“Emily!” she says. “I head back for New York today, so I’m glad I got to see you before I leave.” I wonder why she is spending all her time in LA in this one restaurant/bar/coffee shop/cave. “Thomas just thinks the world of you, and I can see why.”

“Thomas would think the world of a rock,” I say.

Jessica just laughs and laughs.

“Did you get your boyfriend’s birth time?” I ask.

“I did!” she says.

Thank God. I do not want to talk to Jessica, but reading her boyfriend’s birth chart will serve my three primary goals at the moment. First, to convince my parents that I am rich. Second, to keep Marta off my ass. Third, to ensure I’ll never, ever have to move back to Riverside.

“Great,” I say. “Fork it over.”

She clicks some keys on her laptop and then reads me the information. “I’m so excited to hear what you say,” she says. “I sent your reading to my sister and a few other friends, and they were all shook.” I wonder if she remembers that this is the precise phrasing she used yesterday and that it is a term that has been out of style for at least three years.

“Let me know if they want readings,” I say. I have tunnel vision. If it isn’t going to make me money, I am not going to do it. This must be how Elon feels.

“I love your entrepreneurial spirit, Em,” she says. “You would kill it in New York.”

I perk up a bit. I always thought New York would eat me alive. At least that’s what my cousin Rachel said after a few too many margaritas once. She lived there for a few years after college and said I was “too fragile.”

“Maybe I’ll move there and we can be roommates!” I say, just to mess with Jessica. This serves my fourth primary goal: to start acting again.

Jessica’s eyes light up. “That would honestly be so fun.”

Surely her mom drank heavily while she was in utero. She has a lot of trouble picking up basic social signals. And I say this as someone who hasn’t had a friend in nearly a decade.

I am excited to look at Jessica’s boyfriend’s chart. His name, she tells me, is Chaz.

Jessica and Chaz are comically incompatible. His sun is in Scorpio, and Libra suns and Scorpio suns do not get along. Take, for example, my Scorpio sun and my raging disdain for Jessica. Libras are flighty and shallow, and Scorpios are dark and intense. Chaz probably hates her too. The other placements are similarly at odds.