My brother, Eugene, is dead.

    He shot himself almost six full years before I moved to Los Angeles.
   
    Christian and I were in his swimming pool with our clothes on. We were under Los Angeles stars, under barely unseasonable Christmas lights. The pool felt like bathwater. The air felt like bathwater. It was warm summer-like air and deceptive for February.
    "What time is it?" I asked.
    Christian tilted his head back into the water, sweeping the hair from his face.
    "I don't know," He replied.
    "I'm curious."
    Christian pulled his wrist from the pool and squinted at his watch.
    "Three a.m.-- hmm--," He shook his head and held the watch to his ear, listening for sound, "If my watch hasn't stopped."
    "I need to go."
    "You're soaking wet. You'll freeze to death."
    "It's seventy degrees outside. I won't freeze. Not to death, anyway."
    Christian pursed his thin pink lips into a smile and innocently lifted his palms above the water, "Global warming isn't working in my favor. You could stay until your clothes dry," He took pool water into his mouth and spit it out, "At the least."
    Christian had big, kind aqua-gray eyes framed by thick-rimmed glasses and a round face with two days worth of stubble. At six-foot-three, his body was kind of soft in a boyish sort of way. He wasn't the slightest bit heavy but he wouldn't be mistaken for painfully thin, either, and his hair had the exact same cut and color as 1965 John Lennon. I believed this to be coincidental.
    Christian and I had met almost twelve hours prior to us jumping into his swimming pool. We were introduced by a mutual friend, and though I had friends in the city, I guess it could be accurate to say that Christian was the first real friend that I had made since I had moved to Los Angeles.

****
   
    I was born at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle Washington on February 20th, 1983.
   
    My brother, Eugene, was the first born and most loved (February 1970), followed by our sister, Jane (December 1977) and then, lastly, me. Our parents split up shortly after my birth and I think that is why I didn't have a single memory of them in the same room together. I could count on one hand the amount of times that I had seen my father in person but I'm sick of bellyaching about it. After the divorce, our mother pretended that she was going to take care of us but left the bulk of the responsibility to her parents.
    My grandparents were fairly knowledgeable in popular rock music. My grandfather had been a biker and there were often a lot of crazy alcohol-fuelled parties at the house. I had grown up surrounded by endless evergreen trees and large, bearded men in flannel shirts who pounded cans of Budweiser and played air guitar to any number of ZZ Top albums. Janis Joplin and Creedence Clearwater Revival were pummeled into my young ears at damagingly loud volumes as I was swallowed whole by the second hand smoke from Raleigh cigarettes. I can't remember having a birthday before the age of eight where there was a single child in attendance.
    Though I was raised in that environment, I didn't realize that I liked rock-and-roll. Then, it was like in one moment, I couldn't remember a time when it hadn't existed. I was eleven years old and there was a Beatles documentary that came on public television. I couldn't avert my eyes from it. I was immediately taken. I loved all things rock and roll. I loved the leather jackets. I loved the matching suits. I loved the long hair. I loved the twang of an electric guitar. I loved the steady bounce of a bass and the driving, controlling force of something as simple in nature as a kick drum. I loved the sound of a scream into a tinny microphone, "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
     I repeatedly listened to every Beatles cassette tape and record that I could find. The first CDs that I ever purchased were Beatles albums. I read every Beatles' book that the library had in stock. I videotaped every Beatles' movie that was shown on the old movie station. I raided my grandmother's closet in an attempt to dress like I had come from the 1960s. I wrote page after page of Beatles fan fiction.
    I was teased relentlessly by the kids at school who were absorbing everything that they saw on MTV. I didn't fit in. When I listened to rock-and-roll, I would get a feeling like a great pressure pushing up on my insides. I could feel it in my organs and my skull and my feet. It was an explosion that couldn't make it past my skin. I had stopped hearing music and I had started listening to music. It was very personal and something that I didn't feel like I could explain to anyone without getting embarrassed or offended. It was like no one had ever listened to music before me, or at least they couldn't do it in the same way that I did. They couldn't understand it the way that I could.
    I was a never a stoner kid. To be honest, I actually only really appreciated the Beatles up until about 1966 and after that I felt like they got a little strange. I couldn't understand it. I was too square-- too afraid to experiment with anything that might get me in some sort of trouble. But when I was in 9th grade, there was this boy a couple of years ahead of me and he was a total stoner kid... and all of his friends were total stoner kids, too. He had long dark hair down to his shoulders. I never got close enough to it or him but I always imagined that it smelled musty and of incense. He wore thermal under t-shirts and carried an acoustic guitar to school with him every day. He used to play for his friends at the lunch tables. Sometimes I'd catch glimpses of him ditching class to smoke cigarettes behind the gym. For some reason, I locked into this boy, became borderline obsessed with him, but not like a crush-- I wanted to be this boy. I wanted to play guitar. I wanted to sneak cigarettes. I wanted to be cool.
    I stole a couple of cigarettes from my grandmother's snap case and carried them around in my messenger bag for weeks, watching and waiting for the boy to take a break behind the gym. When I finally saw him, I went clammy and asked to be excused from English to go to the nurse's office. I sprinted towards the gym, then slowed to a casual stride as I rounded the corner, holding my breath so that I wouldn't be panting. I pulled a cigarette from the pencil pouch inside my bag and pursed it in my lips. The boy looked up at me, surprised to see someone else there. He was listening to music through yellow headphones. He acknowledged me with a lift of the chin. I searched for matches but realized that I didn't have any. He pulled a Zippo from his pocket and flicked it open, lighting my cigarette with the flame. We smoked in silence, standing at least a yard apart and not looking in each other's direction. I had never smoked before. I didn't know how to inhale and was enveloped in a cloud of the stuff. Finally, as I finished, I stubbed the cigarette out against the brick wall and shoved the butt into my pocket, not knowing what else to do with it. I tapped the boy on the shoulder and he turned to me. His gaze was vacant-- almost annoyed.
    "What are you listening to?" I asked him. He squinted then pulled the right headphone from his ear. I repeated the question. He pushed the stop button on his walkman, opened up the tiny plastic door and slid from it a homemade tape without a label. He handed it to me, gave me a little salute as a parting gesture and walked away. I rushed home that day, ran up the stairs to my room, slammed the door and put the cassette into my tape deck. That was the first time that I had heard Nirvana's In Utero.
    If the Beatles were the first time that I realized that I liked music, then Nirvana was the first time that I realized that I wanted to play music-- that I was meant to play music.
    When I was fifteen my brother gave me an electric guitar that our grandmother had bought for him but he never learned how to play. It took me years to figure out that Eugene probably never learned to play because he was frustrated. My brother was left handed and the guitar hadn't been set up as such. To this day, his curse had been my blessing.
    I also managed to acquire a broken Casiotone that could only play on the organ setting and half of its pre-recorded drum tracks. I made up little one chord songs and pretended to host my own radio show, recording them with a Walkman tape recorder.
    Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, I played in three different bands that I took entirely too seriously & spent a lot of time in my room listening to mix tapes and reading back issues of Maximum Rock and Roll.
    At the age of twenty, I started a band that was to become thee band amongst a lot of my peers. I had gone to school with Kevin Underwood but had never really spoken to him. He was a couple of grades ahead of me and we ran in different circles... actually, I'm pretty sure that he was a stoner kid and friends with the boy who gave me the Nirvana cassette. Kevin had been a guitarist first and foremost but had been forced into being a bassist against his will simply because almost every band seemed to be in need of one and if he was going to play rock and roll, that seemed like the way to do it. Due to faulty judgement we had both spent a summer living in Olympia, watching the same terrible bands play in the same terrible basements and standing on the same front lawns in the early morning hours drinking the same watered down beers. We recognized each other as being something familiar and bonded instantly out of necessity. We were out for kicks. We wanted music to be loud, fast, hard and abrasive. We wanted to play on fucked up equipment and then smash it at the end of the sets. We covered ourselves in fake blood and lit things on fire with rubbing alcohol. Being on stage and causing chaos--destruction-- with those two boys was the most comfortable that I had ever been as myself. We understood each other, we supported each other and we knew that the three of us would never find anyone quite like each other. Sometimes, with bands, there is this kind of magic, almost akin to a great romance, that is made that can't be made by the individuals themselves. All of the outside world can see it, feel it and will respond to it even if they never understand how or why. For a short period of time, I was lucky enough to be in one of those bands.
    We toured relentlessly, spending six weeks on the road and six weeks off. We went on like that for years and the lines began to blur as to where home was. Home was a room at my grandparents' house in Bremerton or in a van with two men who hadn't showered in a week or in a sleeping bag on a stranger's floor or bundling up cables from a sticky stage. I stopped calling my family or writing to my friends because I couldn't be bothered with the real world. All that I could bring myself to care about was eating, sleeping, loading in equipment, playing, loading out equipment and getting paid just enough money to afford to drive to the next town and do the whole thing over again.
    I was twenty-two, and in Michigan somewhere, when I got the call that Eugene had committed suicide. It was weird but I don't remember having a reaction to his death. My mother bought me a plane ticket with her credit card. I played whatever shows were lined up until the day that I had to leave for Seattle. I know that I cried and that I couldn't eat or sleep for a week or two after it happened, but then I removed myself from it. I went back on the road the day after the funeral to finish up the tour. I didn't think twice about it. I had been living my life a certain way and I didn't plan on having time to feel the loss.
    Stephan, Kevin and I continued on our tour regimen for the next two years until I got the idea for the film.
    At twenty-four, I went back to Seattle, took a break from touring, got a job in a record store and begun to write a somewhat fictional account of what had happened after my brother's suicide. I called the film Severance. I used my friends as actors and Stephan helped me compose a score. I suppose the lack of professionalism could've made the film a disaster--the fact that it wasn't, sort of felt like getting away with a spectacular crime. I took Severance across country for various festivals and it got a few nods, nothing spectacular but with the accomplishment came a kind of relief. I went back to Washington with no future obligations on the calendar, packed the film into the closet & much like the event that inspired it-- forgot that anything had happened in the first place.
    I quit my job at the record store sometime around my 26th birthday and balanced working fulfillment for an independent record label with hosting duties on my own weekly radio show for a local radio station.
    I was twenty-seven and the band went out on the road for summer. We gave an interview to a radio DJ named Adam Mitolo on the morning of our show in Los Angeles. Off air, Adam and I started in on a conversation about the Raymond Pettibone film Sir Drone that we managed to draw out into lunch with his wife, Holly. I still find this fact disconcerting considering that the conversation about Sir Drone was longer than the film was itself and, to be frank, the film wasn't good enough to warrant a conversation that long pertaining to it. But I suppose people talk about weird things when they've got nothing to talk about. 
    Adam and Holly came to our show that night with their friends, Jared and Emily Miller. Jared was a DJ and management-type at the radio station that Adam worked for. Jared told me that he had heard my radio program in Seattle and wondered if I was interested in doing one like it for his station. I could record the show in Seattle and overnight the discs to him, which he would air when he found a time slot for me. I had three weeks left of tour and told him that I would come back to Los Angeles for a few days when I was done to discuss the details.
    While we were loading out, I was approached by Noah Welles, a little known film maker whose work was compared to that of the greats. He had seen Severance and wanted me to hear him out on a project that he was working on. I arranged to meet up with him on my way back through town.
    When the tour was over, I went back to L.A. as promised, but instead of staying for a few days, I stayed for a few weeks and instead of staying in a hotel, I stayed with Adam and Holly. I was drawn to all of the sun, ocean air, shiny cars and concrete swimming pools.
    I was making friends that were different from any people that I had known before. These people were involved in music in a completely different way than I had been involved in music. They were able to put on a record and have a party, they wouldn't have to just sit and listen to the record the way that I did. Their music was more fashionable. To them, music was just a part of life, it wasn't all of life, but they seemed to understand why I thought that it was. They were making money off of music without ever having to play it. I respected them for how honest they were with themselves about it.
    They were also involved in movies in a completely different way than I was involved in movies. I made my film because I had something to show people about Eugene. They made movies because they didn't know what else to do. Their friends were the people that I read about in magazines and saw on television. The night that I found out that Holly was a member of SAG, I almost fainted dead away. I thought that it was amazing that someone that I knew was a member of SAG. Holly found it amazing that I wasn't.

    I met up with Noah a few times in those three weeks and found him enthralling. He believed in old Hollywood and classic films. He loved French New Wave Cinema as much as he loved Hitchcock and British Mod movies. Noah was the embodiment of everything good about film. He didn't believe in non-sense. The first time that I sat down to lunch with him he told me,
    "There isn't a damn good thing about this town, Audrey. There isn't one movie being made that is worth making."
    By the end of our meetings, I felt that I was trying to sell him on letting me help him to make his movie.
    I went back to Seattle, anticipating the rain, cold and gray, thinking that maybe Los Angeles wasn't such a bad place after all.
    Stephan and Kevin wanted to move the band to New York City, so I gracefully bowed out. I began recording radio programmes for L.A. and playing solo shows.
    I had some form of contact with Holly everyday, whether it be by e-mail, post cards or phone calls.
    It had been six months since I had met with Noah before I heard from him again. He called to tell me that the film was ready to go into production and he offered me the lead. The conditions were that I would have to relocate to California for a while and that he could pay me $30,000.
    When he told me that last part, he said it in such a way that made it seem as though he could only pay me $30,000. From my perspective, I was packing up my records before he could add the last zero on $30,000.
    I gave two weeks notice at the record label and was living in a studio apartment in Silverlake within a month. The day that I arrived Holly helped set me up with SAG for myself.
   
    Christian took his watch off of his wrist and pantomimed wringing the water out of it; he threw it to the side of the pool.
    He shivered, "Do you want to get out of here?"
    I nodded even though I wasn't certain whether he meant the pool or his house.
    He climbed up the side of the pool without using the steps or the ladder and hoisted himself onto the concrete. For a fleeting moment, I thought that maybe he had worked on that move to impress women and had probably perfected it over the years. I didn't want to appear impressed even though I was, he made it appear to be a natural thing to do. If I had tried such a maneuver, I would've ended up bruised and bloodied.
    I vacated the pool by using the stairs in the shallow end while Christian was in the house. I hugged my arms across my chest and listened to the rhythm of my teeth chattering. Christian came back through the sliding glass door with an armful of white towels. He playfully drapped a towel over my head and rubbed it vigorously as though he were trying to dry my hair. He lifted the edge so that he could see my eyes.
    "Come into the house. I'll wash your clothes for you."

    I followed Christian through the house then into the bathroom. He started a shower for me and pointed to the shampoo, conditioner, bar soap and more towels. He placed a gray flannel robe on the sink and closed the door behind him.
    He appeared to be a very tidy person. The bathroom was empty, save for the items that he had pointed out, and was void of any color. It felt lonely and I wondered if Christian was lonely.
    It seemed to be a stupid thought considering that I had only known Christian for a handful of hours.
    In that time we had eaten lunch, gone to a movie, eaten dinner, paid twelve bucks to see a band play and jumped into his pool. Most of these events didn't include a whole lot of conversation. For all that I knew he had a girlfriend or a wife, maybe even a couple of kids. I didn't know what his last name was.
    I quickly showered, washing my hair and scrubbing my skin.
    I emerged from the bathroom clad in the robe, holding wet clothes under one arm and towel drying my hair with the other.
   
    I wandered through Christian's house, trying to get a feel for who he was. From the outside, the house appeared to be a nice pale blue two-story in the suburbs. It was the sort of house that looked like a family was being raised in it. There was a small, well-manicured front lawn with shrubs up the property line in leiu of a fence. Inside, the house was furnished sparsely with things that were found in thrift stores. In the living room, there was a teal 1960s sectional couch, a dark wood kidney shaped coffee table, a brass magazine rack, antique cameras, two lamps with large amber glass basses and a small house plant. There weren't any paintings or photographs, the only thing hanging on the wall was the television. In the kitchen, there was an aluminum table with a cream enamel top and four matching vinyl chairs. There was a room upstairs that looked like a library. It's walls were lined with books and records. I found the records to be bizarre because there were well over two thousand records and they were almost exclusively 1960s psychedelic/garage records. I didn't know that there were that many psychedelic records made, ever, 1960s or otherwise. I scanned them, running my fingertip gently along the spines, searching for just one junk record or record that fell out of genre but there weren't any. The closest that I could come was a whole vein of Paul Revere and the Raiders and unfortunately, that still sort of counted.
    The books were equally as dumbfounding. There were big heavy-looking textbooks with titles that I couldn't pronounce or make sense out of it. They were Chemistry books, as far as I could gather. The books in his collection that weren't textbooks, were second-hand paperbacks by authors like J.D. Salinger, Sylvia Plath and F. Scott Fitzgerald, though they were a treasure trove of good books, they seemed too common for Christian or what I thought that I had learned about him.
    Before I walked downstairs, I wanted to take a look at his bedroom. I knew that it was personal but I thought that was where I would find out the most about him. I was disappointed when I found a well-made full size bed, a chest of drawers, a night table with an alarm clock on it and a small bookcase with the same kind of paperbacks as in the other room.
    I grew shy when I found Christian standing in front of the washer freshly showered and fully dressed in jeans and an old thread bare t-shirt advertising Thailand or some crazy place like that. I assumed that his watch had dried out enough because he was wearing it again. I pulled the collar of the robe up tightly at my neck as he added my clothes to the machine. I felt self-conscious, almost naked, even though all of me was covered. I was afraid that he could read the guilt on my face or that he knew that I had gone through his things.
    We stood barefoot in the kitchen eating peanut butter sandwiches. The awkwardness of not knowing each other had set in and we couldn't help but silently stare at the tile.
***
    We sat on the couch, watching black and white movies on TCM. I wanted to be Barbara Stanwyck right then, with her smoky voice, set hair, small waist and infinite cool.
    "What's on your mind?" Christian inquired.
    "I wish that I was Barbara Stanwyck."
    "Seventy years from now some woman will say the same thing about you."
    "Doubtful. Seventy years from now, I'll be lucky if my film hasn't deteriorated in a can somewhere."
    He frowned, "What makes you say that?"
    "Hedy LaMarr."
    "Who?"
    "Exactly."
    "Continue," He urged.
    "Hedy LaMarr was this devastatingly beautiful actress from the 1920s and 1930s, or maybe it was the 30s and 40s, either way-- well, she was in a movie in 1952-- ugh-- I digress-- She was very famous and she starred in a lot of very famous films of the time. By the time the 1960s hit she couldn't get any work at all and had run out of money. No one talks about her as one of the greats. She was sort of scandalous, though. Like Frances Farmer."
    "Frances Far---?"
    I instinctively rolled my eyes, "Did you ever see Son of Fury?"
    He shook his head. I gave him a detailed plot summary all about the perils of Tyrone Power starring as Benjamin Blake.
    "I don't even have to watch it now," He said.
    "What was I on about again?"
    "Barbara Stanwyck. I get it though. I'd like to be James Stewart in Mr. Smith goes to Washington."
    "That's very noble. You're tall enough for it, " I told him.
    "I have a fear of being forgotten. I'm the most unfamous famous person that there is."
    "Sounds dramatic."
    "I'm serious. I've been in television, radio and movies for the past fifteen years. Whenever I'm in public, I get asked if I went to high school with so-and-so. It happened tonight, actually."
    "Really?" I was surprised. He nodded.
    "At the show. I'm not trying to be vain. I know that what I'm saying must sound awful to you but, I would rather be recognized for who I am or ignored completely."
    I saw a small gray streak.
    "What was that?" I asked, startled.
    He lifted his head, unphased, "Probably Mr. Mittens."
    "Mr. Mittens?"
    "My cat."
    "Your cat's name is Mr. Mittens. How old are you?" I teased him.
    "Thirty-seven."
    "That's sweet," I complimented.
    "Not creepy?" He asked.
    "Not so much."
    He smirked, "Look at you. With your film, records, radio...is UNICEF next?"
    "Not yet. Hey?"
    "Yeah?" Christian rested his head on the back of the couch.
    "I get it. The thing with being recognized. You deserve to be yourself."
    "I knew that you would."
    "Is this the part where we tell each other how great the other one is?"
    "I think so," he agreed.
    "I don't know... it's sorta nice."
    "It's mutual."
    "Too sweet. My stomach aches," I joked.
    "... and you have a difficult time with praise?"
    I shrugged self-consciously, "Maybe."
    "Mind if I ask you a personal question?" Christian began.
    "Shoot."
    "This is going to sound awkward," His eyes averted away from me and he blushed, tripping on words, "Okay, I'm just going to ask."
    "Okay..."
    "You don't have a boyfriend... do you?"
    It was odd how he assumed that I wasn't in a relationship. It was almost like how I assumed that he was lonely. I got this weird panicky feeling as though he were going to ask to be my boyfriend but I knew that didn't make any sense. If anything, Christian seemed fairly logical.
    "No," I answered calmly, "So you don't have a girlfriend?" I paused, "Or a wife?"
    He guffawed, "Did you just ask me if I had a wife?"
    "Maybe?"
    He feverishly shook his head and attempted to stifle laughter, "No, no, no. No wife. No girlfriend. Uhhh...awkward. How long has it been for you?"
    "Oh, I've never had a wife-- might consider a girlfriend."
    "Ha ha ha," He deadpanned, "I meant since you were seeing anyone?"
    I couldn't ever remember having an actual boyfriend. I had men that I was crazy about for a while but never anyone who called themselves my companion.
    I shrugged, "And you?"
    "Seven years," He replied without question and as though his answer didn't mean anything. Seven years. It was a fact.
    "Are you serious?!"
    "Completely."
    "Why?"
    "I don't know. I just am."
    "No, not serious. I mean, why seven years? You must have met agreeable people in that time?"
    Christian shrugged, "I wasn't looking for people agreeable or otherwise. I had everything that I needed."
    "Is it lonely?"
    "It will be when you leave," He said light-heartedly.
    "What does that mean?"
    "I think that I might miss you being around."
    "You don't know me. At least I've gone through your things," I blurted. He was unphased by my confession.
    In an old movie kind of way, Christian reached out for me.
    "Is this okay?" he whispered.
    "You shouldn't ask."
    "Okay. I'm going to kiss you."
    "You shouldn't announce it, either."
    He paused as though his confidence were fleeting.
    I noticed light creep in through the windows. I turned his wrist and looked at his watch.
    6:30 A.M.
    "I have to go." I pulled away from him.
    "You don't have to," Christian said.
    "I don't want to," I spoke, momentarily brazen.
    "May I see you again?" He asked.
    I pulled myself up from the couch and away from him.
    "Sure."
***
    Adam and Holly lived five blocks from Christian's house.
    "Audrey!" Adam exclaimed as he opened the door. He appeared surprised to see me.
    "Good morning, sir. Can I catch a ride with you to the radio station?"
    "Yeah, but we'll have to leave in about twenty minutes." Adam obliged.
    "Who's at the door at this ungodly hour?!" Holly tone was jovial despite her words as she called out from the background.
    "It's just Audrey! She needs a ride to the station!"
    "...twenty minutes...just Audrey..."I repeated in a mutter. He gave me a smug grin.
    Holly rushed to the door, tightening the belt of her short beige silk robe with one arm and extending the other to me in an embrace.
    "Good morning, sweetheart! I haven't had a chance to get dressed, yet... that's a lie. I've had plenty of chances but... 6:30! Come in. Have a coffee."
    "Sorry to drop by like this," I followed them into the house, "Jared's on vacation and I'm covering his show. I needed a ride."
    Holly sat down at the kitchen table, "Are you having car trouble?"
    "No. I stayed over at a friend's house."
    Adam's eyes lit up at the opportunity to make fun of me, "A friend?"
    "Quit talking," I warned him.
    It was too late. Holly's good-natured curiosity got the better of her and she enthusiastically fell into his trap, "Is it that kind of friend?"
    "No," I dismissed immediately, "Just a friend. We watched movies and I lost track of time."
    "That's all?" Holly asked.
    "That's all." I confirmed. Holly took me at my word and didn't press me further.
    Adam, however, couldn't drop the subject, "Do you have friends here? Who do you know in this part of town besides us?"
    "What? I'm not allowed to know anyone in the good part of town? Let alone anyone at all?"
    "As long as you don't tell them that you're from hipster-infested Silverlake," Adam teased. I cringed at the hipster reference. Hipsters in Seattle were one thing but hipsters in Los Angeles were an entirely different subject. Los Angeles hipsters were well groomed and perfectly maintained with a disgusting kinship towards faux hippie attire. It would've been like Eugene, Oregon having it's own edition of Vogue.
    "No, I'm from hipster-infested Seattle-- I'm living in hipster-infested Silverlake."
    "I'm sure Audrey knows lots of people," Holly assured Adam, "But, do you want a friend, Audrey?" Holly winked at me.
    "There's no time," I shot her down.
    Adam set his coffee cup down on the table, "For either of us. We need to go."
    As we left, Holly made another dash for the door and called out.
    "Audrey, I'll see you tonight!"
    "What?" I didn't know what she was getting at.
    "To the going away party for James Davis? Lots of handsome men! You didn't forget, did you?"
    I felt terrible because I had forgotten, regardless of the fact that I didn't personally know James Davis. To me, he was just a face in magazines.
    "Noah and I are working late."
    She gave me a stern look, "The party won't stop. I'll send a car for you."
    I exhaled, annoyance, "Fine. I'll be here extremely late but I will be here."
    She smirked her satisfaction and delicately waved goodbye.
    In the car, Adam continued to list the names of people in his neighborhood to figure out who I was with the night before. Never once did he think to mention Christian.