Leah trips over her own Nine Wests walking into the bar. It's not a club--there's too many college kids. It's not really her territory, but her co-workers convinced her that it would be fun to go out tonight. It would give them something to talk about over the cubicle walls tomorrow. Thirsty Thursday, they said. A Thirsty Thursday at home is a Thirsty Thursday wasted. That gem was Jennifer's.

"Hey!" Jenn yells from twenty feet away. Leah's cheeks flush and burn. "Look who made it! Hey, it's Leah! See, I told you I'd shame her into coming." She's already sloshing her martini over the sides of the glass. Leah couldn't tell if it was the booze, or the fourteen people pushing her from all sides.

"Yeah, here I am!" Leah says defeatedly.

"Oh, come on! Don't be lame! Tonight is Girls Night Out! We're gonna have a blast!" Elise, ever the enthusiast.

"I thought it was Thirsty Thursday," Leah interjects.

"That too," says Jenn, as the girls cheer and klink their glasses. More martini on the floor.

Leah waves down a server and orders herself a Jack and diet cola. She's not messing around tonight.

Leah, Jenn and Elise met about eighteen months ago while working for a major health insurance provider in South Carolina. A pretty boring job: lots of customer complaints, claims processing, all the pencil-pushing mumbo jumbo one can think of. They made it interesting by trading sarcastic barbs throughout the day. No topic was off-limits. Usually Elise bowed out of the competition early; she was too nice to actually be good at sarcasm. Jenn and Leah were like a mind fused. It was scary what they could come up with together. They would constantly joke that their dream was to leave the company and create their own Family Guy type show, about single girls. Nothing like Sex and the City.

Jenn and Elise went out most weekends. They were both attractive girls, Elise tall, soft-spoken, and blonde, the trifecta, and Jenn spunky, into hot pink and showing off her gymnast's body. Leah wasn't unattractive, but she knew she wasn't like her friends. She was 30 pounds overweight, and was generally average-looking. She definitely didn't attract a lot of guys. She knew it probably had more to do with how she acted--isn't that what all the magazines say?--but she wasn't willing to dumb herself down so a guy would notice her. It's the double-whammy: self-conscious with principles.