“Please,” she says. “I’m a big girl and this is not about feelings. I just like to know these things. Tell me where you met her. Where does someone like Love Quinn hang out?”

“She came into the shop,” I lie.

Monica texts: Passing out everything will be fine Love is out cold Forty is high as shit and Milo is

Her phone must have died because that’s it. Delilah prods me. I put my phone down. “What?” I ask.

“The bookstore?” she says. “You’re trying to tell me that Love Quinn came into that bookstore?”

“Yeah,” I say, defensive. “She reads.”

She pulls her hair back and looks away.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says. “It’s just that I think you actually met her at Soho House.”

I have nothing to hide. “I did,” I say. “I don’t know why I’m being weird. I feel weird talking about her to you.”

She says I don’t have to feel weird and she tells me about the guy she’s been seeing and she can’t tell me his name but he’s an actor and he’s someone I would have heard of and he has something you can’t buy with all of Love’s money. Her words, not mine.

“He’s famous,” she says. “Like, legit famous. And it’s good but sometimes he freaks out and pulls shit like he did tonight and stands me up.”

“You were waiting for him at La Pou?”

She nods and this is why she changed. She didn’t evolve. She didn’t grow. She didn’t forsake her aspirations for a healthier outlook on life. She got some famous dick inside of her and some famous dick called her back. Between us we have no money, no fame, no power, no butler, no boxes of Frosted Flakes that just appear without having to go to the grocery store, no elevated lawns under starry skies. Between us we just have negativity. We both got dumped, fucked over.

I tell her I’m exhausted and she asks if she can stay. We both check our phones and we’re both still losers. I don’t need to be on this futon alone, so I tell her it’s fine. We don’t spoon. We’re both too wounded and I fall asleep wondering if there will be more angry sex in the morning.

WHEN I wake up at five A.M. I’m still a loser, and there is no message from Love. I sigh but as long as I am here, I could go for another blowjob. I roll over. I’m ready to go and I reach for Delilah. But she’s not here. I rub the sleep out of my eyes and head toward the bathroom and there she is, in a bra and panties, like some drug-addled victim of human trafficking, hunkered down in my bathroom.

And in her hand is a reusable Pantry bag, my reusable Pantry bag, the one I brought to Henderson’s.

30

“DELILAH,” I say. My heart gets loud in my throat. What the fuck is she doing?

She whips her head around. “Joe,” she says, her eyes wide. “I was looking for toilet paper.”

“There’s a roll on the counter.” I step toward her.

She cowers. She hunches forward, as if she’s praying. “Is there?” she asks, nervous, insincere.

“There is,” I say. “I don’t see how you could have missed it.”

“Oh, you know,” she says. “Guys, a lot of the time, you don’t have toilet paper.”

I don’t like the high pitch of her voice and she turns around and scoots backward, as if she can cover the Pantry bag, as if she can backflip into my tub and escape through the drain. She went through my things. She is a self-destructive fiasco of a person. She couldn’t just stay in the bed with me. She couldn’t be content to suck my dick and cheat on her not-a-boyfriend boyfriend. Nope. Like an addict who loads the syringe even after she knows the batch is bad, that it killed a bunch of people, Delilah got out of my bed and went into my closet, where she doesn’t belong. She is an addict. And you can’t go to rehab for what has stricken her, a star-fucking disorder where she risks her own life and security and happiness to find out what Love Quinn’s home looks like.

“What are you looking for?” I ask again. I taunt the cat. I poke the tiger.

“Nothing,” she says. “It’s okay.”

“You said you were looking for toilet paper,” I remind her. Dumb girl. Can’t keep her own story straight. “Did you find any toilet paper in there?”

She stands up. “I think I should go.”

“I think you should stay.”

She stands in front of the Pantry bag, as if her legs are cover. “Find anything good in there?” I ask.

“Joe,” she says. “I am not like that. I was just looking for toilet paper.”

“Delilah,” I say. “I don’t think you’re telling the truth.”

It’s always the same with these fucking people, bad people when they’re caught. They try to sell you. In Delilah’s case, she actually tells me that she knows people who could make a documentary about all this. “Like Serial,” she pitches, as if this is what I want. “I mean, I’m not going to jump to conclusions about this bag and the way you were at Henderson’s and all the ways things are adding up but, Joe, this could be very interesting.”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“Let’s just talk about it,” she says.

“Get in the tub.”

She whimpers. “Please no. I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

I point. “Get in the fucking tub.”

She cries and I had a feeling this would get loud and she yammers again. “I know people,” she says.

“No,” I remind her. “You fuck people.”

I knock her back into the tub and she falls. I use some of the tape from the bag to seal her mouth shut and tie her arms together. I close the bathroom door and block the doorknob with a chair. I turn on some music—Journey’s greatest hits—to drown out her muffled cries and I tear the Kandinsky off the wall. She doesn’t know art. She doesn’t know anything but celebrities and she is an empty person, a mean person. She will never be happy. She won’t stop shooting for the stars, sucking them off, trying to pull them down to her futon, to her chicken bones.

I am not going to kill her just because she knows I killed Henderson, because she’s crying about it in my bathroom, as if this is the path to freedom. No. I’m also going to kill her because there is no happy ending for a star-fucking girl like Delilah, a girl who actively refuses to embrace her talents, celebrate her insides, lead with her brain. After this “famous” guy, whoever he is, finishes with her, she’ll go tramping for someone else until one day she realizes she’s too old to be taken seriously by these motherfucking pricks. And then she’ll either spend her savings on surgery or pop pills or move away and try to sell her secrets to a publisher.

Oh, the sadness of the Angeleno with a bank account dwindling, a forehead creasing, a self-esteem level deflating. I wish Delilah were a little more like me. I wish she were more confident. I wish she never stopped believing in herself, like her tattoo, but she did. She thought she needed someone famous in order to feel worthy. She could have settled down with Dez or Calvin or me or any of the guys she met. But she wanted fame more than love. She will never be happy, and really, I’m doing her a favor. She will never find what she’s looking for. I pull an orange Rachael Ray knife out of the butcher’s block. LA kills women. It’s a shame that Delilah moved here. She should have gone back to New York. You don’t belong here unless you’re tough, beautiful, or talented. What I am doing is a kindness, a mercy killing. I am putting her out of her misery.

I open the bathroom door and she’s cowering in the tub, on her knees. Sad cat. Poor kitten. Her face is a wad of chewed-up gum. All the joy is gone. Somewhere along the way she broke her own heart and without a heart, you can’t get better.

“I know,” I say. “I know how sad you are. I know how sick you are. But it’s over.”

Steve Perry’s unmistakable voice crescendos and Delilah hyperventilates. She cries and cries, and how badly she needed this. How much more of this there would be for her were she to stay on this long and lonely road ahead. The girl who paid someone to inscribe words on her thigh, words that she could not live by, words she did not understand. The key is not just to continue believing, after all, but the key to life is to believe in something that matters, something big and beautiful, something more profound than fame, money.