Now the camera pans to a close-up of Glasswell’s face. And he looks . . . terrified. His skin is ashen, his jaw is tensed, sweat beads at his hairline. His eyes bore into the wall like he’s looking through the gates of hell.

  This image of him does something to me—something I don’t expect. I lean closer to the screen and feel, in the lowest part of my stomach, a cringe on his behalf.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I find myself telling him, wanting to swipe out of the app because this is too intimate. This is not the detached research I came for.

  “I—I don’t have to do this,” Jake’s voice rasps, barely audible. And I know he didn’t hear me, since that’s not physically possible according to any laws of time, space, or technology. But for an instant, it feels like he did. It feels like my words reached him in another realm. Like they were supposed to. Like they were just what he needed to hear.

  All at once, his arms release their death grip on the wall. For an instant, his expression relaxes completely. Then the video goes into slo-mo as Glasswell’s mouth connects with a fluorescent-green hold. Bloody mouthed, he cries out, “Ohhhhhhh sheeeeeeeeit” in 960 fps as his body rebounds off the wall. This was the meme. This was what social media seized on and made into a million jokes.

  This and the next shot of Jake crumpled on the floor in the fetal position, Aurora at the summit, covering a laugh with her hand.

  I stare at my phone, feeling an inexplicable desire to pass through my screen and go to Glasswell, to help him up off the ground—

  I jump when I hear the Lyft chime that asks if I want a new passenger. I do, but I feel a little nauseous as I put my car in Drive. I want to stop watching. I’ve seen too much already. But YouTube auto-plays a second video. This one is a recent interview between Glasswell and Oprah.

  I’m about to swipe to the Lyft app so I can focus on my passenger, my driving, and the safety of the world at large . . . but Oprah’s first words have me hooked.

  “We’ve gathered a group of Everything’s Jake viewers whose lives were changed by Jake Glasswell’s fall off the climbing wall. Jake, can you tell us a bit about this very special group of people?”

  Car horns blare. I hardly hear them. “Give me a break, Oprah. All he did was chip a tooth,” I mutter, even as a part of me knows this isn’t true. There was something else that happened in that clip. Something essential.

  “The stunt was meant to be a challenge,” Jake says, indulging Oprah. “For me to face an old fear of heights, dating back to when I was a child. I knew there was a risk of my panicking on air, but I wasn’t opposed to exposing myself in that way.”

  “Let’s give him a Nobel,” I say to Gram Parsons.

  “For the first week or so after that fall,” Glasswell continues, “I was just the butt of an internet joke. It comes with the job, and I’m used to it. I get that what happened was funny. But soon, I started getting letters from people who responded—not to the moment I spazzed out on the wall—but to the moment right before it.”

  “ ‘I don’t have to do this,’ ” Oprah feeds him the line with gravity.

  “That’s it,” Glasswell says. “And Beth, who’s sitting right there”—the camera cuts to a beaming blond woman, nodding as she fiddles with a gold chain at her neck—“she wrote to me that these simple words inspired her to leave a job where she didn’t feel valued.”

  “Amazing,” Oprah says. “In fact, every person we’ve invited here today incited a major life change after watching you say those words and surrender to the climbing wall.”

  “We call it hashtag JGlass Falling Up!” an older woman in a floral blouse chimes in from the panel.

  “It’s remarkable,” Glasswell says with fake humility. “People began to share so much with me after that episode that I found I wanted to share even more of my own truth. That day on the wall, I wasn’t just letting go of my fear of heights. I was also letting go of some old pain. From my father.”

  “Your father?” Oprah says.

  Glasswell takes a breath, folds his hands over his lap. “I lost my father when I was eighteen.”

  Now I slam on the brakes. Eighteen? I was eighteen when my dad died. I had my identity purged at that tender age, two weeks before my high school graduation. I missed out on my bright future because I stayed home to help my mom pick up the pieces of her life.

  Glasswell didn’t lose his father then—I watched them pose stiffly with a private photographer at graduation. The memory is burned into my brain because it made me sick with envy that he had a dad who was still alive. What the hell? Is Glasswell lying? To Oprah? Against my will, against my subconscious, against traffic, I’m intrigued.

  So’s Oprah.

  She grips Glasswell’s knee. “Go on, Jake. When you’re ready.”

  My car falls in line behind the other drivers in the rideshare lot, but my focus remains on my screen. On Glasswell. He’s good at this, letting the moment build around him. The camera zooms in on him and waits.

  It’s hard not to notice how well he’s aged. Boyish manhood suits him. He’s grown into his height, while maintaining his gangly high school angles. He still exudes the vibe of someone you want to get into trouble with, braided with a guy you’d give all your secrets to.

  So maybe he’s a better actor than I gave him credit for back in high school.

  Glasswell broods, gazing into the middle distance. His eyes pool with tears. I hold my breath. Seconds pass. He doesn’t say a word. Like a shooting star, a tear flashes on the surface of his cheek.

  “He’s faking it,” I say to Gram Parsons.

  Then, completely out of nowhere, a gigantic sob spumes from my chest. It bursts past my lips and eyes and suddenly I’m Old Faithful, wiping my eyes on my sleeve and trembling.

  Glasswell might be fake, but he’s released something real: When you lose a parent as a teenager, on the brink of your own adulthood, not only their death hangs over you. It’s also the death of who you might have been before they died. So when your life doesn’t look the way you wanted, every day gives you something more to grieve.

  But Glasswell doesn’t understand this. He’s lying. To Oprah. I need to turn off YouTube. I need to get a grip. I need another life.

  My back door opens.

  I scream and clench my grip on the phone, shooting it into the back seat like a salmon over a waterfall. It lands face up, still playing the Oprah interview, as my passenger slides in.

  My passenger—in his low-slung Yankees hat and aviator sunglasses, clutching a vintage green duffel bag—is a dead ringer for Glasswell.

  Thankfully, Glasswell doesn’t take economy rideshares from the airport.

  “Olivia?!?” Dead Ringer says with bizarre incredulity for a Lyft passenger. My name is on the app, right next to Red 2012 Nissan LEAF.

  Which makes it especially strange when my reply is: “Nope.”

  Anyone but me, anywhere but here.

  I take a deep breath, and the scent of eucalyptus fills my nose. No. No. No. No. I look at Gram Parsons. He smells it, too.

  Fate isn’t this much of a fucker, right?

  The Oprah interview is still playing in the back seat.

  “Give me that,” I say, reaching for my phone.

  Dead Ringer holds the phone out to me . . .

  On which we both now watch Glasswell say somberly: “It’s not just losing my father that hurts, it’s losing who I might have been—”

  “Shut up!” I beg the phone, at last clicking off the video. The horns of a thousand cars surround me like I’m the walls of Jericho. I’ve got my passenger. It’s time to get out of their way.

  Gram Parsons puts his paw on the gearshift, as if to say, “Drive.” It’s what a reasonable person would do. But I have no idea where I’m going. And I’m terrified that if I click my phone back on, Oprah will be waiting.

  In the rearview mirror, Dead Ringer lowers his sunglasses to reveal multi million-dollar grassy greens. He smiles crookedly and says, “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Olivia Dusk.”

  I clock the chipped left front tooth. I register the honeyed-gravel voice. I note my running mascara. I understand that I’m in hell.

  I hit the accelerator. In this most hideous of all possible moments, the only thing I can think is that at least my yellow journal is safe in my glove box, that I didn’t leave it open in the back seat.

  “This isn’t happening,” I say under my breath. I was not supposed to see this man until I was ready. Until I was dressed to kill and professionally blown out and not driving a Lyft and had spent at least half an hour pretending to meditate this afternoon.

  “Maybe it’s a dream.” I hear the smile in his voice, the click of his seat belt. “Though it feels fairly real. I thought I heard you were back in LA.”

  Back in LA? Does Glasswell still think I ever left LA? That I went to Juilliard after graduation, like the yearbook said I would? Oh God, he thinks I went to Juilliard and still ended up driving other people for a living in my piece of crap car? That’s even worse than the truth.

  “All these years, I kept waiting to see your name in lights in Times Square,” he says.

  “Nope,” I say, tight-lipped. “That’d be you.”

  “Ah yes, you’re right. It is me, isn’t it—”

  “Stop talking,” I say, waking up my phone and using cheetah speed to kill YouTube and open my Lyft app. When I see his destination—a residential street in Silver Lake—and Glasswell’s name—terrifyingly surreal—I’m certain my life has ended. Murdered by humiliation.

  I tug down my trucker cap, because what’s going on with my hair isn’t fit even for a corpse. I’m trying to drive and wondering about the state of my back seat and praying for an earthquake when he leans forward, his face between the seats, and says in that fucking voice:

  “You used to have a sense of humor.”

  “Noël Coward is funny,” I argue. “Dogs dressed as people, playing poker, are funny.”

  Gram Parsons growls Glasswell back into the back seat.

  “What’s your dog’s name?” Glasswell asks.

  “Gram Parsons.”

  Glasswell laughs under his breath. “That’s so Olivia. Let me guess. You stayed in the motel room in the desert where the real Gram Parsons died?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I knew it!” he says. “Did you sense his stylistic presence? Did you feel rock and country becoming one?”

  “Look, pal—”

  “I always wanted to stay there,” he says.

  “Don’t do that. Don’t mock me.”

  “I’m not . . .” he says, before seeming to concede. “What’d you think of my blooper reel?”

  “Your what?” I say in my best liar voice. Which is pretty bad.

  “It rolls into Oprah,” he says, like he knows I was deep-dive googling him.

  “I wasn’t—”

  “It’s fine,” he says. “I get it.”

  This humblebrag is infuriating enough that I accidentally take the on-ramp for the 405 when I very clearly should have gotten on the 105. I’d like to say I haven’t made this mistake before. Some of us are born rideshare drivers, and some of us probably shouldn’t have a license.

  The highway is a hellscape straight from central casting: ten jammed lanes of parked cars, fanning out for miles. As I realize we’re completely trapped on the endless curving on-ramp, my phone says this slowdown will add twenty-five minutes to the trip. Suddenly the half hour it should have taken to get Glasswell out of my car doubles.

  I’m supposed to meet my mom in fifty minutes to record the podcast. There’s no way I’ll make it all the way to the east side and then back to Santa Monica in time.

  If I exit now . . .

  If I take surface streets . . .

  If I kick Glasswell out of my car . . .

  Can I leave Glasswell in a vacant lot in Inglewood?

  This idea thrills me . . . until I imagine Masha catching wind of it. I bang my head against the steering wheel, causing my horn to honk, causing horns around me to honk, causing Gram Parsons to howl in tune.

  “Maybe your being my ride is lucky,” Glasswell says from the back seat.

  “Like when a bird shits on you?”

  He doesn’t clap back right away. I glance over my shoulder. He’s looking out his window, one long leg folded over the other in a figure four, hands clasped in his lap.

  “I was worried things might be awkward,” he says. “Between you and me. I think it’s good we’re clearing the air.”

  “Is that what you think is happening?”

  “I’m sure we can both at least agree we don’t want to mess up the rehearsal dinner tonight because of some old—”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” I say, not wanting to hear Jake describe how he rejected me a decade back. “Nothing will ruin Masha and Eli’s happiness this weekend. I’ll make sure of that.”

  “And I’m happy to help.”

  “And the only way you can help is to stay out of my way.” I slam on my brakes, narrowly avoiding a collision with an Aston Martin SUV. “That guy came out of nowhere!”

  “You are a terrible driver,” says Glasswell, checking his seat belt. “Do you enjoy this line of work, Dusk? I suppose striking fear into strangers’ hearts does seem on-brand for you.”

  “I should be asking why you’re slumming in a Nissan LEAF?” I crane my neck to confirm that this traffic does indeed stretch beyond the horizon. “Is some intern getting fired for not booking your black car?”

  “That’s a boring story,” he says.

  “Your specialty,” I say, which actually makes him laugh. “And just so you know, I’m only doing this because—”

  “There’s no shame in being a rideshare driver,” Glasswell says.

  My knuckles on the steering wheel turn white. I could wring Glasswell’s face like a sponge. He’s always had a gift for condescension. “My life,” I say, “is one hundred percent, absolutely great.”

  I think of my mom, and of Masha, and this feels essentially true. But saying it out loud to Glasswell makes it sound like a lie. It’s as if, from the moment he got in my car, Glasswell has been holding up a mirror to me that says, right above my face: Your life is a shitstorm.

  “No judgment, Olivia. I swear—”

  “I have a real job, okay? I’m a podcast producer for a very demanding host, and if this traffic doesn’t clear, or you don’t evaporate, I’m going to be late for an important recording session.”

  “You produce a podcast?” he says. “Wow, that’s cool.”

  “I really think I’m going to puke.”

  “What’s it about?”

  I pause. There’s the version I tell everyone, which is true, about my mother’s compulsive need to discuss the self-help books she reads, and how I channeled that into something fun and useful for us to do during the pandemic. And that we’ve had exactly twenty-one downloads, our two reviews are mixed, and Mom and I don’t care.

  Then I glimpse Glasswell’s arrogant face. “Book reviews.”

  “What genre? Classics? Sci-fi?” He leans in and drops his voice. “Erotica?”

  Gram Parsons growls. Glasswell retreats. I eye him in the rearview mirror and say, “Never utter that word to me again.”

  I don’t know if it’s Glasswell’s husky voice that’s gotten me so flustered or the fact that he still seems to expect an answer, but suddenly my mom’s taste in self-help books feels dubious. Why is it that so many things I feel good about become embarrassing under the gaze of this particular man?

  “You’re not going to tell me?” he says. “Just because I said erotic—”

  “Contemporary, okay? Mostly nonfiction.” It’s not an outright lie, but it’s enough to inspire a disappointed glance from Gram Parsons.

  “I’d love to do something like that,” Glasswell says.

  “Is there an Off switch to your pandering? You’re not on the air.”

  “Thank God.”

  We fall into miserable silence. I hate the downward tick of my battery meter. I hate the NPR blaring out the open window in the Tesla next to us. I hate that we’ve covered less than half a highway mile.

  I turn on the radio. Chuck Berry’s voice fills the car as he sings “You Never Can Tell.” It’s a beautiful song about a wedding, and I take this as a sign to center myself. I imagine Masha’s wedding going gorgeously tomorrow, bright smiles and joyous dancing, good food and great romance and ocean waves crashing in the background—

  “I can’t believe our best friends are getting married,” Glasswell says, shitting on the vibe.

  Who does he think he is? I’m permitted to feel that brand of wonder, because I’m an actual best friend to one of the people getting married. I’m the best friend who drives Masha to get her IUD put in and has a cherry Slurpee waiting when it’s time to wheel her from the procedure because she’s feeling faint. I’m the best friend who buys two pistachio muffins when they’re in stock at Sprouts because they’re Masha’s favorite—one to freeze! I’m the best friend who waits to watch The White Lotus season finale when Masha gets Covid and her power goes out the same weekend, because we’ve yet to miss a live-texting session, and some traditions are sacrosanct.

  Does Glasswell even count as Eli’s friend?

  As far as I can tell, Glasswell’s the buddy who has his assistant send a generic gift basket at Christmas. Who invites Eli at the very last minute to join a pre-planned trip to Vegas, probably when someone more important canceled, to watch something dumb like a fight he got free tickets to.

  Okay, men show their love in idiotic ways. But I take BBS with Masha as seriously as I take anything. Our bond isn’t something Glasswell gets to touch.

  Then again, this weekend, friendship means giving Masha the loveliest, least dramatic wedding of all time. The friend of my best friend’s fiancé cannot be my enemy—at least from rehearsal dinner through Sunday brunch.