Sinner

  I could never get sashimi here again.

  “Most sinners do not linger in our memory like you,” the host said coolly. “Out.”

  I snapped, “What did you do, Cole?”

  Baby watched each of us, back and forth, like a tennis match.

  “It was a long time ago,” he repeated.

  The host said, “Not long enough.”

  I was as humiliated as I would have been if I had done something. “This is perfect. Let’s just go.”

  Something burned furiously in Cole’s eyes, but he shoved out of the booth and tossed his napkin contemptuously on the table. “Rumor works both ways,” he told the host.

  One of the guys behind the counter twisted his knife in the air slowly, just so the light caught it.

  “Oh, I see you. I am terrified,” Cole said. “Keep your shorts on. We’re going.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so embarrassed. One of the perks about not giving a damn. I couldn’t even put words together.

  I had spent so many afternoons doing homework at Yuzu, just being alone there where nobody knew me or what my facial expression normally looked like, and now my time there had gone from present to past in just a few minutes.

  Out in the deathly fluorescent end-of-the-world mall, Cole told Baby, his voice cool and remote, “Rematch. I’ve lost my appetite.”

  “Are you sure?” Baby asked as we headed back down the escalator. “Now would be a good time to shoot some good TV.”

  “Yeah,” Cole said. “Yeah, I’m sure. I can think of something better.”

  Baby said, “Do it, then. I’ve got the greatest surprise for your birthday, but you have to earn it.”

  We parted ways with her on the sidewalk. It was shockingly concrete white after the dim, timeless mall. We didn’t speak until we were back to the SUV.

  “What was that?” I spat. “What did you do to those people?”

  In the passenger seat, Cole shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know? I saw your face. You know.”

  “Isabel, I don’t remember.”

  “Don’t lie to me!” I snapped. “I saw it! What did you do?”

  “Victor and I —” In the passenger seat, Cole pinched his nose and, a second after, threw his fingers outward like he was chucking an idea away from himself. He had been restless before. Now he was rattling around inside his own body.

  I guided the SUV through a traffic light, past an apartment building with a pagoda roofline. “I hope that means you’re trying to figure out how to tell me why I can’t ever go back to my favorite restaurant.”

  Cole said, “Isabel, Jesus, give me a second.”

  “Also,” I snarled. Now the rage was developing properly. “Girlfriend?”

  “What, you want an apology for that, too? There’s probably an application I should’ve filled out before I was supposed to say it, right? Jesus. Of all the things —”

  Of all the things. Maybe he’d had girlfriends before, but I’d spent a lot of time intentionally being no one’s. And now I didn’t even know if he’d been saying it just to put a suspicious waitress at ease or because he thought I was really his girlfriend. And I didn’t even know, after that, if I even wanted to be. I didn’t know if it mattered if your boyfriend wasn’t a mess if everyone else in the world thought he was.

  Cole rested his temple on the window, his eyes cast toward the cloudless sky. “I’m trying,” he said finally. “I’m trying and it doesn’t matter to anyone. I’m always going to be him.”

  “Who?”

  “Cole St. Clair.”

  It seemed on the surface like a stupid thing to say, but I knew exactly what he meant. I knew just how it felt when your worst fear was that you would be yourself.

  Here’s what I knew: If I went back to the apartment by myself now, I’d go into the bathroom and slide a needle under my skin, and even though it was not drugs, even though it was so much cleaner than drugs, it would remind me of that person I had been not so long ago. The person who had gone to Koreatown to score and trashed a sushi restaurant when things went sour. I couldn’t take hating myself like I’d hated myself then.

  So I begged Isabel to take me back with her, at least for a little while.

  And she must have known me, because she did, even though she was angry.

  Isabel’s mother lived in one of those houses that would be a lot nicer if the houses that flanked it weren’t nice in exactly the same way. It didn’t look like California to me — it looked like Upper Middle Class, USA. Isabel backed her huge SUV into the driveway; she did it so neatly and proficiently that I was sure she must have intended to crush the flower bed on the right. When she climbed out into the evening yard, her lips parted dismissively, and I knew I was right. This was guerrilla warfare: Isabel versus the suburbs. She hadn’t figured out yet that the only way to succeed was retreat. Or maybe she had, only her retreat was blocked. So she had decided to go down fighting.

  It made me feel tired just looking at this neighborhood. It reminded me of my parents and Phoenix, New York.

  We stepped into the center hallway, which smelled like air freshener. The decor was endlessly nice, and I forgot what it looked like the moment I moved my eyes. Isabel was out of place here: an exotic. She pursed her bubble-gum paradise lips and then we heard her mother call, “Isabel?”

  Isabel had warned me that her mother would be home and that she would take care of it.

  But then there was a lower rumble: a male voice.

  Isabel’s eyes narrowed at exactly the same moment that Sofia appeared on the carpeted landing above us, looking equally out of place here — a drowsy-eyed transport from a silent black-and-white movie, complete with one of those side-curl hairdos and words printed in fancy font on the bottom of the screen. Her white hand gripped the stair rail.

  She mouthed words. They would have been printed on the bottom of the screen like so: Your dad!

  Tom Culpeper.

  I’d last seen him over Victor’s dead body, two thousand miles away and a million years ago. Culpeper hadn’t known it was a guy in wolf’s clothing, though. He had just been trying to kill things with sharp teeth. So Victor’s death wasn’t really his fault. It was mine. Always mine.

  I should have gone back to the apartment.

  “Isabel? That was you, right? Sofia, is that Isabel?”

  Both girls looked at me. Sofia silently scooted down the final stairs and started to touch my arm. Then she thought better of it and made a little hand-wheeling gesture. Words on the screen: Follow me! Isabel put a finger to her lips — Shhh (air kisses, baby/air kisses/follow my breath) — and stepped into another room.

  As Sofia whisked me down the hall and straight through a fine, nice, forgettable kitchen toward an open patio door, I heard Isabel say coldly, “Oh, how wonderful. All of my DNA is here together again.”

  Sofia didn’t stop until she’d led me two steps across a small deck and directly into a tiny wooden playhouse that butted up against it. It was the sort of playhouse with a green plastic slide and a climbing wall, and usually a wasp’s nest inside. The interior was about four feet square, and was dimly lit by the porch light. Sofia crawled into the far corner and curled her arms around her knees, and I sat in the other corner. I realized that we could still hear the Culpepers, especially when they came into the open-windowed kitchen a moment later. The small, green-shuttered window even gave us a view of the festivities — Sofia and I weren’t visible to them, but they were lit like a television screen.

  “I see you picked up the dry cleaning,” Isabel said, voice still cool. She got herself a glass of water. She didn’t say anything to her father.

  Isabel’s mother smoothed a hand over her hips. She wore a pair of meticulous white pants and a low-cut black blouse. She was one of those glorious women who was put together but not constructed. Usually mother-daughter pairings felt like before/after shots, but in this case, the two of them together just left the room in c
ollective awe over the excellence of the genetics involved.

  “Your father would like to know if we’d like to spend the weekend with him,” Isabel’s mother said.

  Beside me, Sofia made herself into a smaller ball. All I could see over her knees were her enormous eyes as they gazed at the kitchen. They had a sheen as if she was crying, but she was not crying. I wondered how old Sofia was. Fifteen? Sixteen? She seemed younger. She still had that mysterious thing young kids had that made people want to take care of her instead of date her.

  “Here?” Isabel said in the kitchen. “Or in San Diego?”

  “Home,” Tom Culpeper said. He leaned in the doorway with his arms crossed, looking lawyerly. “Of course.”

  Isabel smiled nastily at her glass. “Of course.”

  Sofia whispered, “I wish I were like Isabel.”

  I brought my focus back into the playhouse. “How do you figure?”

  “She always knows what to say,” Sofia said earnestly. “When my parents fought, I just blubbered and looked stupid. Isabel never gets upset.”

  I didn’t know about that. I thought Isabel was always upset.

  “There’s nothing wrong with blubbering,” I said, and added untruthfully, “I blubber all the time.”

  Sofia raised an eyebrow and smiled at me behind her knees. I saw just the corner of it, shy and disbelieving. She liked that I’d said it anyway. I pulled out my tiny notepad and wrote down the air kisses lyric before I forgot about it.

  “Are your parents divorced?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Was your dad a dick lawyer, too?”

  She shook her head. Her sheen-y eyes were a little sheenier. “Not a lawyer, and not a dick.” She couldn’t even say dick in a hateful way. She said it very carefully, like she was talking about anatomy, and she didn’t want anyone to hear her.

  In the kitchen, I heard Isabel say, still very chilly, “Driving two hours doesn’t give you a particular claim on my time. I have plans. If you and my mother would like to enjoy a weekend of adult activities and flotation devices, however, I’m fine with that. You’re big people.”

  “Being eighteen doesn’t give you a free pass to be rude, Isabel,” Tom said. I closed my eyes and thought about the different ways I would like to hurt him, starting with the easiest and working toward the cruelest: with my fist, with my words, with my smile. “Do you speak to your mother like this?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel.

  I opened my eyes and asked Sofia, “How long have your parents been divorced?”

  Sofia shrugged and rubbed her finger on the interior of the playhouse. In the dim light, I saw that she was touching the words Sofia was here, written with a spidery font. She was sad in a way that didn’t ask me to do anything about it, which made me want to do something about it. I felt in the pocket of my cargo pants until I found a marker, and then I leaned past her and wrote Cole was here. I signed it. I’m good at my own signature.

  Her teeth made a tiny crescent in the darkness.

  I heard Teresa’s voice rise, and both Sofia and I leaned to listen again. I missed the end of her sentence, but Tom’s reply was unmistakable through the open windows and door.

  “You and I both know that love is for children,” he said. “We’re adults. Compatibility is for adults.”

  “Compatibility is for my Bluetooth and my car,” Teresa replied. “Only they get along just fine, and my car never makes my Bluetooth feel like shit.”

  “Well,” Isabel said, thin and mean and condemning, “I’m going to leave you two here. I have things to be doing, like drilling a hole through my own temple. So long.”

  Tom broke off his death stare toward his wife to look at his daughter. “I drove two hours to see you.”

  Isabel’s back was to us, so I saw her arms crossed behind her back instead of her face, and I could see how she so savagely pinched the skin of her right arm with her left hand that the skin flushed red. But her voice was still glacial. “And now you’ve seen me.”

  She clicked out of the room.

  Tom licked his teeth. Then he said, “I see your parenting has done wonders, Teresa.”

  There was no universe in which Tom Culpeper and I would be friends. Sofia ducked over her phone, texting rapidly. I saw nothing but Isabel’s name at the top of her screen.

  A moment later, Isabel appeared around the side of the deck and squeezed into the playhouse — I had to crush right against Sofia to make room. Isabel looked carved from ice. Her eyes were pointed at the place where I’d signed the playhouse, but she wasn’t really looking at anything at all.

  “Here,” I said.

  I offered her the marker, but she didn’t take it. She said, “I want to forget I was ever here.”

  Sofia volunteered, “I can go in and get some cookies if you want them.”

  Isabel snapped, “I don’t want you to go get me any goddamn food, Sofia!”

  Her cousin somehow managed to shrink without actually occupying any less space. Isabel closed her eyes, her mouth thinning.

  I was sandwiched between two miserable girls and I had no car of my own to go anywhere else, and even if I did, it was a Saturn. And once Sofia had said cookie, I really did want one, because our dinner had been reneged by suspicious sushi chefs. But now Teresa and Tom Culpeper were having a proper scream fest in the kitchen and really, nobody could go inside without risking civilian casualties.

  “I would take a cookie,” I said to Sofia, “but I’m watching my weight. Camera adds twenty pounds, you know, and there’s really no point to life if I can’t be handsome on camera.”

  Isabel snorted. Sofia snuffled and murmured something.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Lens distortion,” Sofia sniffed. “That’s why it adds twenty pounds. Every — sniff — lens is technically a fish-eye so it makes the middle of everything bigger, like your nose and stomach and stuff. And all of the lighting and flash and slave flash and — sniff — whatnot gets rid of shadows and edges, so you look even fatter.”

  “Well,” I said. “The more you know.”

  The fight in the kitchen escalated. (Teresa had just shouted gloriously: Isn’t lawyer just another term for whore? And Tom had replied, If we’re talking about women who work all night long, I think the term is doctor.)

  I retrieved my phone. “Want to see the episode we did today?”

  Sofia said, “What’s it about?”

  “That’s a surprise. I could tell you, but then I’d have to edit you out of the world’s fabric.”

  Isabel opened her eyes. I thumbed through screens on my phone and navigated to the website. Both girls leaned a little closer to the illuminated screen in the darkness.

  The episode began with my fight with Leyla and proceeded apace to the fight with Chad over Jeremy.

  “What a jerk,” Sofia said.

  “Doesn’t he know Jeremy was married to you first?” Isabel added hollowly. I knew she was saying it for Sofia, to sound like she was into the video-watching and to be forgiven for being mean earlier. It worked, too, because Sofia badly wanted to forgive her.

  After I secured Jeremy, the three of us headed to the address Isabel had given me. It was the wedding of a super-fan in Echo Park. Well, according to Isabel it was a super-fan. A lot was resting on Isabel’s ability to both play me on the Internet and also know how to do her research. Because if this turned out to be just a normal person’s wedding or a casual fan’s wedding, we were heading to disaster. Timing was tight, and the Saturn mysteriously ran out of gas on the way. We were forced to walk for gas to a station where the attendant just happened to recognize me.

  I paused the video. “So this is the part where I got to find out if Isabel really did know everything.”

  Sofia said, “Why?”

  “She’s the one who found the wedding.”

  Sofia’s giant eyes turned to Isabel.

  Isabel said, “Good thing for me I know everything.”

  And she did. We eventual
ly made it to Echo Park, where both the bride and the groom turned out to be super-fans, and the bride fainted wonderfully and mostly on camera when she saw me and Jeremy climb out of the car. Much to the horror of all of the parents involved, we jammed and played the couple down the aisle. Leyla wasn’t even terrible on the drums. It really was a fine bit of television.

  Sofia sighed happily. “It’s so romantic. Was it that romantic in real life?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Isabel was scrolling through the video comments on my Virtual Me phone. There were a lot. Too many to read all of them, even if you wanted to. Isabel squinted at the most recent one. It was a paragraph long, full of love for NARKOTIKA and weddings and asking if I would ever write another song like “Villain.”

  As we were both looking, another comment came in. Comment number 1,362, and just one line:

  cole st clair facedown is how I remember him

  Isabel pursed her lips. She didn’t look at me. I felt trapped between that comment and the confrontations in the sushi restaurant and with Chad. It felt like my past was getting closer and closer instead of the other way around.

  Sofia was still in rapture from the glib ending of our episode. “Do you think you’d have a rock band at your wedding, Isabel?”

  “I’m not getting married,” Isabel said, clicking off the work phone and putting it away. She still wasn’t looking at me or at the house or at anything. “I don’t believe in happy endings.”

  Later, in the empty apartment, that was all I could remember clearly. The aborted dinner with Baby was a blur of humiliation and anger. The conversation with Chad a smear of doubt. The smiles of the wedding guests: forgotten.

  I just remembered the one person I wanted to be with saying she didn’t believe in happy endings.

  When I got into the Saturn late that night or early that morning, the radio was playing “Villain.” My voice snarled at me as I backed it out into the alley:

  Didn’t you always want me this way?

  On-sale late-night going-out-of-business

  I’m so much cheaper.

  The roads were eerie and deserted. Even the bars were closed. The lack of people and sun somehow emphasized the lack of grass and foliage beside the sidewalk. This place was carved from concrete. On the radio, my voice was still bitter. I didn’t turn it off.