Today’s event was a press conference for the Royal Clean Water Initiative, a charitable organization devoted to providing drinkable water to the over a third of the world’s population that lacked such a necessity. Most of our team’s work entailed filling the stage with a podium, a sound system and restrained floral design. So all of this wouldn’t remind guests of a funeral, I’d commissioned, as a backdrop, a series of shimmering floor-to-ceiling acrylic panels, which, when layered and ingeniously lit, appeared to be a glistening, tumbling waterfall, flanked by photo blowups of Prince Edgar, who’d visited over thirty countries helping to dig wells, construct pipelines and bring global attention to his signature cause.

I’m not going to talk about Prince Edgar, because I hate his guts, since he’s perfection itself. I hate him because when I was little and I’d smear ice cream on my striped T-shirt, my parents would inevitably ask, “Why can’t you behave yourself, like that Prince Edgar, who’s always such a gentleman?”

I hate Prince Edgar because he’s almost exactly my age and has never had, as far as I can tell, a blemish, an awkwardly timed fart, a cataclysmic breakup or not just a bad hair day but even a bad hair moment. I hate him because he’s openly gay, which means every queer man in the world fantasizes, even if they won’t admit it, that Edgar’s their boyfriend or husband or secret when-he’s-in-town fuck buddy. There aren’t that many out dreamboats on such an international level; when seeking mass-media swoon material, gay men will sometimes insist that various movie or pop stars are actually gay, as if collective gossip is a form of conversion therapy.

I hate Prince Edgar because, as I stood atop the cherry picker and adjusted a banner, which pictured His Royal Perfection in a tux at a previous summit, I knew one thing for sure: I was the total opposite of Prince Edgar and I seriously wanted to slap his photo or have sex with it. But instead I signaled Mikaela to lower the cherry picker and I told the team they’d all done an awesome job and had earned a longer lunch break and could clear out, as the United Nations staff would be running the event itself.

I stayed behind to fulfill Cassandra’s most unbreakable edict, which was humiliating but at least could be done without anyone watching. Cassandra had a bizarre, we-are-all-one, zen-consciousness streak, which was Cassandra combining her daily-horoscope superstitions, her rampant OCD and her needing the constant intuition that she’d pleased and befriended Marie Kondo, Martha Stewart, Reese Witherspoon and Gwyneth Paltrow.