Richa Moorjani

Please invite me to your party.

I'm a great guest.

I will appreciate all of your deep cleaning.

The baseboards you scrubbed, the silverware you polished to a high gleam, the corners you awkwardly maneuvered the Swiffer into to sweep the last of the crumbs and cat hair out of sight.

I too have stood panting in the middle of a room no one coming to my house is even supposed to enter, worried what someone who stumbles in mistakenly looking for the bathroom is going to think because there's dust on the back of the TV.

Speaking of bathroom, I will notice that you wiped all the toothpaste flecks off the mirror, ran a wet washcloth across the scale you hide under the radiator, and I'll appreciate that your toothbrushes are standing up straight in the new toothbrush cup you ran out to Target to get three hours before your first guest arrived.

I will see your anthropology shower curtain and think, damn, she's fancy enough to get her shower curtains at anthropology?

Your Aesop hand soap won't be lost on me either.

And I know you really want me to peek at your unpronounceable shampoo brand, so rest assured, I will do that.

I'm so fun.

I'll talk to everybody.

I'll charm your mom, telling her that she looks hot and fuchsia, and joke with her that she should adopt me because you're such an asshole, and when your dad corners me aggressively into talking about sports, I will gently remind him that I'm not exactly that kind of lesbian.

But also, I've seen enough Skip Bayless to fake my way through a convincingly knowledgeable conversation about Ezekiel Elliott's rushing yards last season, and that will win him over.

He will suggest that we go to a football game together, an invitation I will dodge until one of us dies.

I'm going to try all your weird party foods without spitting any of them out or hiding them in your plans, even the stuff that looks homemade, which goes against one of my primary guiding principles.

I'm going to sample that gritty breadstook-looking thing, and even though I know before I touch it, it's going to shatter into particles of sharp dust down the front of my nice party shirt the second my teeth make contact."

The aesthetic uniformity of carrot sticks is appealing to me, and I find them to be an excellent vehicle for delivering ranch dressing to my mouth, even though doing so will cause me to horrify anyone who attempts to talk to me.

If you take even one bite of a raw carrot, you will have carrot flecks in your mouth for at least a week afterward.

I will eat them for you so it doesn't look like you don't know what people want to eat.

The hot dip?