I had already unbuckled my seat belt. I dragged my backpack — the only thing I’d brought from Minnesota — to
my side of the car. Leon’s eyes opened wide. He couldn’t tell if I was serious, which was ridiculous, because I was always serious.
Isabel. Only a few miles away.
My heart was starting to tumble inside me. I knew I should contain it, because I still had a long way to go. But I couldn’t quite pull it off. This day had been so many weeks of planning and dreaming in the making.
f live: Are you trying to get Leon to abandon a car on the interstate?
cole st. clair: I’m trying to save his life before it’s too late.
Come with me, Leon. We shall walk away from this car, you and I. We shall find fro-yo and make the world better.
Leon held up a helpless hand. Only moments before it had been a jazz hand. How he was letting me down.
leon: I can’t. You shouldn’t. Traffic is bad now, but in a few minutes, it’ ll be over. Just wait — I clapped my hand on his shoulder.
cole st. clair: Okay, I’m out. Thanks for having me on the show, Martin.
f live: Is Leon coming with you?
cole st. clair: It doesn’t look that way. Next time, though. Leon, enjoy the track. The account’s all settled, right? Good.
f live: Cole St. Clair, former frontman of NARKOTIKA.
A pleasure, as always.
cole st. clair: Now, that I’ve heard before.
f live: The world’s glad to have you back, Cole.
cole st. clair: The world says that now. Okay. Gotta go.
Hanging up, I opened the door. The car behind us let out the softest of honks as I climbed out. The heat — oh, the heat.
It was an emotion. It owned me. The air smelled of forty million cars and forty million flowers. I felt a spasm of pure adrenaline, memory of everything I’d ever done in California and anticipation of everything that could be done.
Leon was staring out plaintively, so I leaned in swiftly. “It’s never too late to change,” I told him.
“I can’t change,” he replied. It crushed him.
I said, “Stab it and steer, Leon.”
I slung my backpack over my shoulder, walked in front of an idling black Mercedes, and headed toward the closest exit.
Someone shouted, “NARKOTIKA forever!”
I blew him a kiss and then I jumped over the concrete barrier.
When I landed, I was in California.
Chapter Two
· isabel ·
There was always room for more monsters in L.A.
“Isabel, beautiful. Time to work,” said Sierra.
I had been working, watering Sierra’s ridiculous plants.
.blush., the tiny, concrete-floored outlet for Sierra (no.last.
name’s) clothing line, always contained more plants than clothing.
Sierra loved the look of the ferns and palms and orchids, but she never wanted to put in the effort to make them flourish.
Her talent rested more with the torture of dead things and inanimate objects. Things that you could stick a needle in without it getting angry. Things you could hang on a rack without violating human rights.
“I am working,” I said, stabbing a fertilizer spike into potting soil. “I’m keeping your plants alive.”
Sierra inserted two dried palm fronds into her updo, which was several shades closer to white than my blond hair. The addition worked for her; most things worked for someone who looked like her. She was a former supermodel. Former meaning last year. That’s seven years in dog years or L.A. time.
“Plants live on sunshine, gorgeous.”
“Sierra,” I said, “did your parents ever explain photosynthesis to you? It’s like this: When a plant and the sun love each other very much —”
“Christina is on her way,” Sierra interrupted. “Please, Isabel.
Endless smooches. Thanks.”
Ah, Christina. The Christina. She was a very good spender when she was in the mood, and she liked to be waited on.
Well, really she liked to know that she could be waited on if she wanted it. She did not want to be hovered over. She did not want to be patronized. She didn’t want someone to hold a pair of leggings for her. She didn’t want to be asked if she wanted to see it in champagne. She wanted a selection of attendants to be present so she could make a point of not asking them for anything.
So Sierra sent us all out to lean on the five pieces of furniture and examine our nails and text our boyfriends. All of us blond little monsters. Bangs sliced jagged and frosty, eyes lined kohl-black-sinister, lips bubblegum or cherry, all of us kissable as a plane crash.
Although I had only been here a few weeks, I was very good at this job. It wasn’t that Sierra’s other monsters were bad at elegantly folding tunics or boredly adjusting tanks on hangers.
It was that they didn’t know that the secret to selling Sierra’s clothing was to lounge on the stool near the front, not giving a damn, demonstrating to every potential customer exactly what the clothing would look like if they were to buy it and not give a damn.
The other monsters weren’t good at this because they gave a damn.
I was mostly focused on opening my eyes in the morning and moving my legs and eating enough food to keep my eyes opening and my legs moving. That was enough. If I added anything else to my emotional workload, I got angry, and when I got angry, I broke perfectly nice things.
Christina arrived. Her hair was crimped this time.
“Is this a new plant?” she asked Sierra.
“Yes,” Sierra replied. “Isn’t it the lushest of lush?”
Christina touched a leaf with a manicured nail. “What is it?”
Sierra touched it, too, but in a way that told me she was thinking of how it would look in her hair. “Lovely.”
While Christina browsed around the store, I stretched over the stool on my belly, typing the names of famous neurosurgeons into Google image search on my phone. I wore two of Sierra’s low, see-through tanks and a low-slung sisal belt and my favorite pair of leggings. Metallic and shimmery-rainbowbeautiful until you looked close and saw all the skulls. They were not Sierra’s design. Not quite her thing in general. The leggings were a little ugly, once you got over how pretty they were.
I stopped looking at surgeons and typed in define friendliness.
My mother, who had no friends, kept telling me that I had no friends other than my cousin Sofia and Grace, who lived in Minnesota. She was not wrong. My friendlessness was for a variety of reasons. For starters, I had only been at the school here for the last five months of my senior year. And second, it turned out that it was a lot harder to meet people once you’d graduated. Third, most of the girls at .blush. were older than I was and had twentysomething lives and problems and gave a damn when I did not.
And finally, I wasn’t friendly.
“Everything she’s wearing,” Christina said.
Her voice was very close, but I didn’t look up. I suspected, however, that she referred to me because of the way she had said it. It was like when there were two Isabels in my class growing up. They called us Isabel C. and Isabel D., but I knew which Isabel they meant before they got to the final initial.
I glanced up just long enough to see that Christina was staring at me in a mistrustful way. The others slithered and crawled to get her the tanks and the belt, unaware that in order to really get my look, you had to accessorize with death in the family and generalized heartbreak. The bass of the music overhead pulsed and whispered. I began to close windows on my phone. So many neurosurgeons were weird-looking. Cause or effect?
“Isabel,” Sierra said. “Christina wants your leggings.”
I didn’t look up from the screen. “I’m not interested.”
“Isabel, precious. She would like to buy them.”
I flicked my eyes up to where the Christina stood. Some celebrities don’t really look that famous in person. They’re a little dustier or shorter when the camera’s not looking. But Christina was not one of them. You’d know she was someone even if you didn’t recognize her face. Because she looked on purpose.
It can be incredibly intimidating, even in this town.
It was clear from her expression that she was very used to this being the case.
But I looked from my waiting boss to beautiful Christina and I thought, I have kissed more famous lips than yours.
I shrugged and looked back at my phone. I typed in frontal lobatomy. It autocorrected. Turns out you can’t spell lobotomy without ooo.
“Isabel.”
I didn’t look up. “The Artemis leggings in charcoal sort of do the same thing.” When nobody moved, I lifted a limp hand and jerked it in the direction of the Artemis collection.
Fifteen minutes later, Christina had bought two tanks, a sisal belt, and two pairs of Artemis leggings, all for the price of a cut-rate tonsillectomy.
After she’d gone, Sierra told me, “You are such a bitch.” She slapped my butt fondly.
I didn’t really like people to touch me.
I shoved off the stool and headed toward the back. “I’m going to go sit with the orchids now.”
“You’ve earned it.”
What I had earned was a trophy for generalized disinterest.
It felt as if it had taken all of my energy to be so limply disengaged.
As I pulled aside the linen curtain to the back room, I heard the front door open again. If it was Christina returning to make a second effort at my leggings, I was going to be forced to get loud, and I didn’t like getting loud.
But it wasn’t Christina I heard at the front of the store.
Instead, a very familiar voice said, “No, no, I’m looking for something very particular. Oh, wait, I just saw it.”
I turned around.
Cole St. Clair smiled lazily at me.
Chapter Three
· isabel ·
I gave so many damns at once that it actually hurt.
It was impossible to understand the truth of the moment.
For starters, because Cole St. Clair was like the Christina, in that he generally appeared famous and not true and not really present in any given moment. There was always a dissonance between him and his surroundings, as if he were being smoothly and handsomely projected from a distant location.
And second: Cole was a wolf.
I didn’t know if I was glad to see him or scared to see him.
I had seen him laid out on the floor with a needle in his arm; I’d seen him shift into a wolf right in front of me; I’d seen him begging me to help him die.
And third: He had seen me cry. I didn’t know if I could live with that.
Why are you here? Are you here for me?
“Heya,” he said. He was still smiling that slow, easy smile at me. He had the best smile in the world, and lots of people had told him about it. His awareness of the smile’s charms should have diminished its power, but that casual arrogance was part of its glory.
But I had been inoculated several months before, and since then, I’d been building up resistance. I was now immune.
We stood two feet apart. There was a buffer of history between us, and everything else pulling us together.
“You could have called,” I said stupidly.
He grinned wider. He gestured grandly at himself, narrowly avoiding knocking over a rack of filmy shirts. “That would’ve ruined this.”
The entire store looked different with him standing there.
Like he’d pulled the afternoon sun in the door with him.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Ta-da.” He was trying really hard to keep his Cole St. Clair smile on instead of his real one. Every time the real one came close to breaking through, my heart crashed.
I was aware that we had an audience. Not full-on staring — they were trying to be polite about it — but soft-focus curiosity.
I wanted to take this out onto the sidewalk, or into the back, or at least look at my hands to make sure they weren’t shaking like they felt they were, but I couldn’t quite put it all together.
Here was the thing: I was in love with Cole.
Or had been. Or was going to be. I couldn’t tell the difference.
I didn’t know if he was here for me, though, and I couldn’t take it if he wasn’t. There was no way, actually, that he’d come all this way from Minnesota for me. Probably he just stopped by to say hi after moving here for something else. That was why he hadn’t called first.
“Come on,” I snapped. “Out back. You have time?”
He idled after me as if time was all he had. On the way through the opening into the back room, he raised his eyebrow at Sierra as if he was used to my tone.
Was this really happening?
I led him through the back room, which was cluttered with neonatal leggings and aborted tunics in every shade of khaki.
Then we were out in the blue-washed alley. There was a trash bin, but it didn’t smell — it was full of cardboard and dead plants. There was Sierra’s old Beetle, but it didn’t run — it was also full of cardboard and dead plants.
As I led him out beside the car, I talked myself down, explaining to myself all of the ways that his being here changed nothing, meant nothing, was nothing. Nothing, nothing.
I turned around, my mouth open to say something else scathing about him not calling me before showing up in my state, in my work, in my life.
But then he wrapped his arms around me.
My breath stopped as if he’d slapped a hand over my mouth.
I didn’t hug him back right away, because I didn’t have enough information to know how to hug him back.
He smelled like strange airport hand soap and felt like a hole to fall into.
Cole stepped back. I couldn’t tell from his face what was going on.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“Hello, too,” he replied.