Once, ten years ago, Brooklyn had just been a place where Nicole's grandfather had been born. But now it was home. Manhattan was somewhere she could stare at with a mix of smugness and detachment from Gowanus Memorial Day parties while she drank vodka with agave-sweetened tonic and decided between Franny's and The Farm for dinner.

She lived precariously near noisy Flatbush Avenue, technically in Prospect Heights, though she preferred to tell people her apartment was in Park Slope because she had always been into the underdog. She was mostly happy to live among people just like her, who went to Celebrate Brooklyn! in Prospect Park every summer, donated to the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls, and belonged to the Young Vanguard at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Her apartment was a crumbling floor-through on Bergen Street, her third place in seven years of living in Brooklyn, after the garden apartment in Brooklyn Heights she had subletted from a contributing editor at The Nation and the railroad apartment on St Mark's she lived in with her ex, Jared, the struggling singer-songwriter who made really good mix-tapes. He still lived just a block away-uncomfortably close-in their old apartment with Eva, his interior designer fiancée. Nicole was pretty sure they had met on Nerve. After the breakup (no one's fault, a decision arrived at after three months of couples therapy at the Washington Square Institute) they sold the Eames sofa on Craigslist but she kept the dog, a Samoyed named Toussaint.

Nicole's ostensible job was to ghostwrite a memoir by Corbin Bleu (tentative title: Push it to the Limit) but she spent most of her time walking to Yogo Monster and updating a file called realbookideas.doc ("a social history of the color pink," "white people and Indian gurus," "bio of Ti-Grace Atkinson"). She had spent all her money from the boom time of 2005-2007 on things she totally needed a year ago: a Jorg and Olif Oma cruiser, weekly visits from a Salvadoran housekeeper named Yolanda who was so thorough-she was known to organize boxes of tampons kept under the sink by absorbency-that she suspected her of OCD, a useless short-sleeved raincoat from Miu Miu that cost more that her rent, trips to India and Marfa, Bose noise-canceling headphones, Liberty print Nike Dunks, an extra-cushy $100 yoga mat.

Now, she was broke and bored and single. She took a dollar from her wallet and stuck it in a jar that was labeled No Bad Vibes on her vintage Steelcase desk. Juliette, her astrologer/life coach who lived in Sun Valley but did phone sessions for $150/hour, had made her promise to put a dollar in a jar every time she had a negative thought, and then at the end of the summer, donate the money to charity. She was thinking maybe something with Darfur-Mia Farrow's hunger strike had been pretty motivating.

Whatever. Money, or at least being ostentatious about having some, was out. At least that's what Darshan said. Nicole wanted to be more like Darshan, who had quit her career as a lifestyle analyst, sublet her room in Bushwick, and biked across Mexico for six months. She got back to Brooklyn right before the swine flu epidemic and was starting a vegan/sugar-free/wheat-free takeout place that would be based out of a repurposed Mister Softee truck. She got out her iPhone and texted Darshan, "Is my summer going to suck?" Darshan wrote back immediately: "It's all happening."

She was in the kind of mood where a quote from Almost Famous was going to make her mega cranky, so she got on her bike and rode down Vanderbilt to the park, feeling a little more superior as she passed each car or stroller. She thought about what she would wear to Miranda's wedding next week, the second Montauk Club wedding she had attended in as many months. She had been dreading it but now, she decided, she was going to try to at least feign enthusiasm.

-Next week: A Tale Of Two Weddings-

Marisa Meltzer lives in Brooklyn. Her next book, Girl Power, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in February.