“I’m not stuck here,” I report to the joint before putting it back in my purse. “There is a way back home. There always is. I just can’t see it yet.”

  Maybe I have to smoke it in Santa Monica, on the beach where Masha was married? I’ll make it my first stop tomorrow. I grab a towel, dry off, and decide, while I’m here, to sample the body and face creams in my voluminous collection. I slather on too much.

  I enter my closet, large enough it can be entered. I laugh at the clothes I own. There’s no sign of the chenille pajamas Masha gave me, but this plush jersey robe will do. Then I go to the bathroom door and peek out—

  Glasswell sleeps in the glow of his bedside lamp, a book opened on his chest, reading glasses on his nose. I draw closer. Gently, I remove his glasses and place them on the table. He doesn’t stir at my touch. I lift the book up, save his place, and clock the cover: Branding Your Business in Ten Easy Steps.

  I squint at Glasswell, a lot confused and a little charmed. Does he still feel like he’s finding his brand? Even after six seasons of his show? I study his face, innocent and calm. Handsome. I think about how cool he was tonight.

  “Goodnight Glasswell,” I whisper and turn out his light.

  I pad down the hallway, searching for a guest bedroom. When I pass the library, I double back and enter the beautiful wood-paneled sanctuary. There must be a thousand books in here, but my eyes fall on my diaries. Maybe I’m my own fairy-apothecary. Maybe my words are the sky for me to fly home.

  I find the pale yellow journal. Senior year. It’s the last book on the shelf. My journals from age nineteen onward aren’t here. I look on the shelf below—and find only travel guides. Brazil, the Philippines, Turkey, Budapest. I wander all around the library but don’t find the other diaries. There should be ten more, including the magenta paisley-print book I’m halfway through filling this year. Where are the rest of my journals?

  I pause before a framed diploma with my name on it. Olivia Dusk, Juilliard Class of 2018. I press my hand to the glass.

  I went to Juilliard? And graduated on time? Which means I must have left for New York mere months after my father died. How could that be?

  I grab the pale yellow book from senior year.

  In one world, I know that this book, complete with its flailing twenty-seven-page prom diatribe, sits inside the glove box of my LEAF. Which sits in the parking garage at Shutters on the Beach. If it hasn’t been towed.

  In this world, maybe it tells a different story. Maybe it holds an answer.

  Chapter Twelve

  May 25, 2014

  Dear Princess Di,

  I awoke this morning as a girl. I write to you now as a woman. Seasoned, certain, alive. What changed?

  Everything.

  What changed it?

  A kiss.

  It was prom. You know that. I’ve been referencing it for pages. But I did not go into prom with stars in my eyes. I hardly expected a transformative experience. Unlike Masha (for whom prom presented a life or death romantic crisis), I’d written prom off as an eighties relic—monumental for Gen X drama queens, but just another festivity for me. I didn’t shop for a new dress. I barely brushed my hair. The plan was chill: snag a limo, sway with my friends for a few hours, call it a wrap.

  But then . . .

  We interrupt this story to fall back on our bed and scream into a pillow.

  Jake Glasswell. Jake and Olivia Glasswell. Olivia and Jake Dusk. Jake Dusk. Jake and Olivia Dusk-Glasswell. Olivia Dusk and Jake Glasswell invite you to celebrate their matrimony—

  PILLOW SCREAMING.

  You know what’s crazy? Until last night, I didn’t even like Jake.

  I thought he was full of himself and way too competitive, and, generally, all up in my business. From baseball to debate to student council, the boy slid into nearly all of my extracurriculars. Only now I realize why . . .

  Wow, I can’t even believe the things I used to think about him—that his goal in high school was to one-up me at every chance.

  It’s like when you imagine high school all summer before freshman year, so clearly, it’s like you’re conjuring reality. And then the moment you step inside the building and see the actual lockers painted their actual soft serve shade of brown, the moment you hear the roar of the hallway and feel the crush of backpacks from all sides, the pencils jutting out like knives—what you thought it would be like vanishes in the high-beam headlights of the hard, oncoming now.

  I love now.

  The only way to love eternally is to love now.

  And everything is different now. It’s like I never met Jake before tonight. It’s like we never spoke before Cupid swiped right on us on a curb outside the gym. I thought I was stepping out for air, but in the moments before Jake sat next to me, I looked up at the sky and felt something—

  Like a promise.

  Like an early warning of a soul-quake.

  He came outside. He looked up at the stars. I looked up at the stars. While I was wondering if he knew the names and shapes of constellations, he sat down and started talking.

  At first, I had my guard up; before prom, all I knew what to do with Jake Glasswell was compete. But something was different last night. The whole evening, our conversation had been natural, expansive. We talked about everything, from our families to our futures to what a hilarious disaster the Wednesday performance of Romeo and Juliet had been.

  Here’s where it got good:

  Jake said: “If you’d been my Juliet—”

  And I looked into his eyes and really saw him for the first time. I saw him in the role of Romeo. I saw me facing him on stage. And I wanted it.

  “Your Juliet?” I whispered.

  He blushed adorably. “If I’d been your Romeo. Is that better?”

  Why hadn’t he auditioned? What had made him look at me that day on the balcony and freeze? Our theater director had called out “Romeo, ascend!” but Jake just stared at me, shook his head, and walked out without a word. I’d always assumed he couldn’t imagine playing that love story opposite me, but suddenly I wondered: Was I missing something?

  He put his hand on my cheek and I was born. I didn’t have a cheek before Jake touched it. I didn’t have a heart until it pounded right then.

  “I know there’s another world, Olivia,” he whispered. “One where we . . .”

  “Where we what?”

  He tipped his head toward mine, so close his eyes filled my vision. I smelled his eucalyptus soap and felt his breath against my skin.

  Then he pulled back. His eyes were still closed and he grimaced.

  “This would be a waste.”

  “What?” I almost turned away. But then I thought about the stars crossing and uncrossing endlessly above, about the soul-quake warning I received right before Jake sat down. I thought about what was happening between us with our eyes. I took his hand and used it to push my fear away. “What could be a waste about this?”

  As his eyes mapped my face I saw a hint of shyness enter them. “Two people get only one first kiss,” he said. “Maybe we should work up to it, until you’re sure—”

  “You think I’m not sure what I want?” It almost made me laugh that he couldn’t tell exactly how I felt. It was that obvious to me.

  When he didn’t answer right away, I showed him. I put my lips on his. I kissed Jake Glasswell. And kissed and kissed and kissed him. Softly at first, I got to know his lips. Then he kissed me back and everything got more passionate and ten thousand times hotter. His hand moved from my cheek to the back of my head, his fingers tangling in my hair as he locked his lips deeply in mine.

  “Only one first kiss, huh?” I finally said with a gasp.

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “But what if the first one doesn’t end?”

  He shook his head and smiled.

  “Let’s find out,” he said, then he leaned in to kiss me again.

  Di: even though I’m here, now, writing this alone in my bedroom, I am still, in some realm, kissing Jake Glasswell. Always. Our first kiss hasn’t ended.

  I know it never will.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I awake in a cool silk cocoon, my head on a down pillow so supple it might be alive. My nose detects the slightest calming notes of ylang-ylang. I’m not all the way awake, and yet I somehow feel replenished. As if I, an infamous insomniac, may actually have had a good night’s sleep.

  No tossing and turning until my sheets are 98 percent on the floor? No heat in my lap commemorating a late-night iPad rabbit hole? No recurring dream of being evicted and living in a tent by Henry’s Tacos? Did I actually have deep and peaceful rest?

  My eyes open.

  Holy wow.

  Out a giant window, a sliver of sun crests the eastern mountains, trimming the sky a dizzy pink. It’s not rare for me to be up this early—but I don’t think the sunrise has ever been the first thing I’ve laid eyes on. This is a revelation, a private box in the opera house of life. This is the kind of sunrise that makes a person want to seize the day.

  I feel a feather-light caress on my left shoulder. I turn my head and see a man’s hand on my arm, his finger drawing circles on my skin. I lie very still. I picture the arm that must be connected to that hand. I trace it underneath my back, my neck, coming out the other side to connect with an underarm, then a chest—

  I turn my head and inhale.

  Glasswell’s spooning me. Shirtless.

  And . . . ?

  Yep. Pants-less.

  Underwear-less.

  “Aughhhh!” I shriek, leaping out of bed and taking the silk cocoon with me. This is a mistake whose implications I only realize once I’m standing up. Because I’ve left Glasswell—let’s just say volcanically exposed. Things are lying everywhere. While I’m busy trying not to look, Glasswell also leaps out of bed.

  “Whahappened?” He spins around, sending things flying everywhere.

  Since he’s not awake enough to notice that he’s naked and—I’m not looking—also harder than a diamond, I pitch the comforter at him.

  “Isitaspider?” he says, fighting his way out from inside the blanket.

  I take the opportunity to straighten the pajamas I put on last night. “Hey, De Beers,” I say to Jake, “how did I get here?” I point fiercely at the bed.

  “You fell asleep in the library,” he says.

  Then I remember. The journal I’d fallen asleep reading . . . The kiss that never happened . . . Except . . .

  I wrote about it in vivid, swoony detail, so explicit I can feel it in my lips and body, even now.

  Our first kiss hasn’t ended.

  I know it never will.

  After that, the journal was only blank pages. That kiss was the last entry I ever wrote.

  What if I wasn’t exaggerating?

  What if there really is another world?

  Where I did kiss Glasswell, and it did change both our lives?

  Where I went to Juilliard.

  Where we’re married. Like this, right here.

  “We need to talk,” I say.

  Glasswell—Jake—tilts his head. “What’s up?”

  “Remember prom?”

  “Patient-Reported Outcome Measure?”

  “I’m serious.”

  His brow lifts. He clocks my rigid body language. “You fell asleep reading your high school journal. I carried you in at about two.”

  A hazy memory surfaces—a scene I’d relegated to a dream. Jake lifting me from an antique library chair. Jake’s arms like a sanctuary. Jake carrying me through darkness into this cloudlike room. Jake lying down next to me.

  The silk cocoon wasn’t the fancy comforter. It was him. His fingers on my skin. His nearness and heat.

  How is it possible that the best sleep I’ve had in ages happened in his arms?

  “Are you okay?” Jake asks, rubbing his eyes.

  “Did we . . . move too fast? After prom?”

  Jake runs a hand over his stubble, his eyes locked on mine. Just when I think I’ve slipped up and revealed that I don’t belong here, he smiles. “I think it worked out alright.”

  But it didn’t. Not for me, because I don’t know what happened after that night. I’m missing miles of autobiography leading me to who I am. And I’ve lost my mom, my dog, and my best friend.

  I turn toward the sun. Where does one dream end and another dream begin? How do you walk the line between fantasy and spin? In my real life, I told myself that better days were just ahead. That was fantasy, sure, but then . . . what exactly is this? I don’t know who I am here. I don’t know what I want.

  What if everything I thought my life was is actually a dream I had last night? With Jake’s naked body looped around my leg?

  No. That life in the bungalow down the cliff was real. It was mine. It was hardscrabble, it was unadorned, but it was me. And I’m going to get it back.

  But how?

  I fall back on the bed and consider a quick, invigorating cry. But then Jake lands beside me, draping the comforter over us. He lays on his side, watching me with verdant eyes. He nuzzles his face in the crook of my neck, and oh boy, here it comes. When he exhales against my skin, it feels so good I could surrender everything. His breath holds me hostage. My cells rise toward him. I don’t know how he does it, turns me on with just his breathing.

  “Do you think we have time?” he whispers.

  He can only mean one thing . . .

  Morning sex.

  The rest of him moves closer. Including the lumber he seems to have purloined from the Petrified Forest.

  “I need to fuck my wife.”

  I see in his eyes he’s not acting. He’s not dreaming. He’s not imagining I’m someone else. High Life Jake Glasswell wants me. In this bed. Posthaste.

  And this absolutely cannot happen.

  As I scramble to the foot of the bed, Jake’s iPhone alarm goes off. He groans and rolls away but not before he takes a husband’s squeeze out of my ass. The shock of his touch sends a lurid lash through my body, leaving me paralyzed.

  “I’ll make coffee,” he says from the doorway.

  It takes a full hot minute for the effect of Jake’s touch to burn off. I know I’ve got to be out of this bed before he comes back, but I don’t know where to go.

  I think of Gram Parsons, who would be eating his Mexican breakfast about now.

  “Hang in there, burrito brother,” I say. “I’ll find you.”

  My phone buzzes on the bedside table. I pick it up and see a full screen of notifications, none of which make sense. A volley of texts from someone named Ivy Riñata. A lot of alerts from Deadline Hollywood—who turned that notification on? Jake Glasswell’s wacky showbiz wife, I suppose.

  I tap the icon for my email, remembering how, yesterday morning when I woke up, the red bubble said that upwards of eleven thousand were unread. Today there are only eight. Six of them bear a variation of the subject line Zombie Hospital.

  An ominous sensation grips my chest. I tell myself to breathe as I open one flagged Urgent, from a sender named Ivy Riñata.

  Attached are today’s sides. Remember call was pushed to 8. I reminded A you asked to leave by 6, but it may not happen. Peace and love,

  Today’s sides? Don’t daily sides get sent to a show’s cast and crew? Does this mean I work on Zombie Hospital? An actual job? That doesn’t sound like me. But it does explain where I got the fancy monogrammed pen.

  I click the attachment, which opens a pdf labeled Call Sheet, Zombie Hospital, Season Eight, Episode 811. Season Seven is airing now—Masha and I had a watch party for the premiere—so they would be filming Season Eight. And somehow, I’m a part of it.

  I mentally peruse my résumé, guessing I’m most qualified to do craft services, or maybe tutor actor kids on set. Then I remember the diploma hanging in this mansion’s library with my name on it. Juilliard. I went. I got the degree. Did I somehow parlay that into a role on a long-running show? It’s a far cry from Broadway, but it is a slanted version of what I once said I wanted.

  I wade through the dense document in the email, searching for my name, but before I find it Jake’s back in the doorway, bearing a breakfast tray.

  “Uh-oh,” he says, reading my expression. It makes me realize how furrowed my brow is, how tense my jaw. “Rough day?”

  “Do you know . . .” I pause. What I do for a living? I can’t ask that, and the fact that I almost did makes me realize something alarming. I’m beginning to view Jake Glasswell as a confidant. If Masha were on speaking terms with me, she’d be amazed at the irony. She’d sing:

  It’s like Jaaaaake on your wedding day.

  But Masha’s not around to sing that. Jake is all I’ve got.

  My stomach growls as he approaches with the tray. I would not say no to leftovers from last night, but when he gets near enough that I can see what he’s carrying, my face falls.

  A mug of black coffee, a mug of hot water with lemon, and a little glass bowl with six different kinds of vitamins.

  “Breakfast, love,” he says.

  “That’s not breakfast,” I say. “That’s a chemistry experiment.”

  “It’s what Aurora recommends,” he says, “and she knows of which she speaks.”

  “Don’t say that name when you’re the closest thing to punch.” My eyes flash at Jake and to my relief, he laughs.

  What is his relationship with Aurora in this realm? If he and I are somehow . . . married, then the two of them can’t be dating. Are they non-boinking cohosts? Why does Jake subject me to her dietary whims?

  Realizing that I’m too hungry to reason this out, I turn my thoughts to Winchell’s Donut House on Melrose and plan to stop there as soon as I escape from here.

  “You’ll be off by six, right?” Jake asks.