The door shoved shut. The shoes were still in front of me.
I closed my eyes. I heard a rustle, then felt someone push fingers into my wrist, felt my breath hitting something close. A hand, checking for respirations. I could smell aftershave.
Leon let out a relieved sigh.
A moment later, the hiss stopped. It had never been my ears.
It had always been the shower. I heard Leon’s shoes squelching on the damp floor.
“Can you sit up?” he asked me. Then, without waiting for my reply, he answered, “Let’s do that.”
A towel wrapped around me and then my armpits jerked and then, just like that, I was painfully dragged and propped into the corner by the sink.
I closed my eyes again.
In the filmy background, I heard Leon moving and running water in the sink and stepping back and forth. He put a cup to my lips and carefully tipped. There was a kind pause as I sputtered and breathed the liquid instead of swallowing it, and then he gave me some more. I felt more alive at once.
I said, “What is that? What are you giving me?”
“It’s water,” Leon replied. “You were lying in it, but you weren’t drinking it.”
“How did you get here?” I asked. My voice sounded like paper looked. “Are you real?”
“You weren’t picking up your phone,” Leon replied. “And I thought you might be in trouble. . . . I saw the episode.”
“It’s up already?”
He gave me a funny look. “It’s been up two days.”
I blew out my breath. It smelled pretty bad. “Oh.”
Leon retrieved a disposable coffee cup from the other room.
He handed it to me, watching me closely to make sure I wasn’t going to drop it. I sipped it as he dropped another towel onto the tile and began to push it around with his feet to mop up some of the water and blood.
“This is sweet,” I said. It wasn’t even coffee. It was sugar marinated in coffee. “Just how I like it.”
Leon shrugged. “Kids these days.”
Suddenly, I saw him in sharp focus, either because the phrase reminded me of when he’d brought me the energy drink in the studio, or because my system was prodded to life by the water in my dry mouth or the sugar in the coffee. Leon was dressed for work in his neat suit and clean black shoes. Morning sun through the bathroom window lit his impeccable form as he used a foot to push a towel around this filthy floor.
I was so grossly ashamed.
“Don’t —” I said. “Don’t do that. I’ll get it. God.”
Leon stopped. He put his hands in the pockets of his slacks.
“This is disgusting,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if I was talking about the floor or me or Leon seeing me like this. “This is not — not the side of me I wanted you to see, friend. This is not the grand future I had planned for our relationship.”
He shrugged his shoulders, hands still in pockets. “Things don’t always go like planned.”
“They do for me.”
“So you must have planned this, then.” He said it gently.
I gulped the last of the coffee. Both my stomach and my heart stung. “I’ve lost all my credibility. I’ll never be able to convince you to quit your job now.”
Leon’s eyes smiled, even though his mouth didn’t. “Was that the idea?”
“That was the idea. Joy and happiness for you, Leon, in this sunlit paradise.”
He took his phone from his pocket and stepped over the towel on the floor. Crouching beside me, he held his hand out for the empty coffee cup. He traded me for his phone.
“What am I doing?” I asked him.
“Looking.”
I looked. He’d opened it to his photo gallery. At the top was a photo of me, carefree and joyful, flipping arrogant devil horns at him. There was the photo we took at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the sky blazing behind crooked palm trees.
The photo of us on the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, the night I’d gone out with him after Isabel had left my apartment.
Those photos I’d expected. I didn’t expect the others. There were photos of surfers running out to the water. People knotted in front of clubs. A crazy, camel-shaped planter with palm trees jutting from it. A fiery sky behind the L.A. skyline. A neon sign that said frolic room. A peacock peering from behind a wall.
A man in blue underwear running down the sidewalk. David Bowie’s star on the Walk of Fame. A pagoda in Koreatown.
Bubbly, amiable graffiti on the side of an old van. A self-portrait of himself reflected in the side of his car, smiling, even though you could see that he was alone.
He’d done what I’d said. He’d become a tourist in his own city.
“It wasn’t about the job,” he told me. “It was just about me.”
After a pause, he asked, “Why did you run away from your parents?”
I closed my eyes. I could so clearly remember the pair of them in front of the Mustang, and it still killed me. “Because I can’t look at them.” There was a long pause, and he didn’t fill it.
“I thought I was going to end up like them, back when I lived in New York. I thought that was what a grown-up looked like.
I can’t take that.”
“Couldn’t.”
I opened my eyes. “What?”
“Couldn’t, not can’t. Because you’re not like them, right? You aren’t afraid of becoming that now.”
But I sort of was. It wasn’t that I was afraid of becoming them — it was more that I was afraid of becoming the Cole that I had been when I’d lived with them. The Cole who was so tired of the world. The me who realized there was no point to being here, where here meant life.
My stomach rumbled loud enough that we both heard it.
“I’m starving,” I said.
Leon said, “You should get breakfast with your parents.”
“I don’t know how to talk to them.”
He took his phone from me and straightened. “Like you’re talking to me. But maybe with some pants on.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
· isabel ·
I went to .blush. I did my job. I sold a lot of leggings. Sierra reminded me of her upcoming party.
I went to class. I did my clinicals. I rolled over a lot of old people and cleaned up a lot of soiled beds.
I went home. My mother made an appointment for my SUV to go to the body shop. My aunt gifted me a bouquet of therapist business cards. I had been in therapy for years, though.
Talk was cheap. I wanted both of them to scream at me for my SUV — my father would have. But he wasn’t there.
Wouldn’t ever be there.
Cole texted me. Talk?
I texted back. No.
He texted back. Sex?
I texted back. No.
He texted. Anything?
I didn’t reply. He didn’t text again.
Rinse and repeat. Job. Class. Home. Job. Class. Home.
I didn’t text Cole, but I kept updating Virtual Cole. I’d have to see him in order to give his phone back, and I didn’t think I could survive that. And I didn’t have it in me to screw him over by holding his Internet presence hostage. And anyway, updating Virtual Cole was the only thing that I had to remind me that life had ever changed at all.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
· cole ·
I called Grace right before I went into the diner. Actually, I called Sam, but Grace answered his phone.
“It’s the end,” I said. “I’m going to breakfast with my parents.”
“I had the worst dream about you last night,” Grace mused.
“Did I go around L.A. biting people? Because that already happened.”
“No,” she replied. “You came home.”
I hadn’t noticed until just that moment that my friendly neighborhood camera crew was sitting on the curb right around the corner. That meant my parents were already here.
I was not convinced I could do this, no matter what Leon said. The weather condition of my heart was murk.
Grace had been talking. She was still talking. She finished, “That’s really all there is.”
“Any advice?”
“Cole, I was just giving you advice.”
“Say it again. The summary version. The abstract.”
“Sam just told me to tell you that the most important thing is to not do what you did to them on the episode.”
“That won’t happen,” I replied, “because I doubt they’ll leave the keys in the car again. Wish me luck.”
She did, but I didn’t feel lucky. I went into the diner.
I spotted them immediately in one of the red vinyl booths.
They looked like a strange album cover, a perfectly matched older couple perfectly mismatched with the lime green wall behind them. I had picked this diner as a meeting place because I thought it might be more their style, but it was possible my parents didn’t match anything in this town.
They’d spotted me. They didn’t wave. That was fair. I deserved that.
I stood at the head of the booth.
“Hello, jolly parents,” I said. There was a very long pause. My mother dabbed her cheek with her napkin. “Can I join you?”
My father nodded.
The cameras settled across the way from us. My parents eyed them. In unison, they slid menus across the table to me.
As I sat, my father said, “We didn’t order yet.”
My mother asked, “What’s good here?” which was much better than any of the other questions I was afraid she was going to ask, like “Where have you been?” or “Why didn’t you call us?” or “Where is Victor?” or “Are you coming home?”
The problem was that I wanted to answer something like, I’m unsure of this fine establishment’s specialties, but I imagine that friendly staffer there will enlighten us! and then whirl over to seize a busboy for a bit of dramatic theater. But something about how they’d opened the conversation — in the roles of my parents — seemed to block this option. It forced me to be their son. It forced me to be that other me. The old me.
“I haven’t been here before,” I replied. Meekly. Gutlessly.
My voice was a stranger to me. They were dressed the same as the last time I’d seen them, or maybe all of their clothing looked the same. Put my older brother in the booth beside me, and the St. Clair family would be as it always had been. I didn’t know why I had come. I couldn’t do this.
“We saw where you were staying,” my mother said. “It seems like a nice neighborhood.”
Venice Beach was paradise on earth, the precise shape and color of my soul, but there was no way to explain it to them.
Not in terms they would understand. They would ask how people survived without garages and why the sidewalks were so ill kept.
My parents shuffled their menus. I moved the saltshaker and the pepper shaker, and lined up sugar packets and sweetener packets according to color.
“It only says poached on this one,” my father said to my mother in a low voice. “Do you think they will do this with sunny-side up?”
God, they even smelled like they always did. The same laundry detergent.
If I could just think of something to say in their language, maybe I could survive this.
The server came over. “Are you folks ready to order?”
She was bird-boned, like my mother, and about fifty. She was dressed like an old-fashioned fifties diner waitress, complete with apron. She held a little notepad and pencil. Her eyes looked tired of everything.
“What is the best thing?” I asked her. “Not just the best thing. The best-best thing. The thing that makes you tie that apron on in the morning each day and think, That is why I am going to work today, to serve that thing to customers who have not yet had that thing and, oh, what a memorable day those unaware initiates are about to have? That is the thing I would like to order. Whatever that is.”
She just blinked at me. She blinked at me for so long that I took her notepad and pencil out of her hand. I wrote THE
AMAZING THING on our ticket. I handed it back to her.
“I trust you,” I added.
She blinked at me more. “What about your folks?”
“They trust you, too,” I said. “Wait.” I snatched the pad back and added BUT NO CHOCOLATE. I put $55 in the total box.
I handed back the pad and pencil.
My parents stared at me. The server stared at me. I stared back. I had nothing better to say, so I performed the Cole St.
Clair smile.
She grinned abruptly, like she couldn’t help it. “Okay,” she said, in a totally different voice than before. “Okay, young man.
You’re on.”
As she headed back to the counter, I turned back to my parents.
And here was the strange thing. I wasn’t sure if the server had been enchanted, or if Grace’s advice had worked a spell, or if it was just that somehow I had finally drawn the logical line between Leon, the server, my parents, and everyone else in the world.
Because in just the amount of time it had taken to place my order, my parents had transformed. Suddenly, instead of my parents, I just saw two people in their late fifties, tourists in this glittering, strange place, tired from sleeping in an unfamiliar hotel room, eager to get back to routine. Their eyes were the same brand of weary as the server’s. Life had not gone as planned, but they muddled through.
There was nothing terrible about them. They had no particular power over me. No more than anyone else.
It had never been them. It had always been me.
This realization was like a word I had to be taught every time I heard it. The definition never seemed to sink in.
They were just ordinary people.