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list of upcoming events. A photo of Johnny, smiling into the camera and looking for all the world like he wanted to fuck whoever was on the other side of the lens… thud. Be still my little horny heart.
    There were other pictures of him, too, most of the handshake variety. Johnny with the mayor, with a local radio DJ, with a president of some museum. And then, a little more surprisingly, of Johnny with celebrities. Row after row of clickable thumbnails enlarged into shots of him next to some of the biggest movie stars of the sixties and seventies. Rock stars. Poets, novelists. A bunch of familiar faces next to his. In most of them, they were both looking at the camera, but there were a few more candid shots, and in those, whoever he was with invariably looked at him like they wanted to eat him. Or be fucked by him. I couldn’t blame them.
    Maybe he wasn’t so ashamed of his dingle-dallying past, after all. More searching turned up a half dozen interviews done on blogs that didn’t appear to have very many readers. Not that I was surprised. Any monkey with a computer can make a blog, and even though Johnny might’ve achieved a certain level of notoriety, it was still within a fairly small realm. He didn’t sound like he regretted anything he’d ever done, at least not in the interviews he’d done in the past few years, and while those had focused more on his current work, inevitably a few questions would slip in about his early movie-making days.
    “I don’t regret any of it,” Johnny told me from a video clip taken at some awards show I’d never heard of.
    The film was shaky, the sound bad, and the people walking past in the background looked a little scary. Whoever was filming also asked the questions, their voice androgynous and too loud in the microphone. Johnny didn’t seem terribly interested in being interviewed, though he did answer a few more questions.
    I settled back onto my pillows, laptop on my knees. Wikipedia did indeed have an entry on him, complete with links to dozens of articles in magazine and newspaper archives. Reviews of the films and entire websites devoted to discussing them. Links to places his art had hung, or was hanging. There was literally a day’s worth of research collected in this one webpage alone. If anyone Googled me—and I did myself a few times a month just to see what was out there—the only thing they’d find would be a list of accomplishments belonging to some other woman with my name. The question was not why there was so much information available about him, but how I’d lived for more than thirty years without being aware he existed.
    I shut down the computer and set it aside, then lay back on the pillows to think about this. I was deep in crush, the worst I’d had since sixth grade when I discovered boys for the first time. Worse than the secret love affair I’d had with John Cusack inside my head since the first time I saw Say Anything. My feelings for Johnny were a combination of both—he was someone I’d seen in movies, therefore, not “real,” yet he lived down the street. He drank coffee and wore striped scarves. He was accessible.
    “Snap out of it, Emm,” I scolded myself, and thought about getting out of my warm bed and shivering my way to the shower. I couldn’t quite make myself.
    I didn’t want to think about the three fugues I’d had the day before, but thinking of the hallucination I’d had featuring Johnny in all his bare-assed glory, I had to think about the fugues, too. Two minis and one slightly larger. None had lasted long, but it was the frequency that worried me.
    I was thirty-one years old and had never lived on my own before these past few months. I’d never worked farther away from a job than I could walk, because I was either not legally allowed, or was too afraid, to drive long distances. I’d spent my life dealing with the repercussions of those few, fleeting moments on the playground, but now I’d finally had a taste of the