A Girl Called Shameless. Laura Steven

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       Hello. Again.

      Hello again, my dear pals. Turns out that several of you are actually quite interested in the utter debauchery and chaos that is my life, including but not limited to: international sex scandals, kissing beautiful brown boys, and overzealous eyebrow tweezing. This interest comes as quite a surprise, on account of Ajita telling me roughly fourteen times per day how dull I am, and yet here I am, gallivanting bravely onward, hoping that I haven’t somehow run out of jokes in the two months since my last blog post.

      On account of the fact I have the memory span of a pair of oven mitts, and I’m willing to bet a bunch of you guys are in the same forgetful boat, I thought [read: my editor thought] it would be a cool idea to do a recap of what happened last time we hung out.

      If I was in any way a skilled author, I would attempt to weave all this seamlessly into the first quarter of the book, but since I’m essentially just copy and pasting my old blog posts into a Word document and adding valuable retrospective insights in square brackets, the weaving seemed like a lot of hard work. So, as ever, I’m taking the easy option, but this also makes it the easy option for you, dear reader, and consequently we now all have more time for the important things in life, like laughing and nachos. Cool? Cool.

      1. Things started out pretty normal. By pretty normal I mean I was an impoverished orphan living with my eccentric grandmother Betty and our wiener dog named Dumbledore. You know, the way all classic fairy tales start out.

      2. And then the Big Bad Wolf ate Betty and stole her identity. Wait, no, that’s not right. Gimme a sec.

      3. Ah yes. My charming little friendship tripod, comprising of me and my best friends Ajita and Danny, was thrown into a tailspin when Danny decided that after eighteen years of watching me poop on FaceTime he was in love with me. A sentiment I did not reciprocate – I was about as attracted to Danny as I am to coffee tables, which is precisely not at all. However, this did not stop him from attempting to buy my affections with all manner of gifts, including but not limited to fancy chocolate, Coldplay tickets, and the classic “please-fall-in-love-with-me-and-suck-my-penis-at-your-earliest-convenience” flowers.

      4. Around the same time this unrequited love business was going down, I slept with Zachary Vaughan, a Republican senator’s son, on a garden bench at a party. Oh, also I slept with another dude that night, Carson Manning. He and I are now in a relationship, but that is by the by.

      5. Anyway, senator’s son. A few days later, I sent him a nude picture, because I wanted to, which should not be too difficult for you to grasp. Then, along with a candid in-situ photo taken mid-hump on the garden bench, someone leaked said nudey pic online, creating a charming website called Izzy O’Neill: World Class Whore. This is a completely a-okay thing to do, since there are no laws against revenge porn in my state. [Revenge porn: the practice of distributing intimate or explicit photos or video of someone without their consent. Just as an FYI.]

      6. Said senator’s son received little to no backlash for said nude picture, because that is the way of high school and also of the world. He also performed a catastrophic cafeteria speech declaring his innocence, which ended up being filmed [because high school] and sent to local media outlets. And since his dad is, you know, his dad, a Republican senator and all-round dick, the footage immediately went viral quicker than, I don’t know, the bubonic plague.

      7. The website creator turned out to be Danny. I mean, looking at it all laid out like this, it was pretty obvious all along. But, as you may remember, I am not the sharpest erection in the shed/brothel. Conveniently, it took me roughly the length of one book to figure out my jilted best friend was behind the vicious website.

      8. Some other stuff that happened: I accidentally outed my other best friend Ajita and nearly destroyed our relationship forever. But miraculously she forgave me, and together with our new friend Meg we launched a platform called Bitches Bite Back aimed toward calling out all the misogyny and nonsense we face on a daily basis.

      9. I signed with a hotshot screenwriting agent in LA after being kicked out of a comedy-writing competition because of the nude pic’s media coverage. Huzzah!

      10. And I finally learned to open up about my feelings and stop using humor as a defense mechanism. As you can tell by this super-serious and not at all sarcastic introduction, it’s going great.

      So settle in, folks, for we’re about to embark on another awkward (and oftentimes calamitous¹) adventure together. And who knows? Maybe I’ll actually get round to telling you the story about the old folks’ home break-in this time.