“Well, good then, we already had one dickhead pop up at this party,” Murf chuckled. “Except it wasn’t yours; it was your girl’s.” He lit the freshly rolled blunt then passed it to Vronsky, who took a drag and held in the smoke for as long as he could, hoping to ease his troubled mind. Tonight was his big chance with Anna, and it hadn’t gone well. “Alexander…” he muttered disdainfully, exhaling the smoke.

Murf took the blunt from Vronsky and shook his head. “That guy is everything I hate about Greenwich. I don’t know how you didn’t put hands on that chump waltzin’ up in here acting like he owned Anna’s ass.”

“The thought crossed my mind,” Vronsky said.

“If I were you I’d’ve shown homeboy some manners, but if my black ass so much as looks at a guy like Alexander the wrong way, shit, I can hear the police sirens just thinking about it…”

“So you’re calling me a pussy then.”

“Yeah, basically.”

Vronsky laughed and shook his head. “This girl’s in my goddamn head, man.”

Murf took huge rip off the blunt and let out an enormous amount of smoke drift up into the branches. “Maybe you wanna drop this whole Anna K. obsession you got going on. I ain’t ever seen so much talent in one place as there is here tonight and I’m sure all these little shorties would happily line up to make your pretty ass forget your troubles. I mean, Anna’s great, but she’s just a girl.”

“I wish it were that simple.”

“Tell me why it’s not.”

“How can I explain it to you when I don’t even understand it? It’s like whenever I see her, nothing else matters except for her, like I just wanna be around her all the fucking time and I’m obsessed with everything she says and does and when she’s away from me, I feel completely and utterly empty, like I’m a ghost or something.”

“You know what you sound like?”

“What?”

“Every single girl who’s ever been in love with you.” Murf laughed. “Kidding! But real talk, you, my friend, are in hella deep,” Murf said. “Which means you got one play left.”

“What’s that?”

“You gotta go after her with everything you got. No more of this bullshittin’ around, having your cuz throw big-ass parties just so y’all can be in the same place.”

“I know, I know, I just wish she didn’t leave with that asshole…”

Murf cut Vronsky off and put his finger to his lips with a quiet shush, stubbing out the blunt on the tree bark as none other than Alexander and Eleanor burst through the front doors of the house and hurried down the steps. Up in the tree, Vronsky and Murf could hear them clear as day.