“Noble.”
It was hard to imagine a person on the planet managing to be uncharmed by this Cole.
He asked, “Can I peel an egg for you?”
“I don’t know, can you?”
“May I?”
I waved a hand. He arduously peeled an egg and handed it to me. I nibbled the white while he worked on the other. I got to the middle, which was rather underdone, just as I noticed that Cole had pretty much swallowed his without chewing it.
“Chug chug chug,” he told me.
I gave it to him instead. “Are they really filming everything you do?”
Cole swallowed the rest of my egg and handed me a donut instead. “It’s supposed to be just an off-the-cuff documentary about me recording this album. But I’m sure they’re hoping I mess up.”
I held his gaze over the donut. Cole was in possession of so many different precedents for messing up that it was hard to know which one was the worst one to be caught on film.
“Could it happen?” I asked him.
His voice was careless. “Impossible.”
It was like when he had answered so quickly before to say that he was here for me. I couldn’t believe an answer given that easily. But maybe it was impossible. I didn’t know the rules of shifting anymore. Once upon a time, it had seemed to be temperature-based. The colder it was, the more likely you were to be a wolf. But it had never seemed to work very reliably for Cole, who had studiously cooked his brain chemistry through a number of substances. When I’d left Minnesota, he had been conducting experiments on the shifting.
I suspected that now he could do it on purpose.
I didn’t know how I felt about that. It was better than heroin, I guessed, but it wasn’t heroin that had killed my brother.
He offered me another donut, which I accepted. The waxiness wasn’t bad when you washed it down with enough Diet Coke.
I asked, “Does Sam know you’re here?”
Sam was one of the members of the wolf pack back in Minnesota. Sort of. He was sort of cured. Sort of getting there. I probably should have called him to see how he was. Probably should have called Grace, too, to see if she was happily anticipating college. But like I said. I wasn’t really friendly.
“Yeah.”
“Did he think it was a good idea?”
Cole shrugged. “His concept of a good idea is majoring in obscure poetry. He wanted to know the pack was taken care of, and they are. I have it all set up. They’ll be fine until winter. And, anyway, he knew I wanted to make some of my own money back again. Not that being a property owner isn’t incredibly satisfying.”
This was because Cole had bought the piece of land the wolves lived on now.
What about me?
“It didn’t have to be California,” he said. “It could have been New York. Nashville.”
He didn’t say anything else. I didn’t want to ask him anything more about it, because I felt strangely emotional and unbalanced over just the few words he’d already said.
Instead, I asked, “What about your green egg?”
Cole picked up the kiwi fruit. “Do you peel it?”
“Not with your fingers,” I said. I didn’t really know. I’d only ever seen them as God intended: peeled and sliced. Sofia probably knew four ways to prepare one. “The skin is thick?”
He bit the fruit just enough to cut through the furry skin and worked at the edge with his fingers. It looked like he was taking the fruit’s jacket off. After he’d revealed a precious inch of the interior, he offered it to me across the table. “First dibs?”
I leaned forward to take a bite. Juice welled on my lips, and before I could wipe it away, Cole pressed his thumb to my mouth. He swiped the juice away with his finger and then put it in his own mouth. Lingeringly, like he could taste my lips on his. I couldn’t stop looking at his mouth.
Then we were kissing, hungry and hard and ceaseless, one bleeding into the next. I heard my glass tip and soda fizzle in the drain. The heel of his hand pressed my cheek; he still held the kiwi in his fingers. Everything smelled like paradise. My fingers grazed his collarbone, his ribs, his hipbones above his waistband. It felt like it had been so long since I’d touched another person. He was so real, his skin so warm, all of him ribs and salt and sweat. It felt like so long since I’d seen him. It felt like this was the only thing I had wanted for so many months.
He restlessly shoved the wreck of the table out of the way and pulled me closer. The kiwi joined the diet soda by the drain. One of his palms was on my neck and the other gripped my thigh, half beneath my skirt. I couldn’t catch my breath. This was bad. I wanted him too much to stop myself, and I needed to stop, or — or —
A phone began to shrill, urgent as a fire alarm.
Into my mouth, Cole said, very simply, “No.”
But the phone kept ringing. I couldn’t understand how it sounded so close until I realized there was a handset hanging beside the toilet.
Cole let out the most ragged breath imaginable.
I had thought I’d be relieved. I was not.
My fingers, which had been hooked on the top of his jeans, fell away as he stood up. He scrubbed a hand over his face before stepping out of the shower. With his foot, he kicked down the toilet lid and sat on it before taking the phone from the hook. His hair was still a mess, but now he somehow looked dressed.
“Da,” he said, rather coolly. His expression had sharpened; it was twitchier than the person who had greeted me, or the person who had invited me into the shower, or the person who had been kissing me. He listened for a moment. “Right. E-mail it to me, then. Oh, this is my excited voice. You have no idea.”
I started to pick up the things that had scattered across the shower. I turned the stool upside down and piled the bowls and eggshells in the cavity inside.
Then I stepped out and leaned against the sink as he stood in the middle of the bathroom, thumbing through his phone. My heart was still thudding. He leaned beside me, his shoulder against mine, still looking at the phone.
My thoughts were a movie screen with nothing projected on it.
After a moment, he tipped his phone to me so that I could see the e-mail on it. From: Baby North. Subject line: AUDITIONS.
T tells me you’re doing auditions on the beach. I’ve touched base with people to make sure the world knew to come. When you’re done with that, I’ve jotted some other ideas in the notebook. Let me know.
Cole pulled a small notebook from his back pocket. It looked brand-new, but when he flipped it open, the first page had slanted, excited handwriting:
Reveal your identity to fans in the music aisle of Target.
Run a block party.
Crash a wedding.
Steal a car.
You know. Be yourself.
“I thought this was a show about you recording an album?” I asked, but it wasn’t really a question.
“Who would watch that?” he replied. He frowned at the list, but not like he was upset with it. More like it was a slightly perplexing shopping list, and he was contemplating the mechanics of fulfilling it.
“Are you really going to do all of those things?”
“Maybe,” Cole said. “I can think of better ones.”
“She wants you to be a disaster.”
He tapped the notebook against his mouth. “She wants me to look like a disaster.”
“Those are the same thing.”
He was very disinterested in this line of questioning. “This is just performing. I know what they want.”
“Who is ‘they’? How did we get plural all of a sudden?”
“The masses. The people. Don’t you watch TV?”
I did watch TV. I watched Baby’s shows. I thought of those knee-high cameras. Perfect angle for catching a shot of someone on his way down.
I wanted to tell him to quit the show and stay here for me.
But that was the opposite of not getting in too deep.
Things were starting to get proj
ected on the movie screen of my mind, and they were all things that might make me cry if they happened.
I pushed off the sink. “I have to go to work.”
“Work,” echoed Cole, as if he had not heard the word before. “How can you work and help me destroy the hopes of a dozen hopeful bass players at the same time?”
“I can’t. And I’m not going to be on your — your thing. I’m not part of the Cole St. Clair show.”
“How boring that is.” Cole’s face was carefully expressionless, though, so I knew he meant frustrating or upsetting instead of boring.
“Well, that’s how things run in the Isabel show. Call me next time you’re off camera.” For some reason, I was irritable now. It was as if every time my feelings were prodded into action, the first thing was always pins and needles.
I opened the bathroom door.
“Wow. Just like that?” Cole asked.
“Just like that,” I replied. “Frosty.”
I stepped back into the view of all the cameras. Cole, still out of their reach in the bathroom, held a pretend phone to his ear. He mouthed _____ me, only I didn’t think the verb was call.
A smile flashed across my face despite myself. His own smirk bloomed so quickly in response to it that I knew he’d been waiting for me to do something forgivable.
Really, that made two of us.
After Isabel had gone, I felt charged and ready to be Cole St. Clair. I was so high that it made me think about how I used to replicate this feeling with drugs. Thinking about that feeling made me imagine how once upon a time, I would have gone looking for some now: not for right away, but for later, as a reward for good behavior. A private high in a harmless environment. Even through my thoughts of Isabel, I felt a surge of nerves and anticipation, some part of me already planning for the treasure hunt through L.A.
I shut it down, feeling dirty for even remembering it.
Thinking it is not doing it.
I thought of how I’d been a wolf just a few hours before. Last time for even that, for a while, I told myself. It wasn’t a crime, but I didn’t need it.
Then I got to work. I called Jeremy on my way to the beach, even though I knew what he’d say, because he’d been a part of NARKOTIKA, which meant he’d been a part of me.
He picked up on the fourth ring.
I peered at my reflection in shop windows as I walked down the sidewalk. “No chance you want to play bass for me again, right?”
“Hey, man,” Jeremy replied, in his slow, easy way. He had the most glorious Southern accent you’ve ever heard on a guy from upstate New York. I’d known him long enough to remember him before he’d cultivated it. If he was shocked to hear from me after a year of silence, he didn’t show it. “I thought you were underground.”
It was at once comforting and suffocating to hear his voice. He was all tied up with my memories of NARKOTIKA, and they were all tied up with my memories of everything before becoming a wolf. It was all awful nostalgia.
“I have emerged like a wondrous butterfly,” I told him. “And now I am going to be on the TV.”
“Yup.”
“I need a bassist. I —”
“Shhh,” Jeremy said, soft as a feather. “I’m Googling you.”
I waited. There was no point hurrying Jeremy. It was like punching fog. I walked half a block in the brilliant sun while he researched my recent life.
“The only problem with you on a reality show,” Jeremy said finally, “is that reality’s never been your strong point.”
I paused to look at a window full of sunglasses. A tiny, tinted version of me appeared in each lens. “They hired me the absolute worst bass player.”
“Cole, I doubt that,” he replied mildly. “They seem like smart people. They used integers to represent the letters in their website name.”
“There was nothing about the guy that was right. And she got me a guitarist, but that’s another story.”
“Guitars are the ones with six strings, right? Have I seen one before?”
I looked in another store window. This shop only sold belts in the color blue. It seemed unnecessarily specialized. “I told her no guitarist.”
“I assume he’s already gone.”
“Oh, yeah, of course. So now I’m going to audition people on the beach, and the best thing would be for you to show up and be the best.”
Jeremy said, “Oh, I don’t know if I’m the best.”
He would not brag, even in jest. This was the Buddhist in him or something. He’d become Buddhist around the same time he’d become Southern.
“You know what I mean. I’m auditioning for a Jeremy, and you’d be a Jeremy.” I paused at another store window. It was impossible to tell what some of these shops sold.
“You know I’m playing with another band, right?” he asked.
I knew. He wasn’t the only one with access to a search engine. I wasn’t offended. I’d been theoretically missing for more than a year and then theoretically out of the music business for several more months than that. I’d have found another band, too. “They are not as cool as me.”
Jeremy thought about this. “No. They aren’t. But I like them, and I don’t want to leave them in a tight spot.”
“It’s only six weeks. Then they can have you back. Undamaged. Entire. The only thing different about you will be that your mind will be blown by the time spent with me.”
“I have no doubt of that. It wouldn’t just be six weeks, though. You’re touring for the album, right?”
I assumed so. That was what you did — make an album, play some shows, sell some records. There was a thrill to it, when it was going well. I was good at it, when it was going well.
It was just when things weren’t going well that it got dangerous. Mostly to me, though. Not often to bystanders.
“So?”
He paused as if he were thinking about it. But like I said, I knew Jeremy. Back when we were in the band, we all knew one another better than we knew ourselves. That was the reason why we were the band. So I already knew what he was going to say. I just didn’t know quite how he was going to say it.
“I don’t think you and touring is a good idea,” he said. “It’s going backward.”
I knew exactly what he was talking about, but I said, “Sideways. Backward is unnecessarily negative.”
“Look, Cole, I’m really glad you’re …”
He didn’t finish the sentence, leaving it wide open for me to imagine what he was going to say. In Los Angeles. Making music again. Still alive.
What it came down to was that he didn’t trust me.
His doubt left a bigger dent in my Teflon heart than I would have expected.
Eventually, Jeremy merely asked, “Can I come to the auditions anyway? To watch?”
“Only if you help me choose your successor.”
“I’d like that.”
Neither of us said anything about Victor. Maybe I was the only one thinking about how we weren’t talking about him. Maybe it was easier when you hadn’t been the one digging his grave. When you hadn’t been the one to put him there.
— What about Victor, Cole?
Remember how we did everything together? I convinced him to become a werewolf with me. Now I’m in a loft in California and he’s in an unmarked hole in Minnesota.
— He chose it, too. It wasn’t all you.
Sometimes I pretend that’s true.
“Cole, you still there?”
“I’m always here,” I replied, though I hadn’t been, really, for a moment. “Watching you sleep.”
“I know you are. I feel it. What’s the way? Today? What’s your way?”
My reflection in the store window finally smiled. The way. The way. When we were on the road before, back before everything went to shit, every show was different. It wasn’t just that we’d play a different set. It was that we’d come dressed as zombies, or we’d play a song backward, or we’d soak a pumpkin in gasoline and set it on fire. It was about the mu
sic, sure — that was always the most important thing — but it was about the game, too. The hook. Somewhere in there, we’d started calling it the “way.” What’s the way, Jeremy? What’s the way, Victor?
Actually, it was always this:
What’s the way, Cole?
“I was looking for props here, but it’s useless,” I said.
“Anything I can do?”
I was about to tell him no, I had to think more, but then, all of a sudden, my brain turned over and something caught.
I narrowed my eyes. “How are the speakers on your sound system?”
Sometimes I took online quizzes to find out if I was a sociopath. Society thinks there are more male sociopaths than female, but that is a dirty, dirty lie perpetuated by the media. There are more unfeeling girls out there than they would like to admit.
Maybe I wasn’t crazy. But if I wasn’t, then everyone else was.
I didn’t know why I kept being shitty to Cole. And by Cole, I really meant everyone else in the world.
He was only a few miles away from me. In California. In L.A.
At work, the minutes seemed fuzzy and timeless. I redesigned a sparse pile of mauve boat necks, and then I dusted the plants, and then I went into the back room. Sierra was not in, but she’d left evidence of herself in a pile of fabric scraps and “inspirations,” which was what she called the weird things she collected to influence her clothing. Since I’d been in the store last, she’d added a glass milk bottle, a freeze-dried leaf of some kind, and, grotesquely, a seagull’s foot.
I couldn’t wait to hang up whatever bit of fashion was inspired by a dismembered gull part.
Pushing Sierra’s stuff out of the way, I sat on the counter and pulled out my notes for my CNA class. The hardest part about the class, in my opinion, was trying to remember what CNA stood for. Certified. Nursing. Assistant. I’d been told that it was a good thing to have if you were trying to get into premed, but it was hard to imagine why. One of the browser windows on my phone was still open to a practice test question. It was this:
If you walk into a client’s room and he is masturbating, what do you do?
a) laugh and close the door