OH MY GOD, DELETE THAT PIC...

The most exciting part of any party, unless you’re a pathological extrovert or the gummy kicked in on the way over, is the ninety seconds before the group photo. You can spend a year planning the thing, but the night doesn’t really get going until somebody yells, “Okay, everybody squeeze in!” and a woman who hasn’t spoken to her sister since Passover puts an arm around her waist.

To the untrained eye, this is a touching moment. Alas, I am trained.

It begins when someone says, “Let’s get one of the girls.” We are grown women with master’s degrees, mortgages and, in at least half the cases, a facelift consult under our belts. But sure. The girls.

A saintly soul volunteers to take the picture. She is actually the savviest woman in the room. While the rest of us are quickly calculating how much of ourselves we can fit behind an overpriced centerpiece, she gets to stand six feet away, holding the phone and the moral high ground.

There’s always one woman who sees exactly what she’s doing. She looks at the good Samaritan the way you look at someone who just stole your cab in the rain. “No, no, you have to be in it,” she says, with the sweetness of a woman who will be damned if she’s the only one sucking in her stomach. “Let’s get the waiter.”

And so a twenty-four-year-old named Mateo, who was on his way to table nine juggling three plates of branzino, is now our official photographer. He has never met us. He has no stake in our faces. He holds the phone at belt level, like he’s scanning a barcode.

The volunteer joins the lineup. Then we go to battle.

The first move is geography. Everyone wants the middle. The middle is protected, upholstered on both sides by other bodies that will absorb your edges. At the end, you’re a lone, amorphous silhouette with no backup, looking like you personally ate for the whole group. The end is exile.

So what follows is a slow-motion shuffle toward the center, six women converging on the same four inches, each one saying, “No, no, you go in the middle,” while physically not moving her feet.

The second move is elevation. Someone always says, “Should we do two rows?” What she means is: I’d like to stand behind everyone and still have my face count. This is not vanity. This is trigonometry.

The third move is the lean. You angle your body forty-five degrees as if gently blown by a breeze, when in fact you are hiding eleven pounds and an entire torso behind Debra. I know this because I am a leaner. I have leaned at funerals.

And Debra knows. Debra has been the human shield at six consecutive events and she is done. She is texting her husband “come get me” before the flash goes off.

Then we all make our little adjustments, which are a language of their own. Hand on hip. Chin up, then down, then forward, like a turtle sniffing a dinner roll. One shoulder back. A half-turn. Tongue to teeth. Someone in the second row shouts, “Hold it higher,” to Mateo, meaning: angle it so I look like I did at thirty-four.

Mateo raises the phone six inches and the entire group exhales in gratitude. A woman in the front crouches, because she’s decided she’s the cute one now.

“One more, just to be safe!” says someone, because Mateo would like to leave. By shot three, nobody is smiling anymore. We’re planking: holding it, shaking slightly, counting down in our heads. By shot five, someones on the floor. By shot six, someone is cursing and announcing she blinked. By shot eight, Mateo is back at his table and a husband has been summoned. He takes it vertically, with his thumb over the lens, and says, “I got a good one.”

When the phone comes around, we go quiet. Each of us pinches the screen and goes straight to her own face. Nobody, and I mean nobody, looks at the group.

“Oh God, my neck.”

“Wait, go back, I’m blinking.”

“Delete that one, I look like my mother.”

There are no group photos. There are six separate private referendums on our faces, conducted at the same time on one screen.

Eventually we settle on the one where one woman looks like she’s on the cover of Vanity Fair and the rest of us look like we’re being held for questioning. She’s the one who said, “Honestly, put me anywhere.”

Naturally, she’s in the middle.