I guess he lied about his place of birth in his chart request, not that it would matter, because the cities are in the same time zone. I don’t blame him for saying Los Angeles instead of Riverside. I make the same lie all the time. Nobody wants to be from Riverside.

“Mount Rubidoux,” I say.

Bo covers his face with one hand. I also understand why he changed his name. “Bo Webster” doesn’t have much star power.

“My dad teaches at Riverside Community College,” I say. “Since before I was born.”

I note the time: 6:49 P.M.

“Time’s up,” I lie. I don’t feel attracted to Beau anymore because Beau does not exist. I feel sad for Bo Webster and also repulsed by him. I want to get away from him, just like he wanted to get away from his mom. He smells like stale beer and sweat and cigarettes.

“Okay,” he says. And then he stumbles off. Once he is halfway down Winona, toward Hollywood Boulevard, Thomas gets out of his car and walks over to me.

“You okay?” he asks, wrapping his arm around me.

I lean into his chest for a quick second, take a sniff of his detergent, then break away. “I’m fine,” I say. “Let’s watch a movie.”

Thomas refuses to watch anything by Roman Polanski because of his exhausting performative wokeness. He says I should be paying more attention to female directors and then says, “I love Claire Denis.” Then he tells me I need to watch a movie by this woman called Greta Gerwig. He puts on something called Lady Bird and it is insufferably twee, so I take out my phone after about thirty minutes. My DMs are filled to the fucking brim. One hits my eye, from JessLovesMatcha.

GIRL wtf I saw you on Stella Shadid’s Instagram!! I knew you were a STAR!!!!!

This makes me overwhelmingly depressed. I rest my head on Thomas’s shoulder and eventually drift off.

The next morning, I have an email from my editor at Vice. He loves the article and has “hardly any edits”—magic words to moi. And he wants it to grace the cover of the winter edition of the magazine. I’ve never been published in print before. Astrology-related articles rarely end up in print. Astrology is more of a digital art, I think, then remember it’s one of the oldest belief systems on the planet.

I don’t really care about being in print. My life is still shit. And isn’t print dead?