A Trip to the West Coast – A Dress Returns – The Jobless Masses – What Kind of Stripper Would You Be? – A Chance Encounter!

Portland was, if possible, even better than all those stories from the Times about how everyone rides their bikes and hangs out at bookstores and listens to The Shins. It was a paradise where food carts served waffle sandwiches, guys with Crass tattoos made their own yogurt, and no one ever asked what you did for a living.

She knew she would like it when, at her first party, the opening of a vegan tattoo parlor, Nicole wore a gold bubble dress that had been out of style for at least four seasons in New York. In Portland, no one knew or cared how uncool her dress was and she got a steady stream of compliments on it.

After ten days in Portland, Nicole didn't find herself thinking of New York hardly at all, except when Jared would text her photos of Toussaint. The poor dog!

She suspected that no one in the city, besides the people who worked at the numerous coffee shops and strip clubs, even had jobs. Nicole had taken up residence on a couch in her friend Rusty's odd loft-y place. Rusty had moved to Portland from New York three years prior, lured by a copywriting job at Nike. But he had been laid off four months ago and appeared to spend his days mastering Rock Band and nights courting Suicide Girls. He too had no plans to return to Brooklyn.

"So what are you going to do when your unemployment runs out?" Nicole asked while they were out at breakfast one morning. Breakfast, even when eaten at noon, was never called "brunch" in Portland.

"You're such a New Yorker. You're so plan-oriented." Rusty rolled his eyes. "Mellow out." He pondered the relative merits of the four different tofu scrambles on the menu. "What are you ordering?"

"The sourdough pancakes with marionberries." Nicole put her menu down and stared at her chipped fluorescent pink manicure. "But Russ, if I, like, stayed here, what would I do?"

"Like for work? I don't know, the same shit you do in New York. Write that book for that Disney kid."

"Do you think I could be a stripper? I mean, I would be a subversive one because I would only dance to, like, Belle and Sebastian and Bikini Kill and I would probably try to organize a union." Nicole stopped the waitress and asked for agave for her yerba mate. "And then I could write about it, like Diablo Cody or that Miranda July story that was in the New Yorker."

"I stopped reading the New Yorker when I moved here. No one ever talks to you about magazine articles out here."

"Is that a good thing?"

Rusty took a bite of his curry scramble. "I don't know."

Later that day, Nicole went to the farmer's market. She was trying to eat a popsicle and text Darshan about how she bought duck eggs and a first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves at Powell's when she felt a tap on her shoulder.

"Nicole? Wow! Hey! I thought that was you."

"Whoa. Hi...."

"-Jay. What has it been, since junior year?"

In high school, Jay and Nicole had been assigned as each other's lab partners in Physics. She would recap episodes of My So-Called Life to him, but the nuances of the Angela-Jordan relationship were lost on him. He, in turn, would tell her how the school's various sports teams were performing, even though she would tell him that she would rather die than be seen chanting, "Go Pirates!" He was cute and tall and half-Swiss, half-Filipino, but too nice and normal to ever be her type. He still wasn't. At the farmer's market that evening, Nicole noted that he was wearing cargo pants, a blue button-down shirt, and some kind of abominable leather dress shoe with a rubber sole.

He offered her a ride home in his Prius, where he shared his vital statistics: environmental lawyer, divorced, no kids, house with a view of Mount Tabor, and a passion for kayaking.

"So I guess I'm kind of a weekend warrior," Jay said as he pulled up to Rusty's loft. Nicole couldn't tell if he was joking. "Are these legally zoned for live-work?

"I doubt it," she said.

"You always were a rebel."

"Hardly." She got out of the car and started collecting her tote bags stuffed with kohlrabi and plums. She thought she saw a polar fleece vest folded on the backseat. "Well, it's been fun catching up. We should do this in another fourteen years." She smiled and waved and started to shut the passenger side door.

"Wait, Nicole." Jay leaned over the seats. "Can I see you again? How long are you here for?"

Are you behind? Catch up!

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