?” he asked, finally looking up from the pile of mock-ups with a hint of genuine concern in his eyes.

“What? Yeah. I mean, of course. I’m happy with my compensation. I told HR that at my review whenever that was . . . a few months ago, maybe? Is there a problem?”

“I’m just saying you can save time by throwing money at the problem. Can’t remember the last time my wife baked a cake for our kids. The only food she puts in our oven came straight from the freezer—it’s like she’s somehow got less time than I do. I’ll never understand what she does all day. But what I’m saying is, just go to any bakery, and they’ll make whatever the hell you ask for. Sharks or trucks or Ninja Turtles or—What is it you like?”

“How do you mean?”

Joe sucked in his lips and squinted. “Just go,” he finally said with half a laugh. “Expense the cab home if you want.”

“Subway’s faster, but thanks. Maybe I’ll buy my own cake next year.”

“You won’t regret it.”

Artie’s firm, RKS, had been around for ten years, which was relatively young for the advertising business. It entered the landscape after David Ogilvy changed the game with his now ubiquitous marriage of sparse imagery and large blocks of text. RKS always strove to be off-kilter, more inclined to create trends than follow them. But like most enterprises with noble beginnings, it had already begun to fall into a stasis, albeit a successful one. They had their trophy clients, the ones that paid everyone’s handsome salaries and kept the office more modern and comfortable than any other in the twenty-two-story building they occupied on Madison Avenue, but they hadn’t created a truly noteworthy ad in five years, when Joe’s overtly misogynistic campaign for a deodorant brand won so many awards he had to buy another shelf for his office.

Eventually Joe was promoted to chief creative officer, a job that was more about decision-making than creativity. With it came a light-filled corner office complete with ample space for even more trophies, a suburban living room’s supply of seating, plenty of time away from the family he openly loathed being around, and a mini fridge filled with Diet Coke and Heineken. Unless, of course, clients were visiting, in which case it was emptied and restocked with Diet Pepsi and Bud Light.

Artie had never studied advertising—he was an English major, to the horror of his parents—and applied for the job on a whim, after a man he made out with for six hours at an all-night dance party at the Holy Spirit told him that advertising was a much more reliable way to make money as a writer. Well, first he told him to work for a magazine, but when Artie said he preferred writing fiction, the man licked his lips and said, “Advertising is just lies, and isn’t that a kind of fiction?” Artie found a sort of profundity within the man’s gentle slurring, and thought a quick buck would be better than his miserable job in the human resources department for an insurance company. Joe was surprised by Artie’s application, specifically its total lack of experience in the field, but impressed by his inclusion of short stories, some published and some not. Maybe Artie was the kind of writer the agency needed for a burst of creativity—someone who came from a different world, instead of the same cycle of colleges and programs from which everyone else in the department hailed. He was a white man who knew how to tie a tie, so at the very least he looked the part. The problem, though, was that he never quite felt it. And when Artie felt a needling of discomfort around his coworkers, he preferred to believe it was because of his lack of experience, not because of his lack of any overt sexual identity.

“Running home,” he said to his office-mate and creative partner, Annette, almost out of breath from a jog past the framed advertisements lining the south hallway. “Just gave the lines to Joe, but he seemed swamped and pissed, so I doubt there will be any feedback until after the weekend. You gonna be OK with the layouts, or do you need me to stay?”

“All good,” Annette said, still hunched over the drafting table as usual. He sometimes wished he were an art director and not a copywriter—there was a more palpable drama to their creativity, whereas his own just looked like typing. When she finally looked up and locked eyes with Artie, her face particularly youthful and innocent, she laughed. “I mean it. Go home. Happy birthday.”

He grinned and bolted toward the elevator with a quick slap on the doorframe. “You’re the best. Thanks, Annette.”

A few power-walked blocks south and Artie was on the D train heading toward the West Village. On the one hand, he loved his commute, four stops on a single train that didn’t even have a bend in the tracks. On the other hand, he hated its efficiency, as it prevented him from doing much reading. So, for the better part of his time at RKS, he’d left for the office forty-five minutes earlier than necessary, providing him the time to take in a chapter or two on a Bryant Park bench every morning. Thanks to the comforting anonymity of a metropolitan crowd, it was private time that just happened to be in public, a daily ritual he treasured to the extent that he never told another friend or coworker about it, for fear that its peace would disappear once exposed to another living soul. How were any of his friends, none of whom had a clue about advertising, to know that it wasn’t an industry of late nights and early mornings? The last thing anyone in his department wanted to do was catch a proverbial worm.

It wasn’t until the doors were closing at the 14th Street station that he realized he should have gotten out there. On most days, Artie used the West 4th Street station in the morning and evening, despite it being farther from his apartment, as he enjoyed the walk up and down the West Village’s mess of improbable lefts and rights. Emerging at 14th Street would have saved him a few precious minutes, the remainder of which he calculated in his head once aboveground and jogging to his place. His friends would be arriving by seven, which meant the cake had to be in the oven in twenty minutes if it were to be even remotely cool enough to frost by 6:50.

It was enough time, he thought, but cutting it close. Artie liked a buffer zone in most things, a kind of grace period to be certain everything would go as planned. It was the kind of character trait people didn’t mind calling him out for to his face, an insult disguised as an intimate observation. The last time this happened, when he was the first to arrive at the Quad for a movie, Kimberly commented that it was classic Artie, early when he didn’t need to be and also, somehow, anxious about being somewhere too early, probably because he was the kind of person who left places early, too. She hadn’t said parties or bars specifically, but Artie knew that’s what she’d meant. And so what if Artie preferred to arrive to places early and be in bed at a reasonable hour? Though there had been acid on Kimberly’s lips as she’d joked about him in the otherwise empty theater, Adam laughed anyway at her comment and clapped Artie on the shoulder as they settled in their seats. “Classic Artie,” Kim said. The words echoed inside of him, shaking loose intrusive thoughts as they rattled around.

Artie’s apartment building was on the corner of Bank Street and Greenwich Avenue, in the northeastern corner of the neighborhood. He lived on the fourth floor, and his living room looked out onto Greenwich, not quite east, providing the perfect angle for a gentle morning sun. He’d moved the previous year, when the extra money from his advertising salary made him feel a little better about living on his own. It wasn’t that he couldn’t have afforded it before, plenty of people he knew lived in studios alone and paid rent on time without worry, but once again, the buffer. There was a larger one with RKS, so he finally moved a couple blocks away to an apartment with a real view and a real bedroom. He’d never been prouder of anything in his life than that view. It was the sort of thing people admired within seconds of crossing the threshold. He didn’t have much stuff, but oh, did he ever have light. “Oh my god,” they’d always say, followed by either “Your light!” “Your windows!” “Your view!” or “Your apartment!” He melted at their inevitable use of the possessive. To them, the light was his. The windows were his. The version of New York down in the street below, his. He wrapped himself up in their compliments every time, despite knowing they weren’t really complimenting him but his city. No matter, it still made him feel like he’d made the right decision. He’d grown up in southern Ohio, surrounded by trees and brush, inside a tense and silent home where all the light was filtered through leaves whose fluttering made the air seem like it was simmering. Thanks to his parents, it often was.

Cake. He turned on the oven. He opened the box of Duncan Hines yellow cake mix he’d placed there before leaving in the morning and dumped its contents into the adjacent bowl. Eggs, oil, water. Stir, stir, stir. Spray both pans. Divide them as evenly as possible. Pop them into the oven, which wasn’t quite preheated but close enough. He set an egg timer for forty minutes and ran into the bathroom to shower. Getting ready took longer than he’d anticipated, as he couldn’t decide what to wear. This would have been easier if Kimberly were already here, he thought. Instead, he was just trying on outfit after outfit, staring at himself in the floor-length mirror nailed to his bedroom door as he contorted his body into all the awkward ways it managed to move, especially during a night out drinking, hoping it would look somewhat appealing in at least one of them. He was in black jeans and a white tank top when he took the first alarming sniff. There was no time to decide on a shirt; something was burning. Not just one thing, actually, but two.

He cracked the oven door just as the door to his apartment burst open.

Artie screamed “FUCK” as Kimberly screamed “HAPPY BIRTHDAY,” a shrieking harmony of thrill layered upon terror, fit for a thirtieth birthday.

“What’s wrong?” Kimberly asked.

“I burned the fucking cake! The timer didn’t go off! I set it! I remember setting it and literally saying aloud, ‘I’m setting the timer,’ so I wouldn’t worry about not setting it! Why the fuck didn’t it go off! Nothing ever fucking works.”

“Maybe it’s salvageable,” Kimberly said as she walked into the cramped galley kitchen where Artie was still pacing in small circles, though a quick look at the charred, smoking round made her grimace. She was about Artie’s height but broader, with powerful thighs, typically covered in short shorts, and a forceful chest, typically covered by a tucked-in button-down shirt containing a pack of cigarettes—the bulge of the pack adding a sort of finishing touch to her look. “OK, maybe not.”

Artie tossed the second pan onto the stove, and Kimberly jumped at the clash of hot metal on hot metal.

“I fucking ruined them,” he said, seeming to forget his friend’s presence. “Of course I fucking ruined them. That’s got to be a sign.”

“A sign of what?”

“That this year is going to be cursed.”

“Don’t be stupid. We’ll go out and buy you a cake. Or we can ask the waiter to pop a candle into a soup dumpling. The whole restaurant will sing!”

“I know it’s fine and I know I’m being dramatic, but,” Artie said, “you know.”

“You had a plan and it went to shit, I know,” Kimberly said.

“I didn’t say it. You did.”

“Of course I did.” She extended her arms and turned her mouth into a big, theatrical frown. “Would a birthday hug make it all feel better?”

“I guess.”

He hugged her, feeling the expected gentle press on her cigarettes, and it did.

“I hate it in here now. I don’t even want to celebrate anymore. It smells like failure.”

Kimberly turned her wrist and checked her watch with the theatricality of someone performing for the cheap seats. “Just so you know, you only get five more hours of this moping. Painfully depressive Artie needs to go back in hiding when the clock strikes midnight.”

“At least give me until last call.”

“Tonight is going to be fun,” she said, rubbing his back. “I promise.”

They’d just sat down in the living room with a pair of gentle sighs when a knock on the door startled them both, and they turned to watch Adam, in his leather bomber jacket and black jeans, looking like Tom of Finland visited an electrolysis center, step inside without waiting for an invitation. He was a boyish hunk, the friend who invited the most attention from strangers anytime they ventured out as a group, as well as the one who tended to disappear without saying goodbye. But Adam always put Kimberly and Artie first, even if plenty of others were in his social queue, and the three of them were mulling about in his apartment by 7:10, more or less on time. Artie appreciated their punctuality and recognized it as a kind of birthday gift. On any other Friday he could be waiting an hour or two for his friends to be where they said they’d be.

“Happy birthday, fag,” Adam said, leaning in for a hug. “Did you burn something?”

“We’re not talking about that,” Kimberly said, bolting up from the couch as if the springs in the cushion suddenly decided they didn’t want her there. “Shall we eat?”

“Yes,” Artie said. “Where are we thinking?”

“It’s your birthday,” Adam said, already at the door, the burnt smell already a distant memory. “If you lead, we will follow.”

They marched down the stairs and onto Bank Street. The air was ten degrees cooler than it had been when Artie got home, a welcome tease of brisk, newly autumnal air that wouldn’t come in with full force for another month. Artie took a confident right toward 7th Avenue, as if he knew where they were going, and his friends followed without question.

Kimberly tapped him on the shoulder with a pack of Parliaments, and Artie took one with a wordless nod. He pulled a brown lighter out of his pants and lit the end, the hit of nicotine instantly dissolving his anxiety over the burnt cake. He looked south down the avenue at all the lights and signs and people, electrified by the very thought of being among such brightness and bustle. Inhale. Exhale.

He remembered the first time they’d all eaten dinner together, five years before, when he still shared an apartment with Waylon. Adam had arrived the previous night, after meeting Way at the bar where he worked, and though they never had sex again, Adam quite liked hanging around that peculiar man and his kind, interesting friends. When Kimberly came by to watch Roseanne, she didn’t ask any questions about Adam’s presence, only whether Chinese food would be OK with everyone. When they all took their seats around the coffee table, topped with several cartons of food, Artie saw the living room as complete. He and Way had lived in that apartment for over a year by that point, but it hadn’t felt like home until that night.

After Artie’s birthday dinner at Shanghai Lee, which was served fast and eaten even faster, Kimberly lit another cigarette on the sidewalk outside and said what all of them were thinking. “Julius’?

“I thought you’d want to take us to the Cubby Hole.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you boys tonight.”

“I could do Julius’. Maybe dancing after?”

“Maybe. One step at a time.”

“Oh shit,” Kim said, biting down on the tip of the Parliament and speaking through gritted teeth. “Since there’s no unburnt cake at your apartment, where should we trek for dessert?”

“I’m over cake,” Artie said. “Let’s just go to the bar.”

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