“What?” Edgar asked. “Tell me what’s worse.”

“Not only have I shamed the royal family for all eternity, and forced my mother to have to explain everything to all my other relatives, and been canceled by people in countries I’ve never even heard of—in fact, places that might’ve declared themselves countries just so their newly formed governments could cancel me—but this year . . . I’m turning thirty.”

I’d been aggressively ignoring this birthday for the past five years, not just because I’d be ancient but because it loomed as a deadline: I would be thirty years old and have accomplished nothing. I would be thirty years old without a boyfriend. I would be thirty years old and I’d start to gain the ten pounds that I’d read accumulate with every decade of a person’s life after thirty. I’d be a thirty-year-old associate event terminal loser and I’d have to accept that this was my life.

“So what?” said Edgar. “I’m turning thirty as well.”

“I know,” I said. “We have the same birthday. January twenty-second.”

“We do? Why haven’t you told me this?”

“I don’t know, maybe I was saving it. Maybe it seems weird, as if we’re related. Maybe if things were going well, I thought we could celebrate together. Or maybe . . .”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe the fact that we share a birthday makes me hate you.”

“Why the hell do you hate me?”

“Because first of all, you look great and you’re only getting more handsome, so fuck you. And second, you don’t have to worry and punish yourself and climb over the railing of a bridge at midnight on January twenty-first. Because you already have—your life. You’ve got this incredible job where they can’t fire you.”

“I beg to differ—”

“I know, you could abdicate or whatever, but basically you’re like the pope or a Supreme Court justice or a seventy-eight-year-old soap opera star—being royal is a lifetime appointment. You know who you are. The world knows who you are. And sure, there are speed bumps, like for example, meeting me, but still: You’re there. You’re you. You’ve made it. So turning thirty means nothing.”

He flipped onto his side to face me, saying, “You are such a complete and total piece of shit.”

“What? Why?”