Me, fucker, and Milo pulls something out of his pocket. It’s a piece of paper folded up into a tiny triangle. He passes it to Love, who takes it and laughs. “This is so old school,” she says. “This is how we used to pass notes.”

Milo eye fucks her as if I’m not here. Shameless interloper, and I imagine a pack of black dogs ripping into him, eating him alive.

Love unfolds the note and she is quivering and I remain invisible. “Omigod omigod omigod!”

“I take it that’s a yes.”

She runs to him barefoot and straddles him and he’s spinning her around and I’m sitting here in splitting pain and somehow Forty is sleeping through all this. I refuse to ask to be let in on the conversation and Love pats Milo’s back and he puts her down.

She comes to me and takes my hands. “Joe,” she says. “Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe.”

And then she kills me. The news is disgusting. Milo got funding to direct a feature he wrote and he’s going play the lead opposite Love.

“What’s it called?”

“Boots and Puppies!” she announces.

“Ah,” I say, because I am too shocked to say actual words. All this time she was searching for news about Milo’s movie. She loves boots and she loves puppies but she loves Milo’s movie more. Milo is the Third Twin, smug as fuck. I wonder if he got her first husband thrown in jail and I wonder if he was in a wetsuit, waiting underwater to murder her cancer-stricken doctor husband. Forty is waking up, yawning, going for the Veuve. Milo is a bad guy. And wait. Love is an actress.

“I’m so confused,” I say. “You’re gonna act?”

Milo lights a cigarette and relocates his Wayfarers to the top of his blond Jewfro. “Love is an amazing actress,” he says. “But she’s not for sale, you know? We know she’s too good for that. But this is our baby. Boots and Puppies is ninety-five pages of straight-up sex and conversation. It’s gonna change movies. It’s a horror movie without any blood. It’s about the sanctity of the human heart. It’s the kind of stuff they used to make movies about. Barry Stein says it’s like The Big Chill only in this case, the dead body is sort of us, you know, as a society. ”

The level of bullshit, and I look at Forty—our movies have plots—but he’s on Team Milo. He plays along and very quickly I know why. Forty says he had no idea that he would be brought on as a producer and he high-fives Milo and Milo says the script wouldn’t be as good as it is without his insights and I want to kill everyone and my skin, on top of all this, my skin. Love wraps up in a beach towel, as if she needs to cover up suddenly. Already she is different, self-conscious, a simpering actress, overthinking her words, pursing her lips. My Love sounds like a fucking asshole as she simpers, “Our perfect little baby.”

“Where are we gonna shoot?” Forty asks, clapping his hands.

“We nabbed a great house in the Springs,” Milo says.

Forty says nice and Love is awestruck. “It’s real,” she says. “It’s really real.”

My skin burns and my heart burns and the three of them talk more about the movie as if I asked. Milo started writing it when they were at Crossroads and you can love someone all you want, but you can’t go into her past and become a part of her formative years. Boots and Puppies is the baby Love and Milo are going to make together while I sell old books.

Monica appears, hair blown out same as ever, stomach taut, same as ever. Forty tells her the good news and she is predictably stoked. She and Forty pop two bottles of champagne and Forty is also stoked for his buddy and it’s a celebration and I’m relieved that I’m sick. At least I don’t have to fake it. Love feels my forehead.

“I think you have a fever, baby,” she says. “Classic sun poisoning. You should go lie down.”

Love the girlfriend would want to go with me; Love the actress wants me out of here. Forty offers me some Vicodin and Milo agrees with Love, saying I should get out of the sun. He means that I should get out of this world, their life.

Love is impatient with me, leading the way up the stairs, prattling on about her identity, how she’s not an actress-actress and the movie’s not a movie-movie. “It’s the kind of story nobody in Hollywood tells anymore,” she says. “A really small love story.”

Love story. “Great,” I say.

She crosses her arms, classic California cold. “You don’t seem all that happy for me.”

“Of course I’m happy for you, but right now mainly, I feel like I’m gonna puke.”

She winces. “Don’t hate me, but it would be so great of you to do that in the bathroom,” she says. “This guy puked in my old bed once and the smell never really went away.”

I’m gonna let that one slide. I promise to vomit in the toilet and she tells me to rest and take a cold shower if I can stand it. She says she’ll check on me in a little while when I’m not Sick Boy, the debilitated obligation upstairs. I listen to her trot down the stairs. A few minutes later, Boots and Puppies arrives in my inbox, a readonly PDF, and the party outside begins and the first song to start it all is “Boys of Summer.” I can’t read Boots and Puppies in this frame of mind and I have another new e-mail: a Google alert for a holy fuck, no article in the Boston Globe. Everything is falling apart at once, my skin, my life, my love, and I am prostrate on a bed I don’t own.

I open the link and there’s a picture of Dr. Nicky Angevine. Prison agrees with him. His hair is short and he’s a little thin, but toned. Dr. Nicky tells the reporter that his work as a therapist prepared him for incarceration—bite me—and the article goes into great detail about his ongoing pursuit of an appeal. Dr. Nicky says the authorities have tracked down all his patients except for one man whose name they can’t print in the paper for reasons of confidentiality and fuck me. They’re looking for me. Well, they’re looking for Danny Fox, the name I used when I went to talk to Dr. Nicky in his beige office and sat on his beige couch. But it’s me all the same. I read on.

The facts are disturbing: NYPD cannot locate this former patient. Dr. Nicky tells the paper that Patient X was a good kid, a real kid, late twenties. But he also says some cunty shit about me. He says I was obsessed with a young woman. And then I read the worst sentence I have ever read in any newspaper:

Dr. Angevine concedes that he is not a detective. “But I do wonder,” he says. “Did Patient X find me through Guinevere Beck? In my gut, I think he did.”

Dr. Nicky—the paper can fuck off, he’s not a real doctor, he’s an MSW—has done pretty well for himself. A lot of his patients are getting together online, trying to find Patient X, convinced that Dr. Nicky is innocent. His ex-wife is on his side too, telling some bullshit story about how Nicky “nurtured” tomato plants in their garden upstate and never could have killed someone. Fuck you, wife.

And fuck doctor-patient confidentiality, because in the thirty-two comments below, some asshole named Adam Mayweather reveals that Patient X went by the name Danny Fox. And this, this is why you have to kill people. If you don’t, they don’t learn anything. They just reemerge, more muscled, more manipulative, more hell-bent on taking you down, maneuvering reporters into furthering their agenda. Fucking Boston Globe and fucking Danny Fox, I should have refused to give a last name. I leave the computer and run into the bathroom and splash cold water on my face. I vomit. I stay there, slumped. Love comes into the bathroom and kneels down behind me.

“Poor, sick baby,” she says.

“Nah,” I manage. “I’m fine. Just a sunburn. How are you?”

“Is it awful if I say I’m great?” she asks. Her voice is different and I don’t like it. There’s more Kardashian in there. “I just feel like yes, you know?”