So they were siblings, not mother and son. But it sure looked like she was raising him. I wondered what the story was.

"Hey," I said to Daniel.

He didn't answer. Maybe he didn't speak English, but it felt more like he couldn't be bothered responding. There was an air of mischievousness about him, or maybe even outright defiance, like he was one of the trickster G.o.ds, Loki in Norse mythology, or Prometheus among the Greeks.

Zoe looked like she'd had it, so before we could say anything else, she said, "Well, it's nice to meet you both." Then she trudged up the stairs.

As they disappeared, I glanced up at Daniel again. He was still ignoring me, but I should probably point out that he was a little like a Greek or Norse G.o.d in one other way too: teenager or not, he was one of the cutest guys I'd ever seen.

The following week, after we were finally unpacked, Kevin was washing the dishes after dinner, and I was trying to preheat the oven so I could make cookies. But the oven was gas, and so old it didn't even have a pilot light. You had to actually open the oven up and light it with a match.

As I was trying to light it, I said to Kevin, "Maybe this is how he did it. The guy who killed himself in our apartment? Maybe he put his head in the gas oven."

"We don't even know if that's true," Kevin said.

"Yeah, but if it is true, maybe he did it here. It sure looks old enough." It was kind of creepy looking into that darkened oven, thinking that someone might have once died there, in the exact spot where I was now.

The apartment had no dishwasher, so Kevin was drying the dishes by hand. "Who knows?" he said. "I bet it's just a story."

"Yeah," I said.

The oven still wasn't lighting. How the h.e.l.l hard was it to light natural gas anyway? I'd turned the crank.

Then I realized something. "I don't smell anything," I said. "I'm not even sure the gas is turned on. But doesn't it have to be? I mean, doesn't the hot water tank use gas? Darn it, I wanted to make snickerdoodles."

"Make what?" Kevin said.

"They were my favorite cookie as a kid."

"We need to call the landlord."

I sat back on my heels. "Not yet. I should totally be able to figure this out. Especially since I'm the butch one in this relationship."

Kevin rolled his eyes. "Are we really doing this?"

"What?" I said matter-of-factly. "You know it's true. It's what everyone says after they meet us. We're both butch, but I'm the impossibly butch one."

"First of all, who cares who's butch? Aren't we beyond all that by now? But if someone did care, the fact that you have to be the butch one just proves how totally insecure you are, that you're not really the butch one."

Hmmm, Kevin had a good point. I'd expected this sparring to go on longer. But he'd already teased me into a corner.

"You know," I said, "I think I liked you better back in high school when you were a dumb jock."

Kevin laughed.

In the other room, my phone started to chime. I couldn't think the last time someone had actually called me.

"It's probably your mom asking if we're okay," Kevin said.

Thinking he was right, I almost ignored it. But I didn't know what else to do to get the stove lit, so I decided to take the call after all.

Unknown caller, the screen said.

I answered it. "This is Russel."

"Russel Middlebrook?" said the voice on the other end of the line.

"That's me. Who's this?"

"My name is Lewis Dunn. I'm the personal a.s.sistant to Isaac Brander. He's read your screenplay A Cup of Joe, and he'd love to talk to you about it."

I was confused. "What?"

"Are you the author of A Cup of Joe?" the voice said. "The screenplay?"

"Yeah," I said, still confused. I'd written that screenplay earlier in the year. It was sort of a romantic "dramedy," the story of a twenty-three-year-old barista named Joe living in Seattle, unhappy with his life. He runs into his old boyfriend from high school, Milo, and decides that getting back together with him will solve all his problems, but Milo has a new boyfriend now. Meanwhile, in an interweaving "flashback" storyline, we learn the real story behind Joe and Milo's relationship in high school (which isn't at all what you think).

The screenplay was (very, very loosely) based on my relationship with Kevin, and I'd been pretty happy with it. It was a "gay" story, but it wasn't about being gay. There was no gay angst, not even in the high school flashbacks, and there was also no straight female best friend, no b.i.t.c.hy gay sidekick, and absolutely no gay hustlers or self-destructive party boys. It was just the story of two guys trying to figure out their lives.

I'd sent out a bunch of query emails to agents and producers, but only a couple had even responded. I'd also entered a bunch of (expensive) screenwriting contests, placed in a couple, and also put the script on TheBlackList.com and Inktip.com - two (expensive) websites where writers post their scripts so "Hollywood insiders" can supposedly read them. But no one had ever gotten back to me. The problem hadn't been finding people willing to take my money in order to get the word out about my screenplay. The problem had been finding any Hollywood insiders who actually gave a f.u.c.k about reading it.

"Didn't you send Mr. Brander your script?" said the voice on the phone.

It was finally becoming clear to me: I was hearing back from one of the handful of people who had actually requested my screenplay.

"Oh!" I said. "Yes! Of course. Let me just check my notes," I said, brazenly lying. I hesitated a moment, checking nothing whatsoever. Then I said, "Yes, I absolutely did send Mr. Brander my script. You just caught me by surprise."

"Well, Mr. Brander would like to talk to you," the voice said.

"About what?"

Yes, I really am that slow.

There was a moment's hesitation on the other end. I, of course, kept kicking myself.

"Um, about your script," the voice said. "Mr. Brander thinks he might be able to do something with it."

Do something? I thought. As in, turn it into a movie? This couldn't really be happening. Could it?

"Do you have representation?" the voice said.

"Uh, not currently, but I've been talking to a couple of different agents." Translation: one single agent had requested a different screenplay of mine six months ago, and I hadn't heard a d.a.m.n thing from him ever since.

"You're based here in town, right? The screenplay says you are."

That meant this was a recent submission. I'd started putting our new address on my scripts three weeks ago, right after Kevin and I had signed the lease. Someone had told me that producers paid more attention to screenplays with Los Angeles addresses. Apparently they were right!

"I am based in Los Angeles," I said. "Just off Franklin and Ivar. I was just out in the pool!"

Okay, so that was probably too much detail. But he ignored it.

"Would you be willing to come for a meeting with Mr. Brander?"

"Let me just check my calendar," I said, brazenly lying again. "Yes, I think I might possibly be able to make that happen." It was only after I said this that I realized he hadn't given me a time or a date yet. So much for the Bulls.h.i.t Factor.

"Tomorrow at one?"

I thought about "consulting my calendar" again, but that seemed sort of ridiculous at this point.

"Tomorrow at one would be perfect."

"Would you be willing to meet here at the house? It's quite a bit more convenient for Mr. Brander."

"No, sure, that's fine." Then I listened while he gave me the address. He only had to repeat it four times as I scrambled for a pen and paper, and then (of course) the pen didn't work at first.

Finally, I had the address, and I hung up the phone. I found Kevin in the kitchen. "You're not going to believe who that was."

"Who was it?"

I told him.

He stared at me, confused. He didn't understand. I hadn't understood at first either. I wasn't sure I understood now.

"You're kidding, right?" he said.

"I'm not kidding. That's who was just on the phone." Kevin already knew how I'd been submitting scripts for months now.

"This has to be a scam or something," Kevin said.

"Yeah," I said. Even now, I was "excited," but not excited, because this couldn't possibly be real. My sixth day in Hollywood and a producer calls me up and wants to produce one of my scripts? What were the odds?

"We need to look him up," Kevin said.

"Huh?" I said.

"On IMDb." The full name of the company Kevin worked for was the Internet Movie Database, and it happens to be the definitive list of everyone who's anyone in Hollywood. "What was his name again?"

I looked at the piece of paper. Of course I hadn't written it down - I'd only written the address. I hadn't written the a.s.sistant's name either.

"Emmett Brander," I said. "No, wait, Isaac, I think."

Kevin was already sitting down at the computer. He typed and scanned for a minute.

"Well?" I said.

He sat back in the chair. He was either totally disgusted or dutifully impressed, and I couldn't tell which.

"What?" I said. "What?"

"If this is the guy he says he is, he's made movies with Sally Field. And Robert Redford. And Burt Reynolds."

I read the list of his credits. It was a whole bunch of movies I recognized, and a few I'd actually seen. Kevin and I stared at each other now.

There has to be a catch, I thought.

Otto and I had joked about a producer calling me up and wanting to produce my screenplays. He'd said that didn't happen - that people didn't just breeze into town and become superstars. Otto had specifically said that it had happened, like, once in the whole history of the city.

But maybe it had finally happened a second time. And maybe the person it had finally happened to was me.

CHAPTER THREE.

Needless to say, I barely slept all night. How would the meeting go? What would I say? More importantly, what would I wear? I knew what I thought looked good, but as Otto had made vividly clear, I had completely failed the Los Angeles "shoe" test. I owned a grand total of three pairs of shoes, one of which were my Onitsuka Tigers, and the other was a pair of Ecco dress shoes, like for a jacket and tie. Sadly, Kevin and I wore different shoe sizes. So I had to rely on my one pair of generic "dress casual" shoes, and hope that Mr. Brander knew about the Screenwriter Loophole, at least until Otto could take me out shopping. The good news is I'd picked up some Gold Bond at CVS the night before.

I planned on arriving at the meeting forty-five minutes early in case anything went wrong.

Something did go wrong: I got stuck in traffic. I was also nearly killed when a minivan almost sideswiped me on North Cahuenga, but I was rapidly discovering that kind of thing was so commonplace that it was barely even worth mentioning. I could actually see Kevin and me in three months, with me coming home to our apartment after another meeting: Kevin: Oh, hey, anything unusual happen today?

Me: I almost got killed three times on my way to Burbank.

Kevin: So nothing unusual?

Then, of course, I got lost. The house was off Sunset Boulevard, in a hilly neighborhood just before Silver Lake. Some of the houses looked pretty nice, others not so much: a perfectly tended garden of succulents and crushed granite gravel on one side of the street, a chain-link fence and concrete cinderblocks on the other. This was clearly an area in transition, but I couldn't quite tell if it was transitioning up or down.

Finally, I found the address with a whole six minutes to spare. Was it a good idea to be fashionably late to something like this? I thought about texting to ask Otto, but decided I didn't even want to try to be That Guy, especially since I already knew I didn't have the right shoes, and I couldn't really be That Guy under the best of circ.u.mstances.

I parked along the street, but the house itself was hidden behind a huge, untrimmed hedge. I walked along looking for an entrance, but there was no way in except the gated driveway, which had a little intercom on a metal pole positioned to one side. That made me think I'd already made a blunder, that I was supposed to drive up into the driveway in my car, not walk in. But I was already on the verge of being late, and I was absolutely positive that I didn't want Isaac Brander to see my car anyway. My car was even more embarra.s.sing than my shoes!

I walked to the intercom and was about to press the b.u.t.ton when I had to stop and take a moment. This was it: the place and time where my screenwriting career could very well make a huge leap forward. Conversely, I could say or do something stupid, and the whole thing would disappear around me.

"Russel?" said the voice on the intercom, even before I'd pushed anything.

Of course I jumped.