No one said a word. We all just stared.

"Milo needs to be more in love with his new boyfriend?" I said.

"At least!" Mr. Brander said. "Give him a live-in boyfriend, a mother with Alzheimer's, terminal cancer, and an internship in Paris! Let's make it insanely difficult for these two boys to get together!" His eyes twinkled. "Okay, maybe not, but you know what I mean. The point is, the harder they have to fight to get back together, the more obstacles they have to overcome, then the more the audience will love us when they finally do."

We all sat there, sort of in awe of everything he'd just said. Behind the wheelchair, Lewis suppressed a smile.

Mr. Brander was absolutely right about my screenplay, and we all knew it - me, the stupid screenwriter who had written the whole d.a.m.n thing and never seen that incredibly glaring flaw, and the other producers, who had spent the last twenty minutes discussing it, but who hadn't said anything close to what Mr. Brander had said, despite it being the script's most obvious weakness.

In short, Mr. Brander was reminding us that he may have been older than the hydrogen atom - he may have gotten confused by too many names and sometimes even fell asleep in readings - but he still knew something about making movies.

I looked from Andrea to Justin to Evan, and it was like I could literally see the doubt leaving their eyes like little b.u.t.terflies fluttering off into the distance. My plan had worked! I'd distracted the producers long enough for Mr. Brander to finally rea.s.sure them that he knew what the h.e.l.l he was doing on this little movie of ours.

But the reality was, I'd been starting to wonder again about Mr. Brander myself. So the other good part of all this was that the b.u.t.terflies of doubt were fluttering away from me too.

Truthfully, I didn't really want to go home that night. Kevin was going to ask me about the reading, and I didn't want to lie to him, but I didn't want to tell him the truth either. I could just say, "It went great!" and leave it at that, because it had been pretty great in the end. But we weren't that kind of couple. We didn't keep secrets (except dumb little ones, like secret cookie-binging and the occasional online cyber-s.e.x romp). But if I told him everything that had really happened, I knew he'd jump to all the wrong conclusions. The point is, I didn't want to have a fight about his negativity about the movie project, not now when I was actually back to feeling pretty good about things.

Anyway, when I got back to the apartment building, I saw Regina and Zoe, Daniel's sister, sitting in the courtyard next to the pool. Regina was stretched out in one of the lounge chairs with a screenplay on her lap, and Zoe looked like she'd stopped to chat on her way in from work. So Zoe had a problem with Kevin and me being gay, but not Gina and Regina? That didn't seem fair.

Even so, I stopped. There was no point in my not being polite.

"Hey, there," I said.

They both looked over at me. They had different expressions: Regina looked fl.u.s.tered and Zoe's face darkened. The point is, neither one looked particularly happy to see me. Maybe I'd interrupted something between them.

Regina's mouth quickly segued into a friendly smile, but Zoe's didn't.

"Russel!" Regina said. "What's up? Have a seat - join us."

Now I didn't know what to do. Did they really want me to join them? On the other hand, I was still dreading seeing Kevin, so I sat down, but I felt stiff and out of place.

"Where you coming from?" Regina asked.

I told them about the A Cup of Joe reading, and also (briefly) that weird conversation I'd had with Kevin over the movie project before, and now how I didn't know what to say to him about how it went.

"Lie," Regina said.

"Really?" I said.

She nodded. "Maybe he'll understand, but maybe he won't, and it's not worth the ha.s.sle."

I considered this, but then immediately thought: Should I really be taking relationship advice from Regina?

I looked at Zoe, implicitly asking her opinion.

"Oh, who the h.e.l.l knows?" she said. "Tell him, or don't. What difference does it make?" I know this sounds like she was blowing me off, but it came out more like she was frustrated with her own life. Knowing Daniel, it was probably frustration with him.

"How'd you end up living with your brother anyway?" I said, but then immediately regretted it. I'd sort of spoken without thinking. What if their parents had died? What if she didn't like me a.s.suming she'd been talking about Daniel when she'd been so frustrated just then?

Her eyes latched onto me. There was still suspicion in them, but there was something else too: respect? She was impressed I'd figured out what had frustrated her. She didn't know that subtext happened to be my specialty, especially lately.

"Our parents were deported," she said. "More than ten years ago now."

"Oh, man, that so sucks," I said.

"But Daniel and I were both born here."

"So they're U.S. citizens," Regina said, and I nodded. It was interesting how Zoe didn't have the slightest trace of a Mexican accent, but Daniel did, even though it sounded like he'd spent his whole life in the U.S. What was that about?

"Anyway," Zoe went on, "Daniel was just a kid, but I was twenty-two, so we all decided that he and I would stay here, and I'd more or less raise him."

"That's a lot of pressure," I said, commiserating, and Zoe nodded. There was also an implied "but" in there somewhere, but for once I didn't want to be the one to bring it up.

"We had a plan," Zoe said. "I'd get a job, and Daniel would go to school."

But Daniel hasn't lived up to his part of the bargain, I thought. Or if he has, he's done the bare minimum.

"I've almost got him through high school," Zoe said. "Then I need to get him through college."

Daniel in college? I thought. Not hardly. But I immediately felt guilty for thinking it.

"Well, Kevin and I said we'd help him with his homework," I said.

Zoe's face instantly darkened again. "When?"

"When he was in our apartment."

"In your apartment?" Her face got darker still. She wasn't quite scowling, but it was close. I guess I'd known that Zoe didn't like Kevin and me, and I'd even known the reason why: Daniel had basically told us she thought her two gay neighbors were going to hit on her teenage brother. This wasn't even subtext anymore - it was outright text.

"It was last week," I said, feeling guilty again, but not quite sure what for. "He came to us. He knocked on our door."

She held up her hands, sort of a surrender. "I'm sorry. It's just..."

"He's driving you crazy," Regina said.

Zoe nodded. "I've worked so hard. And it feels like..."

"He's throwing it all away."

She nodded again, tightly.

I looked down at Zoe's hands, now clasped together on her lap. The knuckles were white, and the fingers were rough and blistered, skin flaking. I still didn't know what Zoe did for a living - I'd a.s.sumed she worked in an office, but who knows? Maybe she was a nurse, or a teacher who cleaned up after small kids. Anyway, she was literally working her hands to the bone for Daniel, and he was too stupid to appreciate it.

Some part of me felt like I should be mad at Zoe for basically implying that Kevin and I were molesting her brother - or even interested in molesting her brother. But I wasn't mad, or even offended. In fact, she was breaking my heart. Zoe and I didn't seem to have much in common, but we both desperately wanted something: she wanted a future for her little brother, and I wanted my d.a.m.n screenplay to be turned into a movie - proof that I wasn't a f.u.c.k up, that I had something to say to the world, something the world wanted to hear.

I was about to say something sympathetic when Kevin appeared in the courtyard.

"Oh!" I said. "Hey."

"Hey," he said, barely glancing over.

"Where were you?"

"Out for a walk." His shoulders were clenched, and he didn't move closer toward us, so I figured he wasn't in the mood to be social.

I looked at Regina and Zoe, sort of excusing myself with my eyes, then headed over Kevin's way.

As we walked up the stairs to our apartment, I said, "What's going on?"

"Charles is an a.s.shole, that's what's going on!" Charles was one of Kevin's supervisors. This wasn't the first time Kevin had complained about him.

"Why? What did he do?"

"You know, I don't even care that he's so eager to dumb the site down. What else is new? What I don't get is why he's not worried that everyone is going to see us as just another corporate shill. Credibility is the one thing we offer that other sites don't have. It's our whole f.u.c.king brand!"

We were inside the apartment now, so I said, "What does he want you to do?"

Kevin went off. (And in fairness to Kevin, it really did sound like Charles was being even more of an a.s.shole than usual.) But as Kevin talked, it occurred to me that he was so distracted by Charles that he wasn't going to ask me how the reading had gone. So I didn't have to make the choice between telling him what had happened or lying like Regina had said. I mean, Kevin already had a lot on his mind. Why add to it?

Look, I'm not arguing that I deserve credit for this or anything, that I was being particularly n.o.ble. Still, at the time, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

CHAPTER TEN.

That Sat.u.r.day, Otto invited me over to his place in Fairfax for another reading, this time of the scripts for the first season of his web series.

He lived in a big old house with a bunch of friends. It had seven bedrooms, I think, with at least ten people living there. They were all artists of some kind: actors, writers, filmmakers, and musicians. I guess you could say it was sort of a collective, that by living together as a group, they could all somehow manage to get by. According to Otto, there was always someone rehearsing a play or a music gig. They called their house the Hive - there was even a sign over the front door with painted bees and everything - which I thought was cool.

One thing I noticed right away: they weren't the cleanest bunch in the world. Actually, the place was disgusting. I seriously wondered if it had ever been vacuumed since the first Hivers had moved in however many years ago. There was the layer of grime you could see, like the dirt on the floor and Doritos crumbs on the couch, but then there was another layer you couldn't quite see, a stickiness to the linoleum and a feeling of general ickiness on all the furniture, like the vague fuzz on cheese that's gone bad. Not surprisingly, the house smelled like the alley behind a tavern. Oh, and there was equipment everywhere - cameras, guitars and amps, computers - but the tables and countertops were also covered with half-filled beer bottles and empty pizza boxes.

By this point, I had totally accepted that I needed to make sacrifices for my own art - packing up and moving to traffic-choked Los Angeles, spending too much money on a c.r.a.ppy one-bedroom apartment that didn't even have a working oven. But having to sit on that disgusting toilet in the Hive bathroom? Sorry, that would be beyond me.

There were eight people to read Otto's scripts. Everyone had a part, but it was the real actors who had the actual roles. (I was reading a bunch of characters who only had one line each: Barista, Producer #3, Receptionist, Spectator, and Parking Lot Attendant.) Otto introduced me around, and I kinda sorta wanted him to say, "This is the guy with the movie in development," but he didn't.

Sadly, it was immediately evident who was an actor, and who was a writer or other artist. Basically, the actors were all hot, sometimes shockingly so, and the writers and musicians weren't, also sometimes shockingly so. I was starting to see Otto's point about the Screenwriter Loophole. (There were other divisions too, like the fact that the musicians were completely covered with tattoos and piercings, and the actors and writers were mostly clean-cut, but this went beyond the scope of Otto's Los Angeles tutorial.) I talked to one guy, Jon (a hot actor), asking him where I might have seen him.

"Well," he said, "on Tumblr, someone pasted Darren Criss' face onto some nude modeling shots I did a few years back."

I smiled, even as I made a mental note to try to find those photos when I got home.

I talked to Lionel (a not-so-hot screenwriter), who told me about a new program where if you made less than twice the poverty level in Los Angeles - twenty-two thousand dollars a year - you could get a card that let you ride ma.s.s transit for half price.

And I talked to Maisy (another hot actor), who told me she'd gone to an audition the week before, and she'd been halfway through her reading when she'd realized that neither of the "producers" were wearing pants. (They'd actually wanted her to sign a release so they could post it to some fetish website.) At this point, I thought, Wait a minute, what about the Bulls.h.i.t Factor? None of Otto's friends were trying to impress me with wildly-inflated credits. On the contrary, they were telling me the actual truth about their lives as artists: how much they were struggling, how humiliating it could be. I guess it was because these were all Otto's friends, or maybe because it was just a web series reading, and the stakes were so much lower. Either way, I liked it. I never did bring up A Cup of Joe, and I was glad I hadn't.

Finally, we gathered to read through the scripts (and I quickly excused myself to use the bathroom one last time, despite the fact that it was so disgusting). When I got back, Otto said to the group, "Before we start, I wanted to say thanks to my friend Russel, who gave me the idea for this web series in the first place."

"I did not," I said, totally blushing. "You thought of it." But I was flattered he'd given me the nod.

We read the scripts after that. Each episode was only about five minutes long, and there were five episodes in all. They were really good, and I'm not just saying that. The first episode introduced the main character: a guy named Otto Digmore who's trying to make it as an actor in Los Angeles, but who also happens to have a big scar on his face.

One of the reoccurring bits of the series was that absolutely every person he meets is totally obsessed with his scar. They stare, they gawk, and they always end up saying, "Does it hurt?" At the end of the first episode, Otto sees a guy on his bike get run over by a car, and he's lying b.l.o.o.d.y in the middle of the street, dying, and Otto goes over to help him, and the first thing the guy says to Otto is, "Does it hurt?"

This made me feel a little guilty, because when we'd met for lunch that first time, I'd been preoccupied with Otto's scar too. On the other hand, I loved how the whole show was from Otto's point of view - how the joke was always on the people who stared and said stupid things, not on him. It never explained how Otto got his scars either, or told you how a person "should" react. It just showed you the reality of his life and let you draw your own conclusions.

There was another reoccurring bit where Otto goes to acting auditions. The producers are always as obsessed with his scar as everyone else, but when the audition is over, and he asks them if he got the part, they always say no, but they never give an honest answer why. Instead, they say things like, "I'm so sorry, we're looking for someone with, uh, fewer arm freckles."

Finally, in the last episode of the season, Otto goes to an audition and gets rejected as usual ("We're looking for someone with, uh, thicker earlobes"). But then Otto confronts the producers, like in the story he told me that day over lunch. And they tell him all the things Otto told me those real-life producers had really said.

Afterward, Otto walks down the street, depressed. In a voice-over, he thoughtfully explains how he can see the producers' point, that his scars are distracting, and it's not fair to expect them to risk their careers for his issue.

At this point, someone stops him on the street and says, "Does it hurt?"

And Otto punches him right in the face.

This got a huge laugh from everyone there. In fact, people laughed at almost every joke. None of the laughter was fake, including mine. Like Gina's comedy set, Otto's web series was the real thing.

When it was all over, I told Otto how much I liked it, that I thought it was really, really great. I sounded sincere, because I was sincere.

"But what are you going to do for season two?" I said. "Is 'Otto' in the show going to do a web series about an actor with facial scars?"

Otto laughed. "That's a really good question. I haven't really thought that far ahead. I guess I'll wait and see what people think of the first season."

I leaned in close and lowered my voice a little. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure. Anything."

"Is 'Otto' gay? The character, I mean. You didn't go into his romantic life at all."

Otto inhaled slowly. "Yeah, I really had to think about that."

"I'm not judging. I'm just curious."

"I guess I decided that sorta blurred the focus. Which makes me a big freakin' hypocrite, doesn't it? I told those producers how great it would be to have a character who just happens to have scars on his face - that the story wasn't about that. And I could do the same thing here, making 'Otto' gay. But it seemed like it confused things, like it would be distracting, exactly what those producers said. It's crazy, isn't it?"

"It's not that crazy," I said.

"But it's not like I gave him a female love interest, you know?" he said. "If I do make a second season, I'm totally going to give 'Otto' a hot boyfriend. You wanna audition?"

For the second time that afternoon, I blushed.