Don’t pretend you like me
The beach parking lot was empty, and when I opened the car door, the air was frigid.
That this is about me
Frigid was good. It would make this last longer.
I’ll be just a story in your wild youth
I took my things and padded barefoot across the sand toward the ocean. I stripped down. There was no one to see me except for the black, starless sky, and the blacker silhouettes of the palms at the edge of the parking lot. I put the needle into my skin.
God you’re a villain a villain
I could be caught, of course. Someone might see me as I ran through the surf as a wolf. Or someone might see me in nine or fifteen or twenty-two minutes when I had turned back into a naked human. Or possibly, very possibly, someone could see the very moment of transformation.
But they wouldn’t. Statistically, they wouldn’t.
And the threat wasn’t enough to stop me. I waited as my veins began to howl and my nerves started to shudder. If there was a way to make my thoughts go before the pain, the screaming pain of the shift, this would be the perfect escape. The cleanest drug, the sanest mental vacation.
Sometimes I forgot how filthy the drugs had made me. But it was like Baby said. I was pretty now.
Villain villain villain
And then, finally, I was a wolf. The sand on my paws, cool and damp and endless. No colors to miss on the night beach. Just sound and smell and wind hissing past my ears as I ran. Every thought was an image.
I came to crouching in the freezing surf. There was no one around. The beach was still empty. I had gotten away with it, which somehow made me feel worse. It was only me who knew the truth about me, but that was enough. Everyone else had already guessed.
I was always him, always Cole St. Clair.
And I could still hear Isabel’s voice as she said, I don’t believe in happy endings.
INTERNET: Hey, Cole St. Clair, is it true you got kicked out of Yuzu?
VIRTUAL COLE: for being awesome
INTERNET: My buddy said it was because you were shooting up in their bathroom.
VIRTUAL COLE: you need new buddies
INTERNET: LOLOL love you man
VIRTUAL COLE: really who doesn’t
INTERNET: Will you ever do another song like “Villain”?
INTERNET: Who is that girl we saw on the last episode?
VIRTUAL COLE: superhot alien
INTERNET: dump her! I luv u cole!
VIRTUAL COLE: superhot alien would destroy planet
VIRTUAL COLE: really im saving the world (no really)
VIRTUAL COLE: thank me now
INTERNET: she wouldnt have 2 know haha lol
INTERNET: Are we ever going to see Victor again? NARKOTIKA rocked!
VIRTUAL COLE:
INTERNET: Great to see you and Jeremy playing together! How about Victor?
VIRTUAL COLE:
INTERNET: OK let’s have Victor now!!!!!!
VIRTUAL COLE: you guys are going to give leyla a vegan breakdown
INTERNET: hahaha no but really NARKOTIKA 4EVER
INTERNET: What do you want for your birthday?
VIRTUAL COLE: to stay young forever
Cole texted me:
Actually I want you
Baby called me and said, “Happy birthday. Are you ready for your surprise?”
I was standing in the rental house next door to my apartment; I’d broken in right after I’d had breakfast. And by breakfast, I mean a banana lying in a hot dog bun, and by breaking in, I mean I found out that one of the rear sliding doors was unlocked. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea that it was my birthday, even though I couldn’t say exactly why. I said, “Am I going to like it?”
“I worked very hard on it.”
“Can I get a hint?”
“Just enjoy the ride,” Baby said. “You might want to put on pants for this. I hope you’ve been writing some music.”
The first surprise arrived on my doorstep at ten A.M. Actually, it didn’t quite arrive on my doorstep. It arrived in the alley behind the house and made really loud noises until I climbed up onto the roof deck to see what was happening.
Down below was a brilliant cerulean Lamborghini revving its engine repeatedly. For a brief moment, I thought, That’s quite a present, and then I realized that the present was actually sitting behind the driver’s wheel in the form of a small, gorgeous Latina with white aviator sunglasses on. She looked both richer and more famous than me, because she was. My heart gave an involuntary lurch.
Oh, Baby, you clever bastard, I thought.
“Magdalene,” I called down. “How nice of you to stop by.”
When I had first met Magdalene, she had just been discovered in some small town in Arkansas or Georgia or South Carolina, the daughter of a sometime mechanic who entertained herself joyriding and singing in shopping malls. She’d just graduated from high school and released her first EP and was looking for some exposure.
She recorded “Spacebar” with us and then we went our separate ways. By which I mean, I went on to make NARKOTIKA famous in a few different countries and then pass out in my own drool. And she went on to record one of the top five selling dance albums of the decade, marry and divorce two actors and one actress in two years, lose and regain her driving license for running a street-racing ring, and star in one of the movies in the Clutch franchise — the only one that made any money. I still had a poster she sent me. With a metallic blue marker, she’d written on it:
Shut up (and Drive), Cole
I understood that she had the largest collection of sky blue supercars in North America.
She was also the nicest drunk I’d ever known. Once upon a dangerous time, I’d had the biggest crush on her. I was quite certain Baby knew both of these things. I wondered what she was hoping I’d do with this episode.
“Happy birthday, Cole St. Clair!” Magdalene gave the Lambo another rev. Wind came from somewhere and lifted her black hair. The ripple of the strands suggested that they had been constructed by a team of specialists. “Get in this car before I run out of gas!”
I leaned over the railing, taking in the blueness of the car. I noticed that T was parked behind her in a van, recording every second. Also, Magdalene had a tactful little mic clipped on her glittery tank top.
“Where are we going?” I asked loudly.
“Baby told me we were recording a song?”
“Oh, did she.”
“I only record in my place. I hope you’ve got something that’s gonna make me sound good.”
“My drummer’s not going to fit in that car.”
“She can take that,” Magdalene said. Contempt oozed off her voice and pooled around the tires of the Saturn.
The image of Leyla being forced to drive the Saturn again was a powerful motivator. I pushed off the railing. As I headed for the stairs, I texted Isabel. Virtual Me might heat up. Episode is happening.
Isabel texted back. The internet never sleeps
I shot back: you could come
Isabel: damn class til late
I texted: tell them it’s my birthday
She didn’t reply, but I didn’t expect her to. I called Jeremy. “I’m sending a car for you. An episode’s happening.”
Jeremy asked, “What’s the way?”
I said, “I have no idea.”
Magdalene took me down to her studio space in Long Beach. I couldn’t even call it studio space. I didn’t know what to call it. It was a warehouse near the Long Beach Airport, all concrete floors and giant doors meant for driving semitrucks through. It was big enough to fit an entire Venice block. Half of it was lined with sky blue supercars. I didn’t know what most of them were. Flat cars with big engines and spoilers that looked like torture devices. The concrete floor between them was marked with big loops of tire marks, some smeared sideways.
The other half was a studio. It was the biggest, fanciest studio I’d ever seen, and I’d seen some pretty big
and fancy studios. There were isolation booths for singers and isolation booths for drum kits and a piano and an upright hipster piano and a rack of synthesizers and an array of guitars and bass guitars and cellos all propped up in stands, waiting to be used. The walls were covered with acoustic padding and the ceilings were hung with microphones on tracks. For a second, I thought I smelled a hint of wolf among the mixing consoles, but then it was gone and maybe it had just been me. Above me, a huge pair of shiny 3-D lips, complete with lip ring, hung on the wall. They were larger than any of the cars and red as the blood in my beating heart.
It was excessive even for excess. I turned to Magdalene. She was already drinking something out of a tiny little glass.
Quick tip: Things in tiny little glasses punch harder than things in big ones.
She smiled at me. It was a smile that had seen ten thousand cameras. Two of the ten thousand were already trained on her.
“You want something? I probably have something that will interest you.”
“I’m clean,” I told Magdalene.
“Good for you.” Magdalene laughed, and her laugh was a little hoarse, like mine was when I’d been touring a lot. “The world needs more priests.”
I wondered if Baby was hoping we’d fight. I let it pass. “Look at all these toys you have here.”
The most insane part was that this place was clearly a concrete manifestation of her imagination. She was so over the top — huge hair, huge eyes, tight sparkly tank top, elaborate belly-button piercing, belt wider than my hand, bell bottoms, and combat boots — that she fit right in.
“Wait till the boys get here,” she said. “Play me something.”
She gestured to the piano. It was a nine-foot Steinway. Because seven-foot Steinways are for posers.
There is only one option if you are presented with a nine-foot concert grand Steinway, especially if it is sky blue, as this one was.
I sat at it.
I wasn’t always a rock star. It wasn’t synthesizer lessons I’d asked my parents for.
I played a little fragment of Bach. Intentionally slow and stilted and soft, like a creepy clown or a joke involving Bach. The piano was incredibly tuned. It practically played itself.
“Come now, Cole,” Magdalene purred, leaning on the piano. She rolled her eyes toward the cameras. “We’re all alone here. Surely you don’t have nerves.”
I smiled at her — the Cole St. Clair smile — and trilled out another snatch of messy Bach, fast but proficient, and then I crashed into the chords of “Spacebar.”
Magdalene grinned wildly, recognizing them at once. She pulled the glass from her lips and sang the chorus as I got to it: “Hit it, hit it, hit it!”
Each time she repeated “hit it,” she ratcheted up the scale. Man, she had a set of pipes. And she’d gotten better since we’d first recorded that track, too. She tapped out a beat on the edge of the piano as I tripped and plummeted through the refrain of “Spacebar,” trying to translate the synth chords into a piano bit on the fly. It had been a million years since I’d played it.
But it was still catchy.
Whoever had written this song had known what they were doing.
My reflection smiled cunningly at me from the sheen of the open piano lid.
Magdalene kept singing.
And oh — oh, it was good to be playing again. To hear someone else riffing off your tune, to throw a bit of an improvisation back at them, to come back again and again to those same crashing four chords that, for two glorious weeks, America had sung over and over until they were dreaming them.
Then we’d sold the rights to a car commercial and moved on to something else.
Magdalene screamed up the last bit of the scale at the same time that I crashed down to the very bass range of the Steinway, and when the last ringing note died, she got herself another drink.
I wondered if she was supposed to be the disaster at the sidelines.
I heard slow clapping. Jeremy and Leyla had arrived, as had “the boys” — the sound techs. The oldest of the techs was the one clapping. An assistant had been filming us with his phone.
He asked, “Can I put that on the Internet?”
Magdalene said callously, “Why not? He’s written something better for later, anyway.” Then she turned to me. I was still a bit destroyed by hurling myself onto the shores of the tune. She put a small hand on my cheek. “Ah, Cole. I forgot what talent sounded like.”
I could say that I had never missed a CNA class before and that I was making an exception for Cole, but I’d be lying. I had always considered class to be a negotiable concept. The only thing that mattered was the grade. Ever since I hit high school, I constantly skated that fine, dangerous line between knowing all of the material and getting in trouble for failing to participate.
Still, so far the only time I’d cut CNA class had been on my dead brother, Jack’s, birthday, but I hadn’t really been thinking about that when I cut. I was just thinking that sitting in someone else’s high school for another six hours was going to make me violently and physically ill.
I cut this time for another birthday: Cole’s. I didn’t want to surprise him until he’d actually had time to get some work done, though, so I found myself with a beautiful stretch of day with nothing to fill it. Ordinarily, these huge swaths of time would invest me with anxiety and hatred of the planet, but today, the hours seemed benevolent. I decided to pick up Sofia from her erhu lesson and make her buy some sexy boots before I drove myself to Long Beach and Cole.
I couldn’t tell what this thing was inside me. Was it a good mood? It seemed like it could be.
But when I headed down the stairs of the House of Ruin, prison keys jingling merrily with the melody of escape, I saw my father standing in the foyer. He looked tidy and powerful, a barely sheathed knife in a gray suit.
I hesitated. That was my mistake. My father had been bred and trained to sense weakness. His eyes were on me in a second.
FATHER: Isabel.
ISABEL: Father.
FATHER: Don’t use that tone with me.
ISABEL: This is my voice.
FATHER: You know exactly what I’m talking about.
I contemplated if I could go back to my room and rappel out the window. Physically, I could. Practically, it would stain my skirt. The point was to look excellent for Cole later. Hopefully, this wouldn’t last long.
Down below, my father gazed up at me. His eyes looked hectic, like they did when he was working on big cases.
FATHER: We need to talk to you.
ISABEL: I’m on my way out.
FATHER: This isn’t optional.
ISABEL: I encourage you to plunder the definition of the word optional as I leave.
FATHER: Isabel — please just — please just come down. This is important.
His voice had gone strange. I came down.
I felt an unpleasant jitter inside me, like when I’d heard the news about Jack.
I followed him into the kitchen. Because it was day, all the lights were turned off, but the sun was high enough overhead that it didn’t make it in the windows. It made the room seem cool and hostile. My mother was already arranged inside, leaning against the counter with her arms crossed. She had dressed herself in contempt. Not her best look, but better than tears.
My good mood felt like an endangered species.
I tried to imagine what could possibly put those expressions on my parents’ faces.
I thought I knew. I just didn’t want to —
“We’ve decided to get a divorce,” my mother said.
There it was.
All of the suggestion and postulation and threatening and, finally, there it was.
“Of course you are,” I said.
“Isabel,” my mother chastised.
My father looked up sharply. He hadn’t heard what I’d said because he had been busy cutting the throat of my good mood on the center island. Luckily, the granite had been chosen to provide a wipe-clean surface for b
lood, orange juice, and disappointment.
I tried to think of how it would change things. I didn’t know if it would really make things worse. Or better. Or different. Mostly I thought of how it meant now when I went away to college, I’d have to visit two separate houses if I wanted to see both parents. And I thought of how if Jack somehow magically returned, he wouldn’t recognize his family, because it had disintegrated. And I thought of how statistically pointless love was and how unsurprising this all was in the relative scheme of things.
“Are you crying?” my mother asked.
“No,” I replied. “Why would I be crying?”
“Lauren said that Sofia cried a lot when she found out about her and Paolo.”
Both my father and I looked at my mother.
“When?” I asked, but I knew it was a pointless question as soon as I asked it. A divorce wasn’t like a wedding or a birthday party. You didn’t set a date and buy flowers. I thought about the photographs that used to adorn the entire entry wall back in our home in Minnesota. An assortment of wedding and honeymoon photos. My genetic material was quite attractive, and they were a striking couple in every photo. I’d like to say that even in those early images you could see the seeds of discord, but I’d be lying. They were beautiful, unposed photos of two beautiful young people in love with each other. They were in love before they got married and in love at the wedding and in love when they had baby Jack and baby Isabel.
But not anymore.
My father said, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“We are talking about it.”
My mother shot my father a look as if this must be obvious.
“What about Christmas?” I asked. It was a stupid question. A child’s question. I was immediately angry at myself for asking it. “Never mind. I answered my own question.”