Can you arrange for a colebot to win a block party today

I rewrote the text ten times before I sent it. It wasn’t my strongest work, but it had to sound neither bitter nor needy. Any punctuation I added pushed it toward one or the other, so in the end I went with the good old absence of grammar to indicate indifference.

Isabel immediately texted back: Give me 30 minutes.

Her punctuation implied that I shouldn’t think this meant we weren’t fighting. Twenty-nine minutes later she texted me the winner’s name and address.

Oh, young love.

Seven minutes after that, I was done cleaning the bathroom, and nine minutes after that, T had arrived with the cameras, and fifteen minutes after that, Jeremy had arrived with his pickup truck.

When you’re in a band, you spend the first four hundred thousand years of your career dragging around your own crap. Your speakers, speaker stands, mixing head, mics, pickups, power cables, mic cables, speaker cables, instruments, the everything. You forget something, you’re screwed. You break something, you’re screwed. You don’t have a long enough extension cord? Screwed.

Once you hit it big, though —

You’re packing your shit into a late-model Mustang and a pickup truck and hoping you didn’t forget anything.

I was living the dream, for sure.

“I’d carry something,” T told me apologetically, his camera on his shoulder, “but I’ve got the, you know.”

“Recording device,” I replied, putting my synthesizer in Leyla’s lap. She didn’t complain, because she was fine with everything that came through the threads of fate and whatnot. This is what I thought: Fate was a lousy lay, and I was over her. I told T, “Yeah. It’s cool. Get this side. This side. It’s my famous side.”

Then Jeremy and I drove in tandem to West Adams.

All of the houses in this neighborhood were older, the same age as the ones in my neighborhood back in Phoenix, NY. But the West Adams houses felt exotic because they were pink and lime green, and stucco and tile-roofed, and anchored by filigree metal railings. I wondered how I would have been different if I’d grown up in one of these instead.

Shayla, the L.A.-area fan who had won (apparently, Isabel had asked fans to identify which album’s liner notes featured a photo of the back of my head), was supersonic with excitement by the time we got to her house.

So were the two hundred people already there. Virtual Cole had a pretty staggering reach.

The gathered fans had pretty much already taken over every street-side parking opportunity ever, so we had to chuck our stuff out into the driveway and then decide which of us was going to go find parking and walk back.

This felt familiar, too.

“Ohmygodohmygod,” said Shayla. “CanIhugyou?”

I allowed it. I could feel her quivering as she did. When she stepped back, I smiled at her, and a slow smile spread across her face, bigger and bigger.

Sometimes, a smile goes a long way.

This was one of those sometimes. I needed a smile, a lot, and she had a great one. Not in a sexy way, but in a way full of nonjudgmental enthusiasm.

My brain was shutting off, the complicated part, and the simpler part of my brain, the concert part, was kicking in. It’s hard to explain it. It’s not nerves. It is something else.

The crowd jostled behind me, buzzed and eager. It was feeding me, evening out the ridges in my spiky, cluttered thoughts. I’d forgotten about this, somehow, this part of gigging. I’d forgotten its hectic erasure of emotions. Here there was no room for anything besides Cole St. Clair, singer, performer, consumed.

I was grateful for it. I didn’t want my thoughts. Not right now.

Isabel —

Jeremy appeared at my elbow, his long hair tucked behind his ears and a pair of blue-tinted sunglasses balanced low on his nose. He looked like John Lennon if John Lennon had been blond and born just outside Syracuse, New York. “Cole. What’s the way?”

“Music,” I said. It was all I was thinking about just then. These people wanted to hear us play, and I wanted to play for them.

“That’s it?”

“Loud,” I said.

Jeremy scratched his vaguely beard-y face. His hair was light enough that it was hard to tell if he was actually growing facial hair or not. “Old school.”

I looked at the gathered crowd. “This is kind of old school.”

So we played music.

In a lot of ways, a block party takes a lot more work than a concert with a stage. At a big concert, you have a stage, you have lights, you have a way, and half the job of setting a mood is done for you. It’s a show before you ever step up to a microphone. But a block party — you’re just a bunch of kids in someone’s front lawn. There’s no difference between you and the audience except you hold a bass guitar or clutch a mic. Every bit of performance has to be won. Carved out of normalcy and chaos. You have to sing louder, jump higher, be crazier than anyone in the crowd.

This was the first lesson: Look like you are supposed to be there.

Fame follows the expectation of fame.

This was the second lesson: Never rush an entrance.

Jeremy took his time building us a tempo, stepping us up into a song, the bass leading into the music, not looking over its shoulder to make sure the others were coming. Leyla — damn her, I wanted Victor, I wanted Victor, I wanted Victor — came in then, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap — and I let it go and let it go and let it go.

The tension built and built and built. And then, as I did a little twist with my hand so they were paying attention, I hit a single note on my synth:

BOOM.

The crowd went wild. And when I dragged the mic closer and sang the first word into it —

In the beginning, there was the dark and there was the buzz.

No, let me start over.

In the beginning, there was the suburbs and the days that looked the same stacked on each other’s backs. Then there was me, and the angels fell.

No, let me start over again.

In the beginning, there was me on a high school stage with Jeremy and Victor, and I felt like I’d never known what I’d been made for before that moment. It was not one listener or two or twenty or fifty. There was no magic number. It was this: Me. Them. It was the drums dropping out for my keyboard to tumble up an ascending bridge. It was the heads tilted back. It was the tug and push and pull and jerk of the bass. It was whatever you plugged into the equation to equal an electrical current between us and the audience. Sometimes it took one thousand people. Sometimes it took two.

In West Adams on that summer afternoon, I crooned and screamed the lyrics at them, and they howled and screamed them back at me. Jeremy’s bass picked relentlessly up the scale. Leyla, face sheened with sweat, thundered in the background.

We were the living, the reborn.

People kept coming. The noise of us and the noise of them kept bringing them in, closer, closer, more and more.

This is why I did it, this is why I keep doing it, this is why I couldn’t stop.

Suddenly, in the midst of this perfection, there was the scratch of a random guitar chord. Guitar? Guitar.

You have got to be kidding me.

Some pale young creature had erupted from the crowd with his guitar. He leaped up and down beside Leyla’s kit, grinding away on his instrument like the world was about to end. All enthusiasm, no malice.

At a real concert, we had security and stage dudes who took care of this. Our job as the band was merely to keep the show going as the disruption was removed.

Here there was only us.

I left Jeremy thrubbing away on the bass and Leyla holding down the beat. My mic still in one hand, I used the other to grab the guy’s arms to stop the guitaring. And then I gripped him to me and danced him forcibly to the crowd. I wrapped my arm around him to hold the mic to my mouth.

“Take him!” I shouted gladly to the crowd. “He is one of yours!”

I released him. Arms seized him like zombies. He was smiling blissfully up at the sky as they took him. I was face-to-face with the others now. Us and them, and the them was right there.

And I saw a face from the past.

It was impossible; it was Victor’s eyes, Victor’s eyebrows. My stomach was falling from a very great height.

It wasn’t Victor. It was his sister, Angie.

I hadn’t even begun to parse what this might mean when she hit me.

It wasn’t the greatest punch, but it landed pretty well — I felt my teeth cut into my lip. My mouth felt warm. Adrenaline hurried to attend to my needs. A wolf stretched and curled inside me.

Angie snatched the microphone from me, and then she hit me with it. That I felt. It hit my cheekbone solidly, and then, as one hand went up, instinct, she smashed it into the back of my head.

Skill? Skill isn’t what hurts people. A lack of mercy is.

I deserved to be hit, too. I deserved everything she was giving me.

I killed him, I killed him, I killed him

“You asshole!” Angie shouted at me, and she wasn’t wrong, even taking Victor out of the equation. She punched me again with the microphone.

T came in close, but not to help: to film.

Angie hurled her entire body at me. She wasn’t a very large person, but justice and physics were on her side. We careened back through Leyla’s kit, both of us falling. Above me was blue sky and the edge of Shayla’s roof and at least two cameras and now her face blocking everything —

She still smelled like the same shampoo she’d used when I’d dated her, back when Victor was alive, and I had never hated myself as I did in that moment, not in the darkest and most disgusting holes I had lowered myself into on any of my tours.

“Angie,” Jeremy said, as urgent as I’d ever heard him. “Angie, come on.”

My back stung something fierce, like I’d been sliced in two with a cymbal. I tasted blood. She needed to hit me harder, because I could still feel everything.

I couldn’t stop seeing Victor’s face mirrored in Angie’s. What I’d done to both of them would never go away.

“Angie,” Jeremy said again, out of my view. “Think about what you’re doing. This is TV. This is your record, forever. This isn’t the way.”

Leyla loomed over me. She gripped my hand and pulled me up. She didn’t say: This is the future growing the seeds you sowed in the past. She asked, “Are you okay, man?”

I stood there in the middle of Shayla’s flat lawn, and suddenly there was no stage. It was just a bunch of drunk people standing in front of an old house. It was an ex-girlfriend looking defeated, a bloody microphone hanging in one of her hands. I’d scuffed the hell out of my patch of grass by jumping up and down while I sang. I looked at it, and at Angie, and then at Shayla. My face still felt warm, and I suspected from both that and the way she was looking at me that I was bleeding a lot. I’d stopped feeling anything, though.

“Sorry I wrecked your lawn,” I said. “Tell the next band to put down a rug or some other shit.”

She clutched her hands together. “Should we call the cops? 911?”

Angie just stared at me. The microphone hung in her hand. She said, “You ruined him.”

Then she dropped the mic and walked into the crowd.

It seemed obvious that this represented the end of the set, but the thought of taking all this stuff down and finding a way to put it back in the Mustang suddenly seemed like a huge amount of trouble. Finding the Mustang, period, seemed like an enormous quest. There is a wave that leads you to a gig, but after it’s crashed you onto the shore of the show, there’s no similar wave that takes you away, especially after your knees are buckling and you can feel every one of your teeth loose in your head. After you can see nothing but your dead drummer and every girl you ever slept with and hated yourself for in the morning.

Shayla was still going on about the cops, but I didn’t know what good they would do unless they were going to retrieve the car. I could hear my heartbeat in my forehead or maybe my temple. Jeremy’s voice went on, smooth and easy, echoed by Leyla.

I should’ve thought of a way to wrap up this episode neatly, but I guessed they would probably edit that punch into something glorious.

T’s camera eyed me. I told it, “That’s a wrap.”

It was the best I could do. Hills and valleys. My mind curled up in the shadow of mountains I’d climbed and then plummeted from.

Jeremy took my arm. “Cole,” he said, “come on, man.” He looked at T. “You’ve got enough on there. Turn it off.”

Jeremy drove his old pickup truck while I sat in the passenger’s seat, leaning my head against the door. We didn’t speak. I was hoarse anyway.

He lived in a house out in the Hollywood Hills. Even though it was not far geographically from the city, it seemed like a different state. The narrow streets snaked up the steep hills, crowded with mailboxes, yucca plants, orange trees, dusty pickup trucks, and BMWs. The houses were mismatched shabby contemporaries from the twenties, one-hundred-year-old denizens of an older Los Angeles.

The streets kept getting narrower and steeper, the turns becoming more and more improbable, until finally we came to the place Jeremy shared with his girlfriend. The light green house was low-slung and lattice-covered. A eucalyptus tree grew beside it, appearing at one with the house, which seemed appropriate for Jeremy. A dusty and very busted Mustang from several decades before mine was parked half-in, half-out of a metal carport.

Jeremy parked on the street. “I think you should leave your work phone in here.”

I stared at him, not understanding. Then I said, “Isabel has it.”

Jeremy frowned. Mentally, he catalogued my online presence over the past several weeks.

“Yes,” he said simply. He pulled up the parking brake and put it in gear. “Well, leave anything else having to do with the show in the car, too.”

We climbed crooked concrete stairs, me slower than him. Inside, the house was everything I would have expected from Jeremy: modest, airy, and very spare. He led me into a galley kitchen full of ugly, pristine ’70s appliances, and I leaned on the doorjamb and felt sorry for myself while he rummaged in drawers for a dish towel.

“Hold still,” he said. I rested my cheek on the counter while he dabbed at the side of my face. The towel came up covered with dirt and grime.

“Jesus Christ! Jeremy! Cole? St. Clair?”

This was how I found out that Jeremy’s girlfriend was the ukulele player for a band that had opened for us two years before. She stood in the doorway to the kitchen in a bra and shorts. Probably some girls would’ve been bothered by suddenly discovering guests while in this condition, but everything about her posture indicated she was not one of them. The last time I had seen her we had been in Portland doing a benefit concert for orphans.

“Hi, Star,” I mumbled.

Star looked at Jeremy. “Did you do that to him?”

Jeremy probed my forehead with his fingers. “Do you know if we have a first-aid kit?”

Star joined him and bent over me. She smelled like patchouli, sweet and dreamy. I could see her bare legs and Jeremy’s bare legs. The way they stood together was so comfortable, so unaffected, that I suddenly felt incredibly shitty about all of my life choices. I wanted — I wanted — I must’ve hit my head harder than I thought.

I wanted Isabel, but she was such an impossible thing to want.

Star touched my hair, very gingerly. “Maybe he should go to the hospital, Germ.”

I closed my eyes. I would have rather died on this counter.

“He needs to be someplace quiet,” Jeremy said. “We’ve had a bad day.”

They moved away from me, into the other room, and I heard their murmured voices. In my head, their voices were like this house, settled and modest and familiar. I heard them say he a lot, and knew they were talking about me, but I didn’t care. People were always talking about me.

“I need a toilet,” I told Jeremy, and they both gestured around a corner.

In the bathroom I locked the door and turned on the light and the fan, and I leaned on the stand sink and rocked back and forth. There was no mirror, and so I kept seeing Angie’s face and Victor’s face and remembering every conversation Victor and I had ever conducted about drugs or wolves or suicide. I got a needle from one of my pants pockets and stripped and curled up beneath the sink and stabbed the point under my skin.

I was gone for five minutes. It wasn’t long enough to do anything but tamp down the worst of the jitters and maybe heal the bruise on my head a little. I hadn’t broken anything and the door was still locked and Jeremy wasn’t pounding on the other side of it so I couldn’t have been loud.

I got dressed and flushed the toilet as if I’d used it and then washed my hands.

I felt better. Or different. I’d been temporarily reset.

Outside, Jeremy stood pensively in the kitchen. He sighed when I walked in and then he said, “She’s going to get some Neosporin and some Korean barbecue. You still aren’t a vegetarian, right? Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

He gave me a glass of water, a clean dish towel with a bag of frozen edamame beans in it to hold to my head, and we wandered through his house, looking at his lack of furniture and material goods and plethora of bamboo mats and potted plants. Probably it would have been insufferable if he hadn’t also had a very comfortable-looking sofa and an orange bust of Beethoven and all of the wood-sided old speakers he’d brought to the very first episode.

“I like this place,” I told him, because the way he took his shoes off and walked around barefoot and proud through the house made me think he’d like to hear me say it.

“I do, too,” he said.

“You’re dating Star,” I said.

“I am.”

“She got hot. How long’s that been going on?”

“Two years.”

“Wow.”

“You were gone a long time, Cole.”

I abandoned the bag of beans in the kitchen sink and we headed back outside and downstairs to wait for Star. As we stood by the lattice overgrown with red roses, he explained how he’d bought this house with his last NARKOTIKA advance, and now he gave the money to Star to pay bills and make sure the taxes were sorted out and he worked band gigs when she said they needed more to keep things on the level.

“She takes all your money?” I asked. A hummingbird zoomed by my head.

He looked at me. “I give it to her.”

Basically, what was happening was this: I had gone away for almost two years, and when I came back, Jeremy had grown up and gotten a house and gotten happy — no, he’d always been happy, now he was just happy and with someone — and I had instead come back and become myself as I always was.

My face throbbed, or my heart did. I was so tired of being alone, but I was always alone, even with people around me. And I was so tired of being surrounded, but I was always surrounded, even when I was by myself. There was so much talk about how everyone wanted to be goddamned special. I was so tired of being the only one of my kind.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I said.

Jeremy didn’t say what? He just rubbed the edge of the dusty, busted Mustang where it poked out into the evening sun. The hummingbird I’d seen earlier zoomed by again. It paused by the roses, but they weren’t what it was looking for.

“I don’t think I can go back out on the road. I don’t think I can take it.”

He didn’t answer right away. He climbed onto the hood of the old Mustang and sat on it cross-legged. The bottoms of his bare feet were very dirty and he wore a hemp anklet, which he plucked at. “Are we talking about tour, really?”

“What else would I be talking about?”

He said, “Is it really going on the road you can’t do? Or is it being you?”

I looked at the grass at the edge of the tiny, sun-bitten yard. Tire prints marked the gravel and dirt. Star had taken the pickup with my phone in it. Possibly not taken. Possibly Jeremy had given her the keys.

“Cole, I think we have to talk about this.”

“You don’t want to know, Jeremy. You really don’t.”

“I think I already do, though.”

I stared off down the dusky street. Way, way down the street, a little boy was tooling around on a faded blue bicycle. What a safe place this neighborhood seemed like. It was somehow more like California than the rest of L.A. More like the land itself. Like the dry stucco and faded wood houses and the dust-covered cars had slowly been pushed up from the dry landscape by generations of heaving quakes. It wasn’t that I liked it better than the rest of Los Angeles. It was just that it seemed like it required less work to keep it looking like this. It seemed like a place that wouldn’t notice you as much if you had a day off or got old. It seemed like a place where it might get dark at night.

Jeremy said, “Do you know what makes it bad? It’s that you do it alone. It’s that you lock yourself in a bathroom. It’s not the thing itself. It’s that you make it secret. It’s that you only do it when you’re upset.”

I didn’t move. I just kept staring at the little boy making uneven circles at the end of his short driveway. I felt as if the world was being crumpled like paper around me. Even if I could figure out how to open the sheet back up again, it would always be wrinkled.

“There are other ways to be unhappy, Cole. There are better ways to cope than just pulling the plug on your brain.”

My voice was rougher than I expected it to be. “I’ve been trying.”

“No, you’ve been happy. You haven’t had to try until now.”

I didn’t answer. There was no point arguing. He knew me as well as I knew myself. He’d played bass for my thoughts for three albums.

“Victor’s dead,” I said.

“I know. I guessed.”

“It’s my fault. The whole thing. I got him into it.”

“Victor got himself into it,” Jeremy said. “We were all kids from New York. I didn’t follow you down any rabbit holes. Victor would’ve gone without you.”

I didn’t believe that. I was very persuasive.

“How do you do it?” I asked.

“I just live, Cole. I don’t go away in my head. I deal with the crap as it happens, and then it’s gone. When you don’t think about it, it lives forever.”

I closed my eyes. I could still hear the little boy riding his bicycle down the street. It made me think about the boy on the roof, the one who had crashed his plane because it wasn’t about the landing, it was about the flying.

“I always thought you’d be the one who died,” Jeremy said. “I kept thinking one day I’d get the call while I was sleeping. Or I’d come to get you in your room before the show and I’d be too late. Or I —”

He stopped, and when I turned to look at him, still cross-legged on the hood of the Mustang, his eyes were shiny. He blinked, and two tears shot down his face, fast and shiny as mercury.

It was possibly the worst and best that I’d felt in my life. I didn’t know what to say. Sorry? I hadn’t meant to hurt anybody else?

“Nobody told me it would be this hard,” I said.

“Why is it always harder for you?”

I shook my head. I didn’t even know if it really was harder for me, if I was just a flawed model. I wiped my nose with my arm and pointed to the Mustang beneath Jeremy.

“That’s a thing,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jeremy said, his voice much different. “Yeah, it conveyed with the house. It came with a trash compactor, too, but Star broke it.”

We both sighed.

“There she is,” said Jeremy as his pickup truck appeared at the bottom of the hill. It stopped beside the little boy, and the kid came over to talk to Star through the driver’s window. I saw her long brown arm hanging out of the side of the truck, bracelets hanging around her wristbone, and I saw her hair hanging in hanks on either side of her face, and the kid on his busted bike keeled over talking to her with his hair all scruffed up. And suddenly I was just eaten by nostalgia, for a past that wasn’t mine.

I just wanted to be happy. I just wanted to make something.

“You have to take it off the table,” Jeremy said, finally. “It’s always going to be an option, otherwise. You’re going to have to give it up and mean it, or it’ll always be your solution when things go bad.”

The pickup truck pulled up beside us. Star put it in park and leaned across to gaze at me through the open passenger window. She grinned easily at me.

“Did you choose life while I was gone?”

I said, “Sure.”

Jeremy asked, “Did you mean it?”

It hurt, but sort of in a good way, to look him in the face. “Yes.”

That night, I arrived at Sierra’s house in the canyons with my shivered-ice eyes and my slaughter lips.

Party time.

I was in a dress that was white vinyl or leather — I couldn’t tell the difference; could anyone else? If they bothered to analyze it, it meant I was wearing it wrong, anyway. I was also wearing white sandals with enormous white heels. The only color to my wardrobe was my horror lips. No one could say I hadn’t warned them.

I used to wonder what partying was really like. When I was eleven or twelve. Everyone in movies seemed so eager to go party. All the television shows were girls wondering if they were going to be invited to this or that party, talking like there were different levels and qualities of party. I couldn’t imagine what was luring them to these places, but the desperation to get there promised that it was something good.

Now I’d been to more than my fair share of parties. And it turned out that the TV parties had not been lies. They boasted most of the features of real parties: booze, making out, music that sounded better on your own speakers. Maybe some drugs or drinking games or pool or witty banter. Possibly witty banter should have been lumped in with drinking games or with making out.

Maybe I was always too sober at these things.

The house was located in the Hollywood Hills, in a high-altitude fancy neighborhood that overlooked the lights of other, slightly less fancy neighborhoods. It was an enormous white, gated compound, a sort of mesa of smoothed concrete and windows. Tastefully hidden floodlights guided me out of the taxi to the courtyard. Because it was Sierra’s house and Sierra’s party, the music was dreamy shoegaze. It sounded like a cross between a spilled water glass and a slow-motion electronic lynching. The place was already full of people.

God, I hated them all.

I stalked in. The irregular beat of the music and the mass of people made it feel like the ground was moving. Heads might have turned. I couldn’t tell. Being me meant that I couldn’t do more than a dismissive sweep of my eyes over any given person.

Part of the problem with parties was that I couldn’t even tell what the goal was, so I never knew when I was done. I searched for Sierra. At least if she saw me, I got credit for coming.

I walked by the big pool. It was full of splashing nymphs and was lit with color-changing lights. Pink, purple, green. A boy, half-in, half-out of the pool, grabbed my ankle with his wet hand.

“Come in,” he said.

I looked down at him. He wore glittery eyeliner. I wondered what brand of eyeliner it was that it didn’t wash off in the pool water. His wet hand on my ankle reminded me of Cole doing something very similar months and months before.

I said, very coolly, “I don’t like to get wet.”

I expected the boy to protest, but he just looked abashed and then slid under the water along with any respect I might have had for him.

In the middle of the pool, a girl floated on her back in slow, lazy circles while a guy paddled lazily beside her and kissed her hand. I wondered if there was ever a world where I might have turned out like them. I wondered if that was the person I might have been if we had never moved from California; if my brother had never died; if we had not moved away from Cole; if my parents had never gotten separated.

As I stepped away from the pool and onto the infinite tiled balcony that surrounded the house, someone wearing a green glowstick around his neck offered me a drink. It was swirled in two different neon colors, seeming at once like something I wanted to put in my mouth and something nature didn’t mean for me to ingest.

I shook my head. Once, my brother had said that alcohol made you someone else — I definitely didn’t want that. What if the someone else was worse than what I already was? And another time, my friend Mackenzie had said it just made you more of who you already were.

The world didn’t need that.

I trailed my fingers along the metal balcony as I walked. The lights inside the house were off and everyone in the house wore glowsticks or Christmas lights or other half costumes that luminesced. I didn’t want to go in, but it was undoubtedly where Sierra would be. She was such a child. Everything here, really, was like a child’s fantasy world brought to life, made concrete.

But this was just a bunch of grown-ups in dress-up and so much pointless glitter.

I just hated —

Why couldn’t this glitter rub off on me?

Hands on my arm. It was Sierra. She’d found me, after all. She looked alien with glow-in-the-dark eyelashes and phosphorescing dots drawn down her nose and cheekbones. Her hair was braided through with fiber optics. She wasn’t a woman; she was an installation. All of her friends were similarly glow-in-the-dark. Sierra grabbed my arm. “Treasure! I was hoping you would come. Get a drink, get a boy, get a dream, everything’s lovely!” Her pupils were black and dazzling with two little reflections of neon pink and green. She air-kissed my cheek.

In response, I parted my lips and blinked, my lashes lingering on my cheek. I’d done that expression in the mirror before, lots. You could do it ever so much slower than you thought you should, and it only made you look more cynical.

Sierra was delighted. She introduced me to her friends and plucked at my dress, her hand right on my breast, and then she threw her head back so we could all see how she had the longest neck.

She said, “Here, you need some —”

From somewhere, she produced more of the glow-in-the-dark makeup.

“Close,” she ordered.

I closed my eyes. I felt her swipe my eyelids, my lips.

“Open.” Sierra smiled toothily at me. “Now you’re one of us.”

That would never be true.

“Go,” Sierra told me, waving her hand. “Play. Then come back and tell me all the tales of the fabulous places you have been!”

“Right,” I replied. “Off to play right now. Ta.”

It wasn’t that I had been dismissed, but I felt dismissed. Sierra really did think I was going to flit off with my newly fluorescent face and meet her cool friends. This was a party of children, and children loved other children.

Maybe I didn’t even know how this was done.

I made my way through a dark living room (a pale sofa was smeared gently with glow-in-the-dark paint) to a dark kitchen (the counter was spattered with luminescence) and then a dark somewhere else (no glowing besides a glass coffee table imperfectly reflecting my face). The music was coming from everywhere. The air smelled like oranges and pretzels and neon pink.

As I wandered slowly through conversations between people who had just met, I thought about how L.A. was a place to not be alone. Every place was a place to not be alone, but L.A. was a city that gloried in connections, that eased them and facilitated them. It was a city that made it more obvious how goddamn impossible it was for you to make connections if you couldn’t make them in L.A. This was a place for smiling at strangers and holding hands and kissing strangers, and if you weren’t doing those things it was because you did not smile and you did not hold hands and you did not kiss. The strangers part was irrelevant.

How long had I been here?

“Isabel!”

It was Mark, Sierra’s Mark. He was in a group of guys that all kind of looked like him, pretty and harmless and tan and cheerful. They were visible because they stood beside a wall of windows. Behind them, the ground sloped off and L.A. moved restlessly.

“You guys aren’t glowing in the dark,” I said.

“We’re bright enough,” Mark replied. His friends laughed. I didn’t. “You want a drink?”

“Something not glowing?” I asked. “Does plain water exist in this place?”

“Water!” said one of his friends. His goatee was immaculate. “Here? That’s not kosher, man.”

“I think it is probably the only kosher thing here,” I replied testily. “Do you actually know anything about Jewish people?”

“I’m circumcised,” he replied. “That’s Jewish, right? Oh, wait, Jesus, are you Jewish?”

I looked at him. I did the slow blink. I parted my lips. He watched. I said, “I thought you were getting me some water.”

He scrambled off to find it. Mark laughed in admiration. “Well done.”

I narrowed my eyes in acknowledgment. Really, the secret was to say pretty much nothing at all, and when you did open your mouth, say something awful. Then they all did what you wanted.

Mark hurried to fill the silence. “Grubb here and I were just talking about, like, this guy who landed a fighter jet after the wing had fallen off. Apparently, it fell, like, right off and he landed it anyway.”

Grubb said, slow as lava, “Isn’t that the craziest thing you’ve ever heard?”

I said, “Crazy.”

Mark touched his neck and his chin, but he was looking at my neck and my chin. “Where is Lars with your drink? He’s taking forever.”

“Just as well. I wouldn’t trust him with anything someone else poured anyway,” I said. I didn’t look away from Mark’s eyes. It wasn’t that I wanted to flirt with him, or that I wanted him, I just wanted to see what I could do. “Might have glowworms in it.”

Mark’s teeth grazed his bottom lip as if he were thinking about the water, but I didn’t think it was a beverage he was imagining. My heart beat a little faster with the power of it. It was a tease, but what could it hurt? I just wanted to know. I wanted to know that if I wanted someone else, could I get him, and how much effort would it take? Was it as easy as just being there, saying nothing, letting them imagine who you really were?

“Look, let’s go find you one,” Mark said. “You can watch me pour it. No glowworms.”

My palms were suddenly sweaty. This wasn’t actually a tease. Not anymore. This was a real thing.

I wondered how Cole felt when he slept with a girl on tour. Was it this? The game. The chase. The kick to the ego, the warmth in my guts, the knowledge that my lips wanted to be kissed and I wanted someone to unzip this dress and see how good I looked in my bra.

I could tell him I’d get the drink myself. I could wait for Lars, although there wasn’t a chance in the world Lars was going to bring something nonalcoholic, because I knew guys, even if I didn’t know him.

I just wanted something to happen. I just wanted to stop walking around this party alone, waiting for … I didn’t even know. When I would know I was done. When I would know I had partied, past tense.

I said, “Let’s go find something.”

“Be right back, man,” Mark told Grubb.

Right back. Right back. Because this was nothing.

I followed Mark. To my surprise, he really did lead me to the bar, where he drew a glass of water. He offered it to me, his gaze holding mine. He waited. My heart was jerking. I wanted to accomplish something, anything, even if that something was making out with Mark.

I said, “Where am I going to drink this?”

It was all Mark needed. He said, “Come on, I’ll show you something.”

Something turned out to be a circular-walled concrete observatory at the end of one of the stretching balconies. It turned out to be a little bedroom inside, with a curving custom mirror on one wall and a chic red mattress just inches from the floor, all lit by skylights that let in the floodlights. It turned out to be Mark closing the door behind us and taking my glass from me and setting it on a low end table.

Then he grasped either side of my waist on the vinyl-or-leather dress and kissed me.

It was probably vinyl. There was no way it was real leather at the price I’d paid for it. But on the other hand, I’d gotten it at the secondhand shop. So it could have been someone’s expensive castoff.

We were still kissing. He was as fierce and urgent about it as Cole had been. It didn’t matter that Mark didn’t really know me. He still approached my mouth as if it were limited edition, going out of style, get it now before it’s all gone. It was somehow freeing and depressing to know that love didn’t seem to have anything to do with passion.

He gripped my hips, hard, and it didn’t feel disagreeable. So this was what it was like to be an object. This was what it was like to objectify. If he had no name, how did it change things? If he had no face? If he was only his hands or only his pelvis pressed up against mine —

He pulled back, just for a second.

“Don’t say anything,” I said.

He laughed under his breath.

“No, seriously. Shut up.”

He shut up.

There was nothing unpleasant, physically, about making out with this person. In fact, the opposite, if I was reductive. My mouth parted beneath his. My belly pressed into his abs. His fingers teased down the zipper on the front of my dress, and my breath skipped when he kissed the edge of my breast. I felt like someone else. From the outside, I thought we probably were a very pretty couple. This seemed like a very grown-up, L.A. moment to have. Two pretty people kissing in an observatory built to study people, groping beside a bed meant for things beside sleep. I knew he would take off my dress if I let him, and I didn’t see why not. It probably wouldn’t be bad, even if it wasn’t good. It would be a chic and distinct story, anyway.

His shirt had tugged up. He was ripped and not offensive in any way. This was fine. I was fine.

Beneath his right palm, the material of my dress had made uneven waves. Surely vinyl wouldn’t move like that? I really didn’t know. Now I felt like I was going to have to look this up online.

He unzipped my dress straight down to my belly button.

So, I guessed this was happening. I kept waiting to feel half naked.

Mark leaned back.

“God,” he said, “you are beautiful.”

His voice sounded precisely like it did when he walked into the back room in the evenings to do paperwork. Precisely like it had when he’d asked me if I knew Cole. Which was to say, precisely like Mark, because he was Mark. What was the point to him even saying that? Possibly he’d misunderstood what this was all about.

I said, “I told you to shut up.”

He laughed.

I didn’t. I slapped his hand away and tugged up my zipper. “We’re done here.”

“What?” he said. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

I expected him to protest, but he just ran a hand through his hair. His lips were smeary neon. From me. That was from my lips. Finally, he said, “Well, damn.”

Part of me wanted to tell him, No, really, let’s still go through with it. Because now I was just stuck with this bad taste in my mouth, and a dim feeling of hating him or hating me or hating everything.

“It was probably a bad idea anyway,” Mark said. “I’m not drunk enough.”

The more he spoke, and the longer it had been since he’d touched me, the more the truth was sinking in: I had almost slept with my boss’s husband. I had made out with my boss’s husband at a party. I was that girl.

“You should go,” I told him. My voice was this side of the crypt, but only barely. “Sierra’s looking for you.”

When he looked at me, his expression was confused for a second, and then it turned to something like pity. He laughed, but it wasn’t a funny laugh, and it was at me or him. I felt naive and stupid. “No. She’s not.”

I leveled my gaze on him, blue eyes cold-dead behind their mask, and waited until the uncertainty crept back into his eyes. Then I said, “I have to fix my lips.”

By the time I had fetched my purse, he was gone, the door barely cracked. I stood in front of the mirror and observed my neon-smeared lips. I cleaned them up and carefully drew my cool pink lips back on and readjusted my hair around my face and tugged the zipper of my dress until I looked the same as I had before.

Then I took my phone out of my purse. I redid my eyeliner, careful not to smudge the neon blue Sierra had put on my eyelids.

I took a breath.

I dialed Cole’s number.

“Are you sober?” I asked.

“Oh, come on. That’s what you —”

“Cole. Are you?”

A pause to convey irritation. “Yeah.”

I kept my voice very even, but it took a lot of effort. “Please come get me.”

When I got to the party, I had to park way down the street, and then after I got in, it took me a while to find Isabel. Inside the house, the lights were out and black lights were wired up to make all of the girls glow in the UV. Outside, it was all glitter and experimental dancing because they were that sort of people. I was recognized, because it was that sort of party, but no one cared, because it was that sort of party. The music made me want to punch a hippie.

Isabel stood by the pool in a group of people who moved their arms with the enthusiasm and gracelessness of the inebriated. She was posed. One shoulder down, chin up. Her eye makeup was black and thick except for a line of neon blue that matched her eyes. Her mouth was a glass creation, still and chiseled. She wore a white leather dress that made her look one thousand times more sophisticated than most humans. Surrounded by all this glitter, in this noise and silliness, in a world that I clumsily and loudly inhabited, she was beautiful.

The guys in the group gazed at her with fearful awe. They looked at the face she wore right now and saw a stunning ice queen. Something to be thawed.

All I could see was how sad she was.

As I got closer, I heard their voices. The others were hysterical and loud. Isabel’s voice, lower, sounded bored and over it.

I walked up behind her. They saw me before she did. “Hi, princess,” I said, loud enough for them to hear me. “The world called. They want you back.”

She turned to me and her face, just in the split second when she saw me — I was murdered by it. Not because it was cruel, but the opposite. For one fraction of another fraction of a second, I saw naked relief on her face. Then it was gone behind the mask. But I still had it inside me.

“What, are you going?” asked one of the other girls. She was blond and blue-eyed like Isabel, but slightly older and several degrees softer looking.

Isabel’s hand was between her leg and mine. Without any fanfare, I threaded my fingers through hers. “Yes, yes. I’m very needy. Don’t tell anyone.” I flashed a smile at her, a needy one, and the girl’s eyebrows shot up.

“I’ll see you on Thursday,” Isabel said. How easily she hid her misery in plain sight. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her so upset. She might have said something else. I didn’t know. I was leading her away, out of there, through the people, through the gate, down the road, toward the Mustang. We were out of neon and into the dark, but I didn’t let go of her hand.

We got to the car.

“I want to drive,” she said.

I did not want to give her the keys. Wordlessly, I handed them over.

She drove too fast, and she braked too late, but the thing about Isabel Culpeper was that she always managed to pull herself up before she went over the edge.

“Whose party was that?” I asked.

Isabel’s mouth went thin. She didn’t look away from the road. “My boss.”

She floored the Mustang away from a light. We were going to die. I was ceaselessly turned on.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

The engine snarled away in the silence. I didn’t think I’d ever been in a car without the radio turned on before. It felt like the end of the world.

“Why can’t I do it?” she asked, suddenly angry. We screamed around a turn. It was possible this night would end with the car getting impounded, but it seemed like a bad idea to tell her.

“Do what?”

“Just forget about everything. Just go somewhere and get smashed and pretend like there are no problems or consequences. I know why. Because there are still problems and consequences. And going and — and — partying doesn’t make them go away. I feel like I’m the only sane person in the world. I don’t get why this whole world runs on stupidity.”

Her voice was getting flatter instead of louder. “You do it. I saw you drunk. And I know you became a wolf again. I can smell it. I’m not an idiot.”

I didn’t answer for a long time. I knew it maddened her more, but I didn’t know what to say. It was too raw that she hadn’t trusted me, and too raw that, in the end, I hadn’t been trustworthy after all.

I had been sober, but I had also been a wolf, and that was worse.

Isabel didn’t look away from the road. She tore around another turn. “Be afraid. Why aren’t you ever afraid?”

“What do you want me to be afraid of?”

The tires scuffed as we scudded to a noisy, bouncing stop at an unoccupied red light.

“Dying. Failure. Anything.”

I’m afraid you won’t pick up the phone.

I said, “Where are we going, Isabel?”

I sort of meant right then, but I also sort of meant more.

She repeated, “I don’t know.”

“Do you want to go home?”

She didn’t answer. That was a no. That was good. I didn’t want to take her home.

“Do you want to go to my place?”

“I don’t want to be on camera.”

That, at least, I knew how to take care of.

Cole didn’t quite take me home. He directed me to park the Mustang behind his place, but when we got out, he led the way away from the gate and toward the house next door.

“It’s empty,” he told me. “It’s a rental. I checked it out the other day.”

Inside, it was dark in a way that Sierra’s house hadn’t been. It was dark in a way that was dusky and imperfect, comforting in its realness. The furniture was shabby chic, sparse and pleasant and inexpensive in the way of rental furniture.

Cole gave me a tour, throwing open doors, barely looking inside each. “Bedroom. Kitchen. Mudroom. Half bath. Stair to roof deck. Bedroom. Hallway to side yard.”

Then he led me through a tiny sitting area to a sliding door hidden by a bamboo shade. He threw his shoulder against it until it gave way. On the other side, impossibly, was a miniature garden world. I couldn’t understand it until I stepped through the door. A white sofa sat in the middle of it; just ten feet away was another sliding door to the rest of the house. In between, in this small room, the walls climbed and sprouted and unfolded tropical leaves of all shapes and sizes. Oranges studded one tree, lemons another. Ferns crowded densely at the bases of small palms. Mysterious flowers like exotic birds revealed themselves only slowly, only on a second look. The air smelled like growing things and beautiful things, things people put in bottles and rubbed behind their ears.

Cole put his hand around my hair and used it to pull my head back until I was gazing straight up. I saw what he was directing my attention to: the ceiling, far overhead, peaked and made of glass. This was a greenhouse. No, what was the proper word? A conservatory.

The walls of plants and the night eliminated any road or party noise. We were in the middle of nowhere. Back in Minnesota again. No, farther than that, stranger than that. Someplace no one else had ever been.

Cole walked to the couch and threw himself onto it as if he had seen the entire world and was bored with it. After a moment, he sighed deeply enough that I saw it instead of heard it, the great lift of his chest and then the release.

I set my purse beside the couch and sat on the other end of the sofa. Throwing my legs across his, I leaned back on the sofa arm and released a sigh of my own. Cole rested his arms on top of my legs and blinked at the wall opposite. There was something threadbare about his expression.

We sat like that for several gray-green minutes, the fronds of palms and ferns barely moving. Beside me, a lustrous trumpet flower hung like a waiting silent bell. We didn’t say anything. Cole kept looking at the wall, and I kept looking at him and at the orange tree on the other side of him.

Cole moved his hand, brushing his fingers over the knob of my anklebone.

I breathed in.

His fingers lingered, playing over my skin, nearly tickling. With them, he described the shape of my ankle, the edge of my sandal: a sculptor’s hands.

I looked at him. He looked back.

Carefully, he unbuckled the strap of my sandal. The heel hit the floor first. He slid his hand over my foot, my ankle, up my calf. Goose bumps trailed after his fingers.

I breathed out.

The second sandal joined the first. Again he ran his palms up my leg. I was caught in the way that he touched me. It was as if his fingers found me beautiful. As if I were a lovely thing. As if it were a privilege just to trace his fingertips across my body.

I didn’t move. He didn’t know how only hours before, back at the party, I’d let someone else touch me, and had touched him back.

But —

Cole stretched forward to meet my lips. This kiss — his mouth was hungry, wanting. But still his hands were on my back and pressed against my hip, and still his touch was a silent shout: I love you.

How stupid I’d been to think I couldn’t tell the difference between this kiss and Mark’s kiss. How ridiculous to reduce Cole to his mess and his loudness, to be so furious with him that I erased the other true parts. What was I with the kindness scrubbed from the record?

Eyeliner in a white dress.

We were so little, when you took away all our sins.

As I linked my arms around his neck, I was crying.

What an idiot I was. This perfect moment, this perfect kiss, and I was crying. There was so much wrong with me. I was so incredibly messed up that I couldn’t cry when everything was wrong and I couldn’t not when everything was fine.

Our lips were salty with it. Cole didn’t stop or pause, but his hands crept up my back to hold me tighter. After a moment, he pressed his forehead against mine and I put my hands on his face and we just stayed like that, breathing each other’s breaths. It was so much us and so little him and me. Us, us, us. The opposite of lonely was this.

Cole said, “You’re the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

I replied, “I’m sorry I’m such a wreck.”

He kissed me again. My mouth, my throat, under my ear.

He hesitated. Pulling back, he said, “Tell me this means something to you.”

It was a strange thing to be asked. It seemed like it should have been the other way around. He was the one who had been the touring rock star with countless girls on countless nights. He was the one with the cavalier smile and the easy laugh.

But that wasn’t the truth. Not really. Not now. Now the truth was that I was the one with the heart of metal. I was the one always walking away.

A tear dripped off my chin and onto my leg. It was gray with my eyeliner.

I said, “Don’t let me leave you.”

Then, in our secret bit of Los Angeles, we kissed and slid from our clothing. His hands adored my body and my mouth explored his and in the end it was this: us us us.

This place, this place. Dry Venice, invented Eden, glowing New Age hipster palace where people come to believe in fate and destiny and karma and all of the things that are only true here and only if you make them true.

I was dead in Los Angeles once.

I opened my eyes and didn’t know where I was. And then, even after waking more fully, I suddenly knew, but I didn’t understand. My brain was a tangle of images and sensations. My own bare legs on top of a comforter, a streetlight moon outside a cracked window, a spidery shadow cast on the wall from a pitcher of dried baby’s breath. Cole’s stubbled chin in the curve of my breastbone, his side, tan and even and endless, his belly button, his hips, his legs, one of his ankles hooked over one of mine, one of his hands carelessly sprawled up against my neck, the other curled in the silky space below my breasts.

My mind took the images, finally, and put them all together into thoughts and memory. Finally, I understood: I was so, so naked.

We were in one of the bedrooms of the rental. Drunk with each other, existing in a sweaty place outside of logic, we’d stumbled in here last night and fallen asleep on top of the comforter here. Now it was some ungodly time of the morning and —

What was I even doing? Who was this other person? What was I thinking?

I extricated myself from Cole and found my clothing on the floor. I reached past it to where my phone was tucked into my purse. Two A.M. My mother would still be at work; she wouldn’t be worried. But of course Sofia had been watching and waiting with sleepless owl eyes, anxious for my welfare. I had four missed calls from her.

“Hey,” Cole said. He looked young and uncomplicated and half asleep. He lifted just his fingers from the comforter in my direction. Sleepily, he said again, “Hey.”

I was suddenly petrified that he would say a name other than mine. I knew in a bruising, truthful way that if he said another girl’s name right now, it would break my heart.

“Isabel,” he said, “what are you doing?”

I didn’t know. I felt unsteady on my legs. I started putting on clothing.

“I have to go,” I said. My voice sounded a lot more awake than his in this room. In the light from the streetlight, I could clearly see the dresser, the mirror, the glass sculpture in the corner of the room. It seemed like it was never dark in any place in this city. I longed suddenly and fiercely for actual night, for a perfect blackness to hide me more completely.

“No,” he replied simply. He lifted his entire arm now, and stretched it toward me. “Stay.”

“I can’t. People are — no one knows where I am. I need to go.”

“They’ll be okay till morning. Come back. Come sleep.”

“I’m not going to sleep. I need to —” I couldn’t seem to work out how to get my dress back on. No part of it was right side out. It was all wrong sides, and my fingers were clumsy.

Cole pushed himself up on an elbow to watch me struggle angrily with the garment. Finally, I aggressively zipped it; the zipper wasn’t even. Who was going to see it this time of night anyway? No one. I couldn’t remember where I’d put my car keys. Maybe they were still out in the conservatory. I couldn’t find them on the side table or in my purse or on the floor or — no, no, I’d come in Cole’s car, I needed a cab, I’d have to call one, I couldn’t even think of —

“Isabel,” Cole said from right behind me. He took my elbows and turned me around to him. I resisted, body stiff. I couldn’t look him in the eye. “If you have to go, I’ll drive you. You’re out of your mind.”

“Please let go,” I said, and it was the meanest thing I’d ever said, and I didn’t even want what I was asking for.

He let go. I expected his face to be blank, the real Cole gone someplace where I couldn’t poke at him, but he was still there. “Don’t do this to me.”

The emphasis, somehow, was on the word me. That he didn’t expect me to be able to stop from doing the this, whatever it was, but I could at least stop aiming it at him.

I wanted my hands to stop shaking. I wanted my brain to regain control of my body.

“I have to go,” I said. “I’m going to go. Don’t be an asshole about it.”

I didn’t even know what I was saying. I just knew that I was going. I had everything together. I would call a cab. I would walk to Abbot Kinney and get into it.

Cole’s voice was raw. “Fine, Isabel. Just — I get it. You get to call the shots. Call me when it’s good for you, right? It doesn’t matter what I need. It doesn’t matter how much I … I get it. Whatever. I’ll play your game.”

I didn’t reply. I was already gone.

light on

which one looks good today

Maybe me

Maybe not

do i match your shoes

your hair

your face

Maybe me

Maybe not

back on the rack

stretched but not worn

i am the used

I wrote the album.

I had nothing else to do.

The L.A. sky turned overcast and smoggy. Everything looked different without the brilliant sun and saturated colors. The houses were flatter, the cracks in the streets deeper, the palms drier. It didn’t feel like the L.A. I loved was gone, just like it was hiding or sleeping or had been knocked out and lay in a ditch waiting for me to find it.

I was tired of waiting. Of making. Of doing. I wanted some closure, an ending, a feeling I had gotten somewhere.

I wanted Isabel to call me and tell me she had been wrong, that she wanted me, that she loved me.

I called Leon. “Comrade. Do you want to get lunch with a famous person?”

“I wish I could,” he said kindly. “But I have pickups until midnight today.”

That was one thousand years from now. L.A. could be dead by then. I said, “Tomorrow, then. Chili dogs. Put it in your datebook. This time I get to drive.”

I got in the Mustang and drove. I didn’t know where I was going, but it took me to Santa Monica. I knew Isabel was here, but the car didn’t know she didn’t want to see me. I drove into a massive parking garage and sat there. I wanted to shoot up. I touched my skin where I would inject the wolf. I could almost feel it. I wondered if it was possible to invoke the shift without a needle or a temperature change, like that time I’d smelled of wolf when the topless girls came over.

I’d told Jeremy I was taking it off the table.

It was off the table. I’d meant it. It was just harder to really mean it than I’d expected. No. Not really. I knew it was going to be hard.

Withdrawal was never easy.

Isabel was just blocks away. I was tired of checking my phone for messages.

The car was getting stuffy. I opened the door and sat there in the dim blue parking garage and touched my wrist and the inside of my elbow and thought about disappearing.

I heard my name.

“Cole? Cole?”

I turned my head. It was a smallish sort of guy with a biggish nose and sort of greasy auburn curls, standing just outside the car. He was probably my age. His face had a religious cast to it. A familiar, glowing expression.

This was a fan.

I made sure I had my Cole St. Clair face on. I didn’t have a pen to sign anything, but maybe he’d brought one.

“Hey,” I said, climbing reluctantly from the car. I shut the door. “What’s up?”

He mouthed what’s up in a wondering, amazed way. “I’m, uh, I’m sort of, I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry, I’m, uh, awkward, you’re just, I’m …”

“That’s okay, slick,” I told him. “Take your time.”

“I’m not a stalker, I swear, I totally am not,” he said.

This was never the best way to start a conversation, but I’d heard it before. I just waited.

“I saw you come in here, I’ve been watching the show, I’m a huge fan of NARKOTIKA. I have, like, all of your albums, twice, and I buy them all the time to recommend them to, like, everyone I know.”

There was absolutely nothing wrong with what he was saying, but for some reason, I felt a little buzz in my throat when he said NARKOTIKA. A sort of claustrophobic squeeze. I had had this conversation, or one a lot like it, on tour. It felt like I was living a memory instead of a minute I was really in. Like I had dreamed two years and now I was waking up and I had never left my old life behind.

“That’s awesome,” I told him. “Always great to meet a fan.”

“Wait,” he said. “Wait, it’s not just that. When you disappeared, Cole …”

My ears felt a little ring-y.

“When you disappeared, I was having a rough time, too,” he said. He pulled up his sleeves. In the crooked blue shadows of the stairwell, his arms were a mess of scars. Track marks and cutting. But old. Old scars. “But when I heard on the radio that you were in rehab, I thought, I can do it, too. And I did. I totally did, because of you. Because if you could come back from that, back from the dead, I could do it, too. You changed my life. That song you guys had, I put the coffin inside/you don’t need to bury me, I know it’s about, about rebirth….”

“Coffinbone” wasn’t about rebirth. It was about wanting to die. All of the songs back then were about wanting to die. My chest felt small.

“When I heard you were in town recording, I knew the time was right for this. And when I saw you drive in here, I knew this was my, this was my chance to tell you thanks. And show you — sorry, it’s still a little raw.” The guy half turned, jacking up his shirt. The skin of his back was red and angry with the irritation of a brand-new tattoo.

In cursive it said, I put the coffin inside/you don’t need to bury me. And then a date. The date he got out of rehab or went in or something. Probably he wanted me to ask. But I didn’t.

There was nothing wrong with any of it except that he’d taken a quote about wanting to die every second of every day and tattooed it on his body because he didn’t understand. There was nothing really wrong with that, either, because it meant what he wanted it to mean.

But I knew what it had meant in the beginning, and the permanence of it, of marking his body forever with my desire to die, made my stomach churn sickly. The feeling didn’t go away when he pulled

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 792