She's crazy. And just when you think you've reached the bottom of her craziness, there's a crazy underground garage. (Unknown)

In the coming days and weeks he almost became my, dare I say it, boyfriend. We never explicitly discussed the semantics of it. He stayed over at my fabulous apartment sometimes. He would kiss me by the pool, even in front of the others – like he was proud or at least marking his territory. I would run lines with him, I did that a lot. It was incredibly frustrating though because his was as dumb as a box of rocks.

I kneel on my bed in a little pair of shorts. Nicky loved shorts. He lay with his head comfortably on the pillow throwing a stupid ball up in the air and catching it, repeat.

“No, Nicky,” I sighed. “That’s the next scene. This is where…”

“Right, right, right,” he quickly stopped me and started with the correct sequence of lines.

I caught the ball out of the air. “No.”

“What is the line?”

I read it to him and he said, “Right, right, right.” I read the opposite part from the script in my hand as he stumbled through the next bit.

“No,” I said firmly. “You didn’t study these lines at all did you?”

“It’s just an audition. I can bring the script in. It doesn’t matter if I have my lines memorized.”

“Don’t you want to stand out? Don’t you want do an amazing job instead of just scraping by? You say it’s “just an audition” but isn’t that the most important part? If you don’t rock the audition, you don’t get the part.”

“You are exhausting.”

“What?”

“Even if I don’t do what you tell me to do, it’s exhausting just to listen to you.”

“Whatever. Run lines by yourself.”

I threw the script down beside him.

“I don’t need to run lines. I’ll just read them at the audition like everyone else.”

“I swear you don’t listen to anything I say.”

“I listen but I just choose to do things differently.”

“Incorrectly, you mean.”

He gave me that smile, that I’m-not-going-to-fight-with-you smile. I rolled my eyes as I stood up on the bed and took a towering step away from him. He nudged his heel against the back of my knee forcibly enough to make me plummet down to the bed, bouncing beside him.

Needless to say I was unimpressed. He laughed and tried to turn my frustration into something else but I was too irritated with him and his laziness. What I really wanted was a nice long line of heroin. Instead, because I wouldn’t risk the charmed life Rider had entrusted onto me, I went to the cupboard and got a bag of bite-size candy. I started chomping away and Nicky teased me about how I was going to get chubby, so I told him to get the hell out. He thought I was kidding until I screamed, nice and shrill. I was afraid only dogs would hear it but he soon stalked out with some comment about my craziness, like I cared.