She meant the way. She smiled then, sharp and beautiful, just the girl I remembered appearing in the studio on day one, back before it all went to shit.
Magdalene opened up her hand, and in it was some ecstasy.
“Who’s your friend? I am.”
I hated how much I wanted to take it. My heart was crashing as if I already had.
But even more than that, I hated how Magdalene believed in that old version of me. She was so certain I’d already toppled.
The world didn’t want me to reinvent myself. Not a single person in it.
“Did Baby give that to you?” I asked.
She made a dismissive sound. It was accompanied by a very alcohol-scented breath. She was such a lovely and friendly drunk.
“Oh, Magdalene, Magdalene. What did she say when she asked you to be on the show?”
Magdalene smiled at me, her other hand on my face again.
This smile was a real one, not her camera-ready number from before. Her obscenely beautiful lips parted to reveal that she was slightly gap-toothed. I suddenly remembered Jeremy saying that everyone looked like kids to him, and just like that, I could see her as the little girl she must have been before she ever got discovered.
It was the saddest thing I’d ever imagined. I couldn’t comprehend how Jeremy could stand it.
“She told me to be myself,” Magdalene said.
I closed her hand back over the ecstasy. Her eyes widened in surprise.
Cole, what’s the way? Nobody but me was going to tell me how to be Cole St. Clair.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, me, too.”
As the camera van approached us, I put the car back in gear and screamed back the way I’d come.
Chapter Thirty
· isabel ·
I was not in the mood to pick out sexy boots. I was not even in the mood to stare at famous people and dissect what made them look famous. I was in the mood for lab work. Back when I’d been taking AP Biology, I’d discovered there was nothing like plucking and dicing and observing to occupy the more active parts of my brain. If nothing else, biology was relentlessly logical. You could not change the rules. You could only work within them.
But this was not biology. This was Sunset Plaza, which was sort of the opposite of biology. It defied logic. It was famous for being filled with famous people, but apart from that, it really wasn’t that exceptional. In fact, the inside of Erik’s didn’t look like much of anything. The narrow store boasted thin, hightraffic carpet, clear plastic, and dull lights that did nothing to replace the sun blocked by the yellow awning out front. .blush.
was way nicer, in my opinion.
But the shabby was how you knew Erik’s was an institution.
If you survived in this city without being drop-dead gorgeous, it meant you were really something. While this ordinary shop continued on with age and cunning, the brandnew, beautifully stark storefronts next door kept coming up for lease as their pretty new tenants got eaten by Los Angeles.
“Sofia,” I snapped, pulling her out of the way of a rogue Escalade. “Watch where you’re going.”
Sofia’s gaze fluttered to me, but she was still mostly watching the rest of the people on the Strip. “Did you see that woman over there? I think it was Christina —”
“Probably,” I interrupted. “Movie stars. That’s the view here.
Unless you’re one of them, I wouldn’t recommend walking out in front of traffic. It won’t stop.”
Sofia kept goggling, so I kept her arm and walked her, seeing-eye-dog-style, from our parking spot across the road to Erik’s. Once inside the dim store, I released her into the wild.
As she walked slowly past the racks, I pulled out Virtual Cole and looked to see how the world was reacting to the acoustic “Spacebar.”
Well. They were reacting well.
In fact, they thrashed and squealed and hated and shouted and clapped delightedly. The music blogs disseminated it.
Sound bites of the song provided soundtracks for animated GIFs of long-ago Cole throwing stuff out of a hotel room window.
Words flashed at the bottom: COLE ST. CLAIR IS BACK.
The four chambers of my heart were all vacant.
I updated Virtual Cole, replying and re-disseminating where necessary, but my mind was wandering back to Minnesota.
Cole dragged himself down the hallway of a house I couldn’t forget. He was a boy and a wolf and then a boy again. He begged me to help him to die. To die or to stay a wolf.
My mind moved down the hall, past Cole, into another memory in that house. My brother Jack, dying in the bedroom at the end of the hall. Crumpled on the bed, burning up, determined to stay human, or to die trying. Everything smelled like wolf and death. Maybe there wasn’t a difference between the two.
COLE ST. CLAIR IS BACK. Was the wolf back, too?
I realized I’d been trailing around after Sofia, eyes on my phone, for quite a while. I looked up to see that she was staring at a pair of strappy sandals that she would never wear. She stared at them for so long that I realized that she wasn’t actually looking at them.
“Sofia,” I said. “Are you waiting for them to speak?”
She rubbed her own cheek and blinked her dark lashes at me with an apologetic smile. “I’m just distracted. Dad’s coming for a visit!”
Immediately, I thought about the conversation in the kitchen with my parents. I couldn’t remember any of it as well as I remembered my father’s voice going strange when he told me we needed to talk. I felt like smashing some shoes off the shelves. People who say throwing shit when you’re angry doesn’t help have never thrown shit while they were angry.
“What a bucket of kittens that will be,” I said.
Sofia began to nod before she realized I was being sarcastic.
Then, all earnest, she said, “Mom said she might go out with us.”
Her face shone.
I couldn’t take the hope in her expression. “Oh, please! They aren’t getting back together, Sofia!”
My cousin looked like I’d smacked her. Her cheeks turned as flushed as if I had. “I didn’t say they were!”
“But your face said it. That’s not how the real world works.”
Predictably, her eyes shone with the threat of tears. “It’s not about that. We’re just going to spend the day together.”
“Really? Not even a little tiny bit of you thinks they will get back together?”
Sofia shook her head fiercely. She swiped the back of her hand across her eyes. They still looked fine, but she had a line of black mascara on her hand. She insisted, “I just want to spend time with him again. That’s all I care about.”
“Well, great,” I said. “I’m sure it won’t be awkward at all.”
She looked at her feet. I hated that she never fought back. I wouldn’t feel like such a jerk if she bothered to hit back. But she just smeared a hand over her skirt, smoothing it, and then over her hair, and then placed one hand in the other, like she was comforting it and sending it to sleep.
“I’m not in a good mood,” I told her.
“That’s okay.” She said it to her shoes.
“It’s not okay,” I said. “Tell me to shut up.”
A tear dripped onto Sofia’s shoe. “I don’t want to. You always say the truth, anyway.”
She didn’t mention the other half of the coin, though: that sometimes the truth wasn’t the most useful thing to add to a conversation. I knew now, minutes after I’d started the conversation, that the proper way to reply to “Dad’s coming for a visit!”
would have been, “Cool! Where are you going?”
“Right,” I said, “Yeah. Are you going to buy shoes?”
“I don’t need shoes.”
I bit my tongue before I asked her why she’d even come.
She’d come because I’d asked her. “Let’s just go before traffic gets bad. I have to get to Long Beach.”
It was hard to remember my mood of this morning. It was harder still to imagine any sort of birthday surprise going well enough to make up for the dismal expression on Sofia’s face.
The one I’d put there.
As I pushed out of the door, I almost ran into Christina.
After she swore at me and said, “Excuse you,” I realized it wasn’t actually Christina, just one of the dozens of interchangeable famous young women who frequented this place, women who looked gorgeous and slender on screen and were all knobbed elbows and big feet and huge sunglasses in person.
“Oh, please,” I told her, and clicked out onto the relentlessly sunny sidewalk.
Sofia, behind me, couldn’t look the fake Christina in the eye. Sofia’s hand was on her waist. I could tell she felt lumpy, because fake Christina was skim and Sofia was 2%. I could tell she felt sad, because her cousin was a bitch. I could tell that, despite it all, she was still a little excited about her father coming to visit.
I hated this place.
Chapter Thirty-One
· cole ·
I sat in the recording booth with the headphones, my legs resting on the music stand in front of the swivel chair, and listened to the track. I’d added my vocals to the chorus at the last moment.
I sounded good. The whole thing sounded good. Not just good, but good.
Though it had been hours and hours and I should have been exhausted, I felt like I’d just woken up. My heart had burst into frenzied life. Or my brain. Or my body.
Sometimes when I was done with a track, I had this moment where I knew it was going to take over the world. Was it about subjectivity? Knowing you’d just done something that would sound good played overhead at a roller-skating rink? Or was it a kind of telescoping sixth sense that only traveled through speaker cables?
I took out my phone. I called Sam, who didn’t pick up, and left a voicemail that was only the song. I called Grace and did the same.
I didn’t feel any more complete than I had before. I called Isabel, even though I knew she was in class. I didn’t expect her to pick up, but she did.
“I have just done something magnificent,” I told her. I wanted her there with me, in a raw, sudden, endless way that was like the song in my head. “Come bask in my glory.”
“I’m in class,” she said in a low voice. “Paraphrase it.”
I’d taken off my headphones, but the music kept playing through them. I could feel the bass pulsing a beat against my thigh. It felt like the end of the world. Or like the creation.
Something was exploding. I needed angels to attend me. It was not good for man to be alone in this state. “I just did.”
“Use your words.”
My words were I need you right now I need to kiss you I want to have you here I want to just have you but I struggled to translate.
“I’ve just recorded my first real track since I died and it is going to eat every dance floor in the country and it’s not even the best one I’ve written so far and someone is paying me to go into the studio and record the others and I can’t wait, I just can’t wait, I want to do it tonight, and I want you here because it is stupid to do it by myself.”
I didn’t know how many of those words I said out loud, or if those were even the ones I used. My brain was tripping over itself, all sudden adrenaline and feeling and music music music, and my mouth couldn’t keep up.
“Are you high?” Isabel asked suspiciously.
I laughed. I was high, but not the way she thought. “I did it.
I made a thing, Isabel!”
“Well done. I alr — dammit. I have to get off the phone.
Just remember” — she paused, and I thought I heard honking, but probably it was just voices at her class. I tried to tell myself that I was lucky that she had even picked up at all — “when a client is a different faith than you, it’s not an opportunity for you to evangelize, even if he’s on his deathbed.”
“Am I a CNA now?” I asked.
“Yes,” Isabel said. She hung up.
In the headphones on my lap, I heard the track loop back around to the beginning. I felt like I had put my foot on a gas pedal and had nowhere to go. Up up up.
Magdalene threw open the door. She grinned wildly. “Now,”
she said, “we celebrate.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
· isabel ·
It was taking forever to get to Cole. First it was an accident, and then a huge event of some kind in the city, and then rush hour, and then another accident. The cars inched and stuttered along the freeway. My forty-five-minute drive turned into an hour and a half turned into two hours. The sky pinked and then blazed and then blackened.
My mood went from bad to worse to the worst.
I told myself it would be worth it for the look on his face when I appeared in the studio, assuming he was even still at the studio when I got there.
I turned up my radio as loud as I could stand, trying to drown out the continuous loop of the scene with my parents in the kitchen. All the words were gone, leaving just their gestures behind. Like a television show with the sound turned down.
The name of the episode: “The Culpepers Get a Divorce.”
I didn’t know why I cared. My father hadn’t even been living with us. I was about to go off to college. They hated each other, and this is what grown-ups who hated each other did. It changed nothing, except for making it all official.
I couldn’t convince myself not to give a damn, though.
I focused on navigating to Magdalene’s studio instead. It hadn’t been a hard thing to find the address on the Internet, but I wasn’t sure what to expect. It looked like an old warehouse in the photos. An old warehouse in the middle of nowhere.
When I got there, it looked like a dance club.