Sinner

  My mother said, “Oh, honey, I don’t know. That’s months from now,” which made me wonder if I’d even said the never mind part out loud. I thought about it and I was pretty sure I remembered the action of forming the words.

  I wondered if I should retrieve the body of my good mood for a proper burial, or if I should just leave it here in the House of Ruin.

  My mother wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. I noticed it just then. My father wasn’t, either. I felt like laughing. A really hideous, cold laugh. Instead, I sneered a little. My face had to do something.

  “What do you need from us?” my mother asked. She asked it with the exact cadence in her voice that meant she had been told by her therapist, Dr. Carrotnose, to ask me that. Divorce-by-numbers.

  “Your genetic matter,” I replied. My skin felt sort of hummy. “And I already got that. So thanks. Congrats on your impending breakup. Well, making it official. I’m out.”

  “This is unacceptable,” my father announced. He was right, but there was nothing really left to do but accept it.

  “Isabel —” my mother said, but I was already gone.

  That day, the acoustic version of “Spacebar” wound its way through the Internet as we wound our way through “Air Kisses,” the track I’d decided to attempt to record that day. I had to redo the lyrics on the spot — they were better with a female vocalist, anyway, but some of it was meant for me when I wrote it, and I didn’t want to hear Magdalene singing about Isabel, even if only I knew that’s what it was. While the others broke for lunch, I sat with headphones on, ducked over the Korg, writing a brand-new bridge. I recorded and rerecorded my pulsing synth heartbeat. I made Leyla record and rerecord and rerecord her drum part, which she did without complaint or brilliance. Jeremy observed silently through the first few hours and then, in hour four, wrote a bass riff that made us all quiet. After that, Magdalene strutted into the booth and caressed the microphone and belted a vocal track that made us all loud.

  She was very drunk.

  Two years ago, I would’ve been, too.

  What’s the way, Baby?

  Then, while two of Magdalene’s boys worked on mixing the refrain, she opened up one of the massive doors so that we wouldn’t all die from carbon monoxide poisoning, and we drove her beautiful cars around in circles in the warehouse and then in the chain-link fenced parking lot.

  The sun had gotten high and then gotten low somehow as we worked. A whole day vanished into a microphone. Dust buffed up into the air in big, choking clouds, all of it orange and violet in the sunset, everything beautiful and industrial and apocalyptic with the warehouses and the sky blue cars.

  Maybe this was the only point of the episode. Enviable and beautiful excess, good music and pretty people.

  As I got into car number four or five — a Nissan GT-R, or something flat and mouth-shaped like that — Magdalene climbed into the passenger seat beside me.

  “Take it down the road and back. See what it can do!” she shouted, pointing down the perfectly straight road that ran in front of her warehouse. “We’ll be back in two minutes, boys!”

  Then she turned to me and said, “Punch it, kid.”

  I didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t the Saturn, and that was great.

  I let it charge to the edge of the lot. Just before we squealed out onto the long, straight road to the airport, Magdalene ripped off her mic and threw it out the window. In the rearview mirror, I watched it roll into the gravel and become invisible.

  “Vandalism,” I remarked uneasily. “Baby won’t be pleased.”

  As the speedometer climbed and the warehouse disappeared in a fresh cloud of dust, she said, all messy and sexy, “Are you enjoying your cage?”

  The engine howled. In the rearview mirror, I saw that the cameramen had stepped out into the road to film our short escape. “What cage?”

  “The one they watch you prowl around in. I have something for you,” she said. “Once we get out of view.”

  I screwed a gear shift. What the hell did I know about driving? And what the hell was this car anyway? We were already going eight thousand miles an hour, and I was pretty sure we were only in third gear and had very little marked road left. “If you’re talking about substances, my dear, I am clean.”

  The road dead-ended in a massive parking lot. Before I could hit the brake, Magdalene leaned over and snatched up the parking brake. The car immediately spun. For a single moment, we were weightless. It was life and death and stopping and going at the same time. The car sailed sideways, the steering wheel meaningless, but there was nothing for it to run into.

  Chaos without consequence.

  Magdalene released the brake. With a jerk, the car finished its spin. We faced back the way we came. Dust rolled by us in herds.

  “I am the greatest,” Magdalene observed. “Cole, you have never been clean.”

  “I’m not using,” I said as the windshield cleared. “Give me some credit.”

  “You’re an addict,” she said. “You’d be an addict if no one ever invented a drug. I saw you before you started using. You aren’t any different now.”

  The car was so loud, even idling. “I’m sober now.”

  “You were sober back then, too. Maybe the world thinks you loved heroin, but I know what your real addiction is.”

  I looked at her. She looked at me. I wanted her to say music, but she wasn’t going to. We’d started this as the same thing: ambitious teens with no idea of what to do once the ceiling was removed from the world.

  She asked, “Have you seen those big black-and-white monkeys at the zoo? They sit around all day picking their butts hoo hoo hoo, until a crowd comes along. And then they pick up all the toys in their cage and start throwing them and clowning around. They do it for the laughs. They do it because there are people watching. It’s not even about the toys. It’s only about the crowd.”

  She meant the way. She smiled then, sharp and beautiful, just the girl I remembered appearing in the studio on day one, back before it all went to shit.

  Magdalene opened up her hand, and in it was some ecstasy. “Who’s your friend? I am.”

  I hated how much I wanted to take it. My heart was crashing as if I already had.

  But even more than that, I hated how Magdalene believed in that old version of me. She was so certain I’d already toppled. The world didn’t want me to reinvent myself. Not a single person in it.

  “Did Baby give that to you?” I asked.

  She made a dismissive sound. It was accompanied by a very alcohol-scented breath. She was such a lovely and friendly drunk.

  “Oh, Magdalene, Magdalene. What did she say when she asked you to be on the show?”

  Magdalene smiled at me, her other hand on my face again. This smile was a real one, not her camera-ready number from before. Her obscenely beautiful lips parted to reveal that she was slightly gap-toothed. I suddenly remembered Jeremy saying that everyone looked like kids to him, and just like that, I could see her as the little girl she must have been before she ever got discovered. It was the saddest thing I’d ever imagined. I couldn’t comprehend how Jeremy could stand it.

  “She told me to be myself,” Magdalene said.

  I closed her hand back over the ecstasy. Her eyes widened in surprise.

  Cole, what’s the way? Nobody but me was going to tell me how to be Cole St. Clair.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, me, too.”

  As the camera van approached us, I put the car back in gear and screamed back the way I’d come.

  I was not in the mood to pick out sexy boots. I was not even in the mood to stare at famous people and dissect what made them look famous. I was in the mood for lab work. Back when I’d been taking AP Biology, I’d discovered there was nothing like plucking and dicing and observing to occupy the more active parts of my brain. If nothing else, biology was relentlessly logical. You could not change the rules. You could only work within them.

  But this was not biology. This was Sunset Plaz
a, which was sort of the opposite of biology. It defied logic. It was famous for being filled with famous people, but apart from that, it really wasn’t that exceptional. In fact, the inside of Erik’s didn’t look like much of anything. The narrow store boasted thin, high-traffic carpet, clear plastic, and dull lights that did nothing to replace the sun blocked by the yellow awning out front. .blush. was way nicer, in my opinion.

  But the shabby was how you knew Erik’s was an institution. If you survived in this city without being drop-dead gorgeous, it meant you were really something. While this ordinary shop continued on with age and cunning, the brand-new, beautifully stark storefronts next door kept coming up for lease as their pretty new tenants got eaten by Los Angeles.

  “Sofia,” I snapped, pulling her out of the way of a rogue Escalade. “Watch where you’re going.”

  Sofia’s gaze fluttered to me, but she was still mostly watching the rest of the people on the Strip. “Did you see that woman over there? I think it was Christina —”

  “Probably,” I interrupted. “Movie stars. That’s the view here. Unless you’re one of them, I wouldn’t recommend walking out in front of traffic. It won’t stop.”

  Sofia kept goggling, so I kept her arm and walked her, seeing-eye-dog-style, from our parking spot across the road to Erik’s. Once inside the dim store, I released her into the wild. As she walked slowly past the racks, I pulled out Virtual Cole and looked to see how the world was reacting to the acoustic “Spacebar.”

  Well. They were reacting well.

  In fact, they thrashed and squealed and hated and shouted and clapped delightedly. The music blogs disseminated it. Sound bites of the song provided soundtracks for animated GIFs of long-ago Cole throwing stuff out of a hotel room window. Words flashed at the bottom: COLE ST. CLAIR IS BACK.

  The four chambers of my heart were all vacant.

  I updated Virtual Cole, replying and re-disseminating where necessary, but my mind was wandering back to Minnesota. Cole dragged himself down the hallway of a house I couldn’t forget. He was a boy and a wolf and then a boy again. He begged me to help him to die. To die or to stay a wolf.

  My mind moved down the hall, past Cole, into another memory in that house. My brother Jack, dying in the bedroom at the end of the hall. Crumpled on the bed, burning up, determined to stay human, or to die trying. Everything smelled like wolf and death. Maybe there wasn’t a difference between the two.

  COLE ST. CLAIR IS BACK. Was the wolf back, too?

  I realized I’d been trailing around after Sofia, eyes on my phone, for quite a while. I looked up to see that she was staring at a pair of strappy sandals that she would never wear. She stared at them for so long that I realized that she wasn’t actually looking at them.

  “Sofia,” I said. “Are you waiting for them to speak?”

  She rubbed her own cheek and blinked her dark lashes at me with an apologetic smile. “I’m just distracted. Dad’s coming for a visit!”

  Immediately, I thought about the conversation in the kitchen with my parents. I couldn’t remember any of it as well as I remembered my father’s voice going strange when he told me we needed to talk. I felt like smashing some shoes off the shelves. People who say throwing shit when you’re angry doesn’t help have never thrown shit while they were angry.

  “What a bucket of kittens that will be,” I said.

  Sofia began to nod before she realized I was being sarcastic. Then, all earnest, she said, “Mom said she might go out with us.”

  Her face shone.

  I couldn’t take the hope in her expression. “Oh, please! They aren’t getting back together, Sofia!”

  My cousin looked like I’d smacked her. Her cheeks turned as flushed as if I had. “I didn’t say they were!”

  “But your face said it. That’s not how the real world works.”

  Predictably, her eyes shone with the threat of tears. “It’s not about that. We’re just going to spend the day together.”

  “Really? Not even a little tiny bit of you thinks they will get back together?”

  Sofia shook her head fiercely. She swiped the back of her hand across her eyes. They still looked fine, but she had a line of black mascara on her hand. She insisted, “I just want to spend time with him again. That’s all I care about.”

  “Well, great,” I said. “I’m sure it won’t be awkward at all.”

  She looked at her feet. I hated that she never fought back. I wouldn’t feel like such a jerk if she bothered to hit back. But she just smeared a hand over her skirt, smoothing it, and then over her hair, and then placed one hand in the other, like she was comforting it and sending it to sleep.

  “I’m not in a good mood,” I told her.

  “That’s okay.” She said it to her shoes.

  “It’s not okay,” I said. “Tell me to shut up.”

  A tear dripped onto Sofia’s shoe. “I don’t want to. You always say the truth, anyway.”

  She didn’t mention the other half of the coin, though: that sometimes the truth wasn’t the most useful thing to add to a conversation. I knew now, minutes after I’d started the conversation, that the proper way to reply to “Dad’s coming for a visit!” would have been, “Cool! Where are you going?”

  “Right,” I said, “Yeah. Are you going to buy shoes?”

  “I don’t need shoes.”

  I bit my tongue before I asked her why she’d even come. She’d come because I’d asked her. “Let’s just go before traffic gets bad. I have to get to Long Beach.”

  It was hard to remember my mood of this morning. It was harder still to imagine any sort of birthday surprise going well enough to make up for the dismal expression on Sofia’s face. The one I’d put there.

  As I pushed out of the door, I almost ran into Christina. After she swore at me and said, “Excuse you,” I realized it wasn’t actually Christina, just one of the dozens of interchangeable famous young women who frequented this place, women who looked gorgeous and slender on screen and were all knobbed elbows and big feet and huge sunglasses in person.

  “Oh, please,” I told her, and clicked out onto the relentlessly sunny sidewalk.

  Sofia, behind me, couldn’t look the fake Christina in the eye. Sofia’s hand was on her waist. I could tell she felt lumpy, because fake Christina was skim and Sofia was 2%. I could tell she felt sad, because her cousin was a bitch. I could tell that, despite it all, she was still a little excited about her father coming to visit.

  I hated this place.

  I sat in the recording booth with the headphones, my legs resting on the music stand in front of the swivel chair, and listened to the track. I’d added my vocals to the chorus at the last moment.

  I sounded good. The whole thing sounded good. Not just good, but good.

  Though it had been hours and hours and I should have been exhausted, I felt like I’d just woken up. My heart had burst into frenzied life. Or my brain. Or my body.

  Sometimes when I was done with a track, I had this moment where I knew it was going to take over the world. Was it about subjectivity? Knowing you’d just done something that would sound good played overhead at a roller-skating rink? Or was it a kind of telescoping sixth sense that only traveled through speaker cables?

  I took out my phone. I called Sam, who didn’t pick up, and left a voicemail that was only the song. I called Grace and did the same.

  I didn’t feel any more complete than I had before. I called Isabel, even though I knew she was in class. I didn’t expect her to pick up, but she did.

  “I have just done something magnificent,” I told her. I wanted her there with me, in a raw, sudden, endless way that was like the song in my head. “Come bask in my glory.”

  “I’m in class,” she said in a low voice. “Paraphrase it.”

  I’d taken off my headphones, but the music kept playing through them. I could feel the bass pulsing a beat against my thigh. It felt like the end of the world. Or like the creation. Something was exploding. I needed angels
to attend me. It was not good for man to be alone in this state. “I just did.”

  “Use your words.”

  My words were I need you right now I need to kiss you I want to have you here I want to just have you but I struggled to translate. “I’ve just recorded my first real track since I died and it is going to eat every dance floor in the country and it’s not even the best one I’ve written so far and someone is paying me to go into the studio and record the others and I can’t wait, I just can’t wait, I want to do it tonight, and I want you here because it is stupid to do it by myself.”

  I didn’t know how many of those words I said out loud, or if those were even the ones I used. My brain was tripping over itself, all sudden adrenaline and feeling and music music music, and my mouth couldn’t keep up.

  “Are you high?” Isabel asked suspiciously.

  I laughed. I was high, but not the way she thought. “I did it. I made a thing, Isabel!”

  “Well done. I alr — dammit. I have to get off the phone. Just remember” — she paused, and I thought I heard honking, but probably it was just voices at her class. I tried to tell myself that I was lucky that she had even picked up at all — “when a client is a different faith than you, it’s not an opportunity for you to evangelize, even if he’s on his deathbed.”

  “Am I a CNA now?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Isabel said. She hung up.

  In the headphones on my lap, I heard the track loop back around to the beginning. I felt like I had put my foot on a gas pedal and had nowhere to go. Up up up.

  Magdalene threw open the door. She grinned wildly. “Now,” she said, “we celebrate.”

  It was taking forever to get to Cole. First it was an accident, and then a huge event of some kind in the city, and then rush hour, and then another accident. The cars inched and stuttered along the freeway. My forty-five-minute drive turned into an hour and a half turned into two hours. The sky pinked and then blazed and then blackened.

  My mood went from bad to worse to the worst.

  I told myself it would be worth it for the look on his face when I appeared in the studio, assuming he was even still at the studio when I got there.