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after making out with Minda in the bar and, later, in Minda’s hotel room, Annie walked to the makeup trailer and, as her stylist fixed her face, noticed the cover of the latest issue of ’Razzi Magazine . “Co-Stars in Love,” read the headline, and there were two photos, one of Minda and one of Annie, doctored to look like they were shoulder to shoulder in a single picture. The stylist noticed Annie’s look of horror. “That’s you,” she said, pointing to the magazine. “I know,” Annie said. “And that’s Minda,” the stylist continued. “Yes,” Annie said, “I know.” There was a pause of perhaps ten seconds while Annie considered the ramifications of the cover. “It says you’re a couple,” the stylist said, and Annie grabbed that magazine and busted the door of the trailer open.
    When she found Minda, Annie read her a few lines from the article. “A close friend of the couple says that they are genuinely in love and have never been happier,” Annie recited. Minda smiled. “It’s sweet,” she said.
    “It’s not true,” Annie said.
    “Well, kind of,” Minda replied, still smiling.
    “Well, not really,” Annie said.
    “Apples and oranges.”
    “What?”
    “Apples and oranges.”
    “That doesn’t—”
    “Well, I think it’s sweet.”
    “And who is this close friend ?” Annie said. “I don’t have any close friends.”
    “It’s me,” Minda said, her smile less a smile and more like paralysis.
    “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
    “I told my publicist and she told some magazines and so now it’s official.”
    Annie felt like she was traveling downhill in a machine whose wheels had, at that exact moment, come off, sparks shooting past her face, nothing to do but wait until things had come to a complete stop and she could get out and run away.
    O nce they found a restaurant far enough away from the arcade and were seated, Annie placed her hand flat on the table, palm down. Her index and middle fingers were swelling at a rapid pace and she was finding it difficult to bend them. While Eric ate a hamburger that looked like something a person who had never seen a hamburger would create if challenged to do so, Annie told him about Minda, the misunderstanding that had transpired, the closeness that inevitably occurs when two people are putting their creative selves into a singular project. She didn’t tell him about the arguments and the stalking and the occasional moments when she would relent and sleep with Minda, the times that she thought she should just smother her with a pillow and rid the world of one more insane person. Unlike Minda, she kept some things to herself.
    “Well,” Eric said, his plate a pool of ketchup and mustard and mushrooms and fried onions and all the other things his hamburger had been unable to contain (Annie thought, “I could make a salad out of what fell out of your burger”), “what I really wanted to talk about, what I find most interesting about you, is your family.”
    Annie felt a bubble of air travel into her brain, a searing pain that flashed and was gone. Her family. Could she perhaps just keep talking about her tits and her lesbian stalker?
    “For instance,” he continued, “you don’t go by your real last name.”
    “My agent thought it would typecast me, nothing but horror films. It sounds made up anyways, don’t you think?” she asked.
    “A little. Is it?”
    “I don’t think so. It’s Eastern European; it might have been shortened at some point. My father said that we were descendants of the first genuine wolf-man to cross the Atlantic and come to America. He had killed so many people in Poland or Belarus or wherever that he had to hitch a ride on a steamer to America to avoid being arrested and killed. And then he came here and, every full moon, killed a bunch of Americans. Later, he told us that his ancestor had probably created the whole story himself as an elaborate hoax and had changed his name to help sell it. That was less