Actually I want you 12 page

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, high-traffic 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 brand-new, 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.

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.”

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.

The parking lot was full of cars. Dozens upon dozens of them, packed in, parked sideways, parking one another in. People had spilled into the parking lot, laughing and drinking.

A party.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

I wasn’t really in the headspace for a party.

For a brief, selfish second, I thought about turning around and going home. Cole couldn’t be disappointed, because he hadn’t known I was coming.

But then I thought about what was waiting for me at home.

I should’ve just gone to class.

I closed my eyes, then opened them and checked my makeup in the rearview mirror. I tried to imagine what I’d find on the other side of those doors. A big party full of people having a great time, and then Cole feeling sorry for himself in a recording booth, sad and alone in a crowd. Cole always liked to see himself as alone, no matter how much the circumstances disputed it.

The only thing that made me move at all was the idea of how happy he’d be to see me. I got out of the car.

Inside, the massive warehouse seethed. Music pounded overhead. The floor was alcohol-slicked sticky. There were a million people dancing. A lot of girls. Everything smelled like beer. Over everything was a pair of giant red lips.

Then I found him.

Cole St. Clair was sitting on a sofa being carried by four other guys, and a girl was sitting on the other side of the couch, and she was famous and she was beautiful and she had her lusciously golden arm around his neck. The cameras gazed adoringly.

My stomach felt it first. I couldn’t move.

I tried to be fair. I told myself it wasn’t like he was making out with someone else. I told myself he had only sounded high on the phone, that I didn’t know for sure. I told myself that I had only thought I’d smelled wolf on him before; I hadn’t actually seen him shift since he’d come here.

I told myself it was possible he was clean and he was not a cheater and that he wasn’t NARKOTIKA’s Cole St. Clair.

But I couldn’t take my eyes off him sitting on that couch with that impossibly beautiful girl. Because he sure as hell looked like NARKOTIKA’s Cole St. Clair to me.

Humiliation and anger clawed inside me.

He didn’t know I was here.

I was going to go.

I was going to go.

I was going to go. As soon as I could look away.

Cole saw me just as I managed to rip my feet from the floor and turn, my hand fumbling in my purse for my car keys. I saw his eyes find me, just for a second, and then I knew I’d stayed too long. Because now it was going to get —

“Isabel! Hey! Hey.”

I kept walking. The door to the warehouse felt miles away. I could see it, but it never got any closer. I didn’t turn around. I kept going. People moved out of my way.

“Isabel!”

Outside, in the black night, I sucked in breaths of empty air, trying to fill this hollowed-out cavity.

“Hey.” Cole grabbed my arm, stopping me. This close, I could smell the alcohol and weed. And wolf. Wolf wolf wolf. It was all over him.

I’d never left that house in Minnesota.

I spun. “Let. Go. Of. Me.”

In the dark of the lot, his eyes were bright and glittery, but there were bags beneath them. He was tired and awake. High and low. Going up and burning down. Turning people into objects and throwing them away.

“What is your problem?” he asked.

“That question is not even remotely appropriate for this situation,” I replied. I felt like I needed to shout to be heard over the music, but really it was just that I could feel it in my feet from inside the building.

“What situation is that? Are you going to clue me in?”

I flicked a finger at him. “You! You are the situation!”

Cole narrowed his eyes. “So the situation is awesome?”

The wire-framed industrial light on the outside of the warehouse was twitching and trembling to the beat inside. Every time I thought of him with that girl on the couch, every time I inhaled and smelled the beer, something inside me did the same thing. I didn’t know why I thought I could do this. “You know what? Just — I’m not even.”

I jerked my arm out of his hand and started back toward my car. It was parked near the edge of the lot. It hadn’t seemed so far away when I’d gotten here.

“So now it’s a crime to exist,” Cole said. “That explains a lot.”

The indignation was too much. I snapped, “Call me when you’re sober. Or actually, don’t.”

There was a long pause, long enough that I unlocked my car and opened the door.

Then he said, “Sober? I am sober.”

This was so ludicrous that I turned to face him. “Come on, Cole. Don’t insult me. I’m not an idiot.”

His face was a broad expression of absolute persecution. He spread his arms out. “I haven’t been drinking.”

“I can smell it on you!” You didn’t grow up in my house without knowing the smell of hard liquor and beer and wine. Without knowing how exaggerated it made the drunk. How they became a caricature of themselves: silent if they were quiet, a hurricane if they were irritable.

“There is beer in the building,” Cole said. “There was beer on the couch. There is not beer inside me.”

“Right. And that girl?”

“What girl?”

“You were wearing her? That one?”

Dismissively, he said, “Magdalene. She’s a sloppy drunk. That was nothing.”

Nothing. Maybe to him. Maybe to him it didn’t count unless you were naked. But to me, who had never been someone’s girlfriend — I was so done. I had driven out here for this stupid surprise, this birthday surprise, and I was tired, and I wished I’d never come and seen it and I wished he hadn’t ever come into .blush. in the first place and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I wanted to go back to not giving any damns. I missed that Isabel. Everything hurt. “And the wolf?”

He didn’t answer right away. His eyes flickered an answer, swift and guilty. God, I couldn’t take it. I’d known it all along, and I’d just been playing pretend.

“So you’re just Cole again, is it?” I demanded. “Cole St. Clair is back!”

“What? Oh. It’s not like that.”

I fired back, “Sure looks like that.”

“Looks and is aren’t the same. Otherwise they’d be the same word. Precision, Culpeper. I thought that was your thing. If you’d been here instead of always saying you weren’t going to be part of the Cole St. Clair show, you’d have seen what really happened here today. Not just been part of the audience, believing the hype.”

“Don’t try to make me feel guilty about not being a player in your life.”

“If you feel guilty, it’s because you put it there, not me. I never asked you to be on the show.”

“Asked! You didn’t have to. It’s like a giant cloud that follows me around!”

“What, so now I’m in trouble for things I didn’t even say? For thinking I want more time with you?”

My eyes seared, like they were close to tears, even though I couldn’t feel any accompanying emotion. “Yes! You always want more from me. Be okay with naked girls in your apartment. Be you on the Internet. Be happy with you smelling like a goddamn wolf. More, Isabel, more! Well, I don’t have any more! I’m giving you what I can give you without completely … And this is what you do?”

Cole laughed in a very unfunny way. “This? This? I don’t even know what this is. Breathing! Living! Being me! What a grand day this has become!” He did the little NARKOTIKA hand gesture that said he was revealing something new. “Happy birthday, Cole! Happy, happy birthday.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Telling me I screwed up!”

This was too much. “Because you did.”

He stepped right up next to me. I could tell he was angry, but I didn’t care. Wolf wolf wolf. “I. Am. Sober.”

Did he think I couldn’t smell him? “Whatever.”

“Whatever?” he echoed. “How about you take my word for it?”

“And why should I do that?”

“How about because you trust me?”

“Trust you? Does anyone do that? Of all the things I would do that are crazy, Cole, you can be sure that will never be one of them.”

Just like that, he was gone. His body was still there, but his eyes were empty. Cole St. Clair had left the building. A very tidy party trick, and the most cunning objectification of all: when he took the person that was him and threw him away. I would have felt guilty, but I had seen what I’d seen. I wasn’t making any of it up. I could smell the wolf, smell the beer, remember the girl’s arm draped possessively around his neck.

I would not feel bad.

I did not feel bad.

“Don’t call me,” I said. “Stop doing this to me. I’m not your — stop doing this to me.”

I got into my car.

I didn’t look back to see if he was still standing in the lot.

I was sober.

I had told the truth, and it hadn’t mattered. In the end, she’d bought into the same story everyone else had.

Did it matter if you’d changed if no one believed it?

After Isabel left, I walked through the party in a haze. I knew I said something to Jeremy. I knew I smiled at a joke some guy told me. I knew I signed someone’s hat. I didn’t remember the fine details of anything. They were all lost in the hiss in my ears.

I moved through the people until I found Magdalene on the couch beneath the giant lips, making out with one of her boys.

“Farewell, pet,” I told her. My smile was a corpse that I resurrected briefly for her. “I’m out.”

Magdalene slapped the boy away. “It’s early! I think it’s early? Don’t go.”

“I must,” I said. “Come, give me a sisterly embrace.”

She staggered to her feet. “How boring that you’re sober! Stay.”

She threw her arms around me in a way I wouldn’t have put up with from my sister, if I’d had one. I removed her fingers from my mouth. I needed to go before I felt-did-was something stupid. I needed to get out of here and I needed to call Isabel and I needed to not be angry and I needed to not think about the many ways I knew how to distract myself from this feeling —

“But wait, wait,” Magdalene said. “It’s your birthday.”

“I remember.”

“You have to stay for your present.”

I looked past her. T was there with his camera, unable to hide his pleased smile. Joan had hers, too. I realized the music had been turned down for this moment. The partygoers, chattering in low anticipation, had parted in an uneven line toward one of the warehouse doors. It was rolled all the way up, and I saw the night sky and a thousand bitter stars.

Jeremy stood by the door, the only one not grinning. His face was watchful.

I asked, “Will I like it?”

Magdalene led me down the aisle of people to the door. T backed down ahead of us to get my facial expression; Joan followed up behind.

I got there and faced the nighttime parking lot. Three floodlights lit my present.

It was my Mustang. Black and shiny and tricked-out and new — well, not new anymore. It had been new when I’d gotten it, back when I’d rewarded myself for my first album going platinum, back before I realized you couldn’t bring a Mustang or your soul on tour. It was not new, but it was still pristine. I could tell it was my Mustang from Phoenix, not just a rental, because there was still a St. Christopher medal dangling from the rearview mirror, just like when I’d left it.

It looked molten in these lights. The black of the paint reflected the black of the sky until it was just a void sitting there.

The doors opened.

My mother got out of the passenger’s side.

My father got out of the driver’s side.

T trotted around to keep getting my face.

It reflected the car that reflected the night sky that was a slice of the universe that contained infinite nothing.

There was nothing wrong with my father except his face looked a little like mine, and nothing wrong with my mother except she wore matched separates, and there was nothing wrong with the two of them together looking at me except it felt like the suburbs had moved into my heart.

“Happy birthday!” shouted a bunch of people behind me.

Jeremy stood there by the car, his shoulders pointed down, his eyes on me. He was the only person here who knew this wasn’t a gift.

I looked at my parents. They looked at me. They looked at me a lot.

I had let them think I was dead.

I had not called them when the world found out I wasn’t.

They had not changed in appearance at all, except to get dustier and older. My father had always looked brittle; now he looked cancerous. I recognized the Windbreaker he wore. I knew those shoes of my mother’s. There was nothing wrong with them except the unchanging constancy of their lives, a circle of grocery-office-Saturday-bed-linen-washing-Sunday-services - Tuesday - ratatouille - night - Thursday - church - meeting-rinse-repeat.

There was nothing wrong with them except that three years ago I’d decided that I’d rather die than turn out like them.

They were really nice people.

They had driven this car all the way out here for me.

I couldn’t move, in case moving triggered emotional reunions on their part.

Magdalene, her voice loud and bright, said, “What a show this will be!”

What that meant was that I had been standing there too long, my expression too naked, and I had not had Cole St. Clair up for the cameras for who knew how long.

I didn’t know what he would do, though. I didn’t know what Cole St. Clair would do right now, faced with these people. Part of the reason I had made him was because he couldn’t coexist with them. Because he was the opposite, everything they weren’t. He was the alternative to shooting myself in the head.

It wasn’t cruel, this transformation, as long as I never went back home.

And now: this.

I needn’t have worried about a teary reunion. Both of my parents eyed the cameras timidly.

And this, finally, this was my reminder. It was still the show, after all. If they’d wanted a chance at the real me, they would have called first.

I plunged forward and seized my mother’s elbow. A little cardigan-covered bird bone. “Welcome to television! Don’t be shy! Let’s do that old mother-son thing, shall we?”

I gave her a grand old hug, a big sloppy Cole-St.-Clair thing, and then I whirled her out of my arms in a dance move before heading for my father. He stared at me as I came around the car at him like I was a bear attacking. But I didn’t hug him. I merely grabbed his hand. I shook it like a man as he stared at me, mouth agape. Then I used my other hand to form his hand into a long bro-shake with mine, complete with palm slap and fist bump at the end.

“What a glorious reunion this is,” I said, to both them and to the partygoers who still watched. I tossed my father’s limp hand away from mine. “What staggering timing. I, in fact, have just recorded a masterpiece in there. I think the two of you will agree that once you hear it played at ear-bleeding volumes, you’re really left with no choice but to move your hips.”

I did a little dance move to demonstrate. My gaze glanced off of Jeremy’s — I couldn’t take the look in his eyes — and kept going.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” my mother said, and gave a laugh-cough.

My father touched his Adam’s apple. He was Dr. St. Clair, twice the punctuation and five times the schooling of his prodigal son, a professor version of me. “I thought it would be dinner someplace nice….”

This was my idea of a nice dinner: sitting on the hood of a car eating a chili dog. This was what he meant: a chain steakhouse.

I couldn’t take this.

“And instead,” I said, “you found yourselves in Long Beach, at one of the more glorious parties of the night.” I reached for Magdalene’s hand and put it in my father’s. Then I took my mother and dragged her lightly to Magdalene’s other side. I placed her hand in Magdalene’s. Half-crouching, dramatic and theatrical, I gestured to the interior of the warehouse. My fingers were spread wide, painting an image.

“Now,” I intoned, “see that wonderland? In you shall go to frolic. This is the life! This is California! This is how the other half lives! Go! Go! Cameras! Behold their excitement!”

My parents gazed into the warehouse, looking for this bright future I’d promised.

And then, as they stood there, hands in Magdalene’s, I got into the Mustang. It was still running. Their heads barely had time to turn.

I tore out of the parking lot, slamming the driver’s-side door shut as I did. Everything behind me was left in billowing dust. All of it gone: the night and the stars and the song that I had breathed into being.

I drove.

Part of me wanted to keep driving. Part of me wanted to stop.

I didn’t know which was worse.

In the end, I couldn’t focus on navigating anymore, so I just went back to the apartment. I was half afraid there would be cameras there, but the alley was dark, and so was the courtyard.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 606