Leyla didn’t laugh.
“I just thought I ought to let you know,” she said, “because I believe in honesty: I don’t respect your work or anything about your personal sense of life.”
“God. Well. That’s out there now.”
Leyla extended an arm and stretched. “It feels good, doesn’t it?”
I wondered if it was some kind of milestone, to be dissed by a hippie. “I wasn’t really reaching for the word good, but okay. Do you want to play any variations on that note, or was once enough for you?”
She switched arms. Her speed ranged between excruciating and sloth-like. “People are totally expendable to you. They’re just, like, objects.”
“Okay, and?”
“And you are in it for the celebrity, not the music.”
“That is where you’re wrong, my friend,” I told her. “I am in it for the both of those things. Fifty-fifty, at least. Maybe even forty-sixty.”
“Have you even written the album we’re supposed to record in six weeks?”
“Now you’re harshing my buzz.”
It wasn’t even fun to mock someone who couldn’t tell that you were.
Leyla asked, “How do you know you’re not going to hate my playing, too?”
I gave her the Cole St. Clair smile to buy some time.
The thing was, I could audition for new bass players because Jeremy, my old bass player, had been sitting beside me. I could get another bassist because I wasn’t really replacing the old one. Jeremy hadn’t gone, just moved. But the drummer from NARKOTIKA wasn’t living in a house somewhere in the canyons. He was dead in a hole, dead in a wolf’s body. And if I started thinking about drummers in an are-they-better-than-Victor way, I didn’t think I could handle it. I had stuffed my guilt and my grief into that grave. I’d said sorry to a dead man, and it was over.
Tenuously over.
I said, “I have a plan. Everything’s under control.”
She closed her eyes again. “Control is an illusion. Animals have no delusions of control.”
Suddenly, out of nowhere, I wanted to be with Isabel and only Isabel so badly that I couldn’t believe I had to spend the evening alone here in this place with just Leyla to look at.
“You’re a hippie freak,” I said. I didn’t care if the cameras heard me.
“There are no hippie animals,” Leyla replied, “because every animal is, by its nature, at one with its surroundings.”
I knocked on the threshold and I stepped back over it into the yard. Desire was still burning in me. “I might fire you tomorrow.”
She didn’t open her eyes. “I am fine with whatever tomorrow brings.”
Which was a ridiculous sentiment. Tomorrow brought exactly what you told it to bring. If you told it nothing, nothing was what you got. I was done with nothing. I wanted something. No. I wanted everything.
It only took about forty-five minutes before Cole called me again. I had just begun the final descent into the House of Ruin.
“I thought about your evening plans,” Cole said, “and I thought, really, they weren’t that great for Sylvia. Sofia? Sofia.”
“I see you know her well. How is it they aren’t great for her?” I backed the SUV into the driveway. I didn’t look in the mirror. I had been straight when I started, and if I ran over old ladies, pets, and children, it was their fault. Fair warning.
“How is it — oh, look how you just played right into my reply here. Because they don’t have me in them.”
“And what, exactly, is your great plan that involves you?”
“All plans involving me are great. But this one is a surprise and you should bring Sylv — Sofia and a sweater and maybe some cheese cubes on sticks.”
“I don’t like ta-das.” Already my heartbeat had sped up. Exactly what I was trying to avoid.
“This isn’t a ta-da. It’s a great plan. Oh, and there will be two other people there. But one of them is like Sofia because life is scary, and the other one is like you. Sort of. Except instead of sarcasm, he has religion.”
“Cole —”
“Don’t forget the cheese.”
An hour later, I stood with Sofia and a bunch of dead people. Cole’s great plan had involved meeting him at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery beside the memorial of Johnny Ramone. He — Cole, not Johnny — looked freshly washed and one-thousand-times-edible in a plain white T-shirt and very expensive jeans. He had brought two not-dead people: Jeremy and a man who seemed to be named Leon. The latter was old enough to be my father and was dressed in very nice slacks and a neat button-up with the sleeves rolled up. A manager, maybe? Jeremy, meanwhile, looked more hippie and less famous in person.
Sofia was not very happy to be in a cemetery. Neither was Leon. Both were obviously too polite to say it out loud.
I wasn’t bothered because:
• The people here were long dead and beyond anyone’s help
• I didn’t know any of them, including Johnny Ramone
• It was taking a lot of my brainpower to not imagine when the next opportunity to make out with Cole would be
Also, the cemetery was not very creepy. The sun was blazing pink down behind the sky-high palm trees and white mausoleums. Vaguely mirthful tombstones grew up around pretty lakes. And there were peacocks. It was hard to be creeped out in the presence of peacocks.
Plus there were several hundred living people sitting on blankets between the graves.
“I’d like to send a card to the flamingo who died to make your coat,” Cole told me, “because it is doing a great job being apparel. I would like to put everything not covered by it in my mouth.”
That was a lot. It was not a very substantial pink jacket (and it was fur, not feathers). His eyes said everything he hadn’t. I wasn’t sure my face hadn’t been saying the same thing back to him.
I was never going to make it out of this evening alive.
“Not in front of the children,” Jeremy said.
Cole handed me his sunglasses. I put them on and looked at him through them. There was not a trace of his showman smile this evening, or possibly these sunglasses had been programmed to edit it out. He just looked … handsome, and cheerful, and like he would have sex with me right there.
Help.
But I was the only one around to help me.
He turned his attention to Sofia.
“Is there cheese in that thingy?” he asked her, waving a hand at the picnic basket she held. To this point, she hadn’t said anything, her brain overloaded by the presence of so many other members of her species. Now this was too much, to be asked about the cheese. She stared back at him with round eyes.
“Just sandwiches,” she managed. Then, a little louder, “Different kinds of sandwiches.”
It was not just sandwiches. Because it was Sofia, it was an actual covered basket with a striped picnic blanket tastefully peeking from beneath the lid. It was ready for a magazine spread: Plan your perfect picnic! Just add friends!
“I want a keyboard on my headstone,” Cole remarked, turning his attention to the statue of Johnny Ramone playing an electric guitar. He touched Johnny’s face, which seemed sacrilegious. “Jeremy, what do you want on yours?”
Jeremy had been gazing at the Rob Zombie inscription on the side of the memorial: A dedicated punk and a loyal friend. “I’m going to be cremated. What good will this body do when I’ll already be on my way to the next?”
“Of course,” Cole said. “I’m going to have you stuffed, anyway. Isabel? How about you? A machine gun perhaps, or a tiara?”
I could not smile because the current game required me not to smile. But I liked his version of me. I replied, “Both.”
“Leon?” Cole asked.
Leon was too kind for this, I could tell. He was the sort of earnest and pleasant man who would never let you know if you offended him, which only made me feel somehow pressured to not offend him. But he wanted to please Cole, because everyone wanted to either please Cole or kill him, so he answe
red, “I saw a grave once with an angel on it, and even though her head was like this” — he tucked his chin — “she was smiling. Just a little. It was nice. I’d like that.”
“I could hook that up,” Cole said.
Sofia realized a second before she was asked that she was the next in line for this question. Distress welled in her eyes.
“That’s morbid,” she interjected in a sweet voice only audible to attentive dogs. Luckily for her, Cole was an attentive dog.
“Death’s not morbid,” he said. “Everything else is.”
“I don’t think it’s nice to talk about,” Sofia said bravely. “There are so many beautiful things to talk about.”
“Indeed,” Cole agreed, to my relief. He grasped Leon’s arm and pointed. “There. Leon. Yonder. That is the photo op of the day.” Leon obediently plucked his phone from his slacks and framed the place Cole indicated: the palm trees, all slanted to the right, silhouetted on the glory-pink sky behind a white mausoleum.
“I took a photo with my mind,” Jeremy said.
My mind’s memory card was full. I had to delete an old mind-photo of a simpler San Diego sunset in order to take this one.
As a group of older women passed by us, laughing and gripping wine bottles, I asked, “What’s your plan here, Cole?”
“Actually,” Cole replied, “it’s Leon’s plan.”
At this, Leon looked modest. “I read about it in the weekend insert.”
Cole agreed, “The place where news happens. Apparently, they are going to project a motion picture on the side of that mausoleum over there” — he gestured to the photo op — “and we will sit like so” — he crossed his fingers on both hands — “and watch it.”
The white mausoleum he indicated was massive and featureless, ideal for film projection. “Which film?”
Cole leaned forward, looking knowing. Desire stabbed me. “Beauty and the Beast.”
He smirked. It was not actually Beauty and the Beast.
I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t like it when you call me a beast.”
Cole’s grin was so wonderful that it hurt.
Leon broke in, “Folks, maybe we should find a seat?”
As Cole leaped ahead with Jeremy, Sofia hung at my elbow. She whispered, “Oh, Isabel, he’s so beautiful.”
Only she said it like she would say terrible.
Up ahead, the boys had found a place without too many tall people in front of it. Sofia spread the blanket and served everyone sandwiches, much to my annoyance — but the others didn’t know to tell her not to. I watched her eat hers very quietly and precisely, tearing off small pieces so she wouldn’t do it wrong with her mouth open. It just made me want to punch something. Couldn’t she see that the others didn’t care about how she chewed? How they were all prepared to like her before she handed them sandwiches?
I expected (feared?) there to be alcohol of some kind, but it turned out that Jeremy was some kind of straight-edge Buddhist, and Leon had given up drinking five years before, and Cole was also abstaining, and Sofia and I were us.
Cole, sitting beside me, put his hand on my back, under my jacket. His fingers wanted me and nothing else. I was absolutely dying.
“Would you like my jacket?” Leon asked Sofia.
“Oh, no, I’m fine,” Sofia said, though she was clearly freezing and Leon had said it in a strictly fatherly way. Probably she didn’t remember what fatherly looked like.
“Sofia,” I said, lowering my sandwich from my mouth. The edge of the bread had a red mark on it from my lipstick. “If you don’t take that man’s jacket, I’m going to set something on fire.”
Cole immediately came to life.
Jeremy shook his head slowly. “No, man. Not here.”
He said it with such lazy, muted humor that it suddenly seemed obvious that they’d been in a band together. That he, anyway, knew Cole in a way that those fangirls did not.
I expected to feel jealous, but I felt more like I’d found another member of a survivors’ club.
Sofia took the jacket.
The movie began. It turned out to be Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which we had all seen.
At one point I glanced over to Cole, and he was just — looking at me. His eyes were narrowed like he was trying to learn something from my face. He was silhouetted by the very last of the pink sky and the tall, leaning palms. It was impossible to think that California hadn’t made him, because he looked like he had emerged from the ground here along with the palms and the peacocks and the memorial of Johnny Ramone playing his guitar.
He didn’t look away.
God, I wanted to kiss him so badly.
I wished we were alone.
But there was Sofia, who needed me, and Leon, who seemed to be Cole’s driver and date, and Jeremy, who — well, I didn’t know what Jeremy was. He seemed like he could handle himself.
Partway into the movie, Sofia excused herself for the toilets. She was gone for too long, so I pushed myself to my feet with a sigh. I whispered, “I’m just going to go check on her.”
I found her in one of the mausoleums. The wide aisle led me under a high, domed glass ceiling. On either side of me, the skyscraping walls were divided into squares that looked like post office boxes. There were small urns attached to the front of them, because these were actually boxes of dead people.
Sofia was crying noiselessly next to an urn, Leon’s jacket still over her shoulders. My heels clicked on the floor as I marched up to her.
“This is not what grown-ups do,” I told her.
She turned her face and sniffled. “I’m not a grown-up.”
“What is even the matter?”
“I don’t know what to say to people.”
“It’s a movie. We’re not saying anything.”
“But if we were talking. I wouldn’t know what to say.”
I didn’t know the first thing about how to cure a hypothetical problem that I would have barely understood even if it hadn’t been hypothetical.
Which meant that a few moments passed, during which Sofia grew more upset and I grew more angry and thought more about dead people and how my brother was one of them, dead in a hole instead of in a clean white box in California.
“Hey,” said a voice behind me. Against all reason, it was Jeremy. He was all unthreatening and hunched over, tucking one bit of hair behind his ear. “It’s me. I came to see if everything was okay?”
“Oh, she’s …” upset with life.
His presence pushed Sofia over the edge. She wailed, “Now I’ve really ruined things!”
I snapped, “You have not.”
Jeremy said smoothly, “Oh, hey, no. Cole’s just on his date with Leon; they’re having a grand old time. So hey, hey, do you mind if I try something? It’s this thing I learned in, like …”
He’d moved around me to face her. And something about his expression must have looked more comforting than mine, because Sofia gulped down the latest batch of tears and met his eyes.
“You just get overwhelmed, right?” Jeremy asked. He gestured while he said it. He had long, long fingers. Bassist fingers. He started to tap his breastbone with one hand, and with the other, he took her limp wrist and made her mimic the gesture on herself. “Tap here and just say something with me. Just say, like, ‘We’re all cool here. They like my smile.’ ”
What the hell.
Sofia offered him a shy smile.
What the hell times two.
“Now tap here,” Jeremy said, and started tapping his chin. I expected Sofia to refuse — I would have — but she did as he did. “And say, ‘We’re all cool here. They think I’m nice.’ ”
Times three. What. The. Hell.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Is this happening?”
“Isabel,” Jeremy said mildly, “this is a positive space.”
Sofia suppressed a startled and watery giggle. I rolled my eyes. “Will this be long?”
“Is eternity long?” asked Jeremy.
“Oh
my —”
He grinned. “I’m totally kidding. It’ll be five or ten minutes.”
I pointed outside. “I’ll be out there. Are you okay with that, Sofia?”
She was. Of course. Imaginary creatures are always happy with other imaginary creatures.
I had only made it a few yards out into the darkness when Cole appeared right in front of me. His eyes were hungry.
“Isabel —”
I just had enough time to feel his fingers seize my hand, pulling me aside, and then we were around the side of the mausoleum and kissing. It was such an instantaneous thing, something I’d wanted so much, that it was impossible for me to decide if he had begun it or if I had. Everything in my brain shut down except for his mouth, his body, his fingers banded tightly around my upper arm, the other hand hitching my skirt. His hand on my thigh was a question: My hands pulling him closer was the answer.
It wasn’t really dark enough to hide us, Sofia could come out with Jeremy and see us, I was not supposed to be getting in too deep.
It didn’t matter.
I wanted him.
A flashlight swept across our faces. A warning.
“Hey, kids,” said a guy. Standard-issue security guard. “Get a room.”
Cole stopped kissing me, but he didn’t let go.
“Yeah,” he said, flashing a tense smile at the guard, who moved on. Then he whispered in my ear, all tongue and teeth, “Come back with me.”
My pulse crashed in my stomach and my thighs. I knew what he meant, but I said, “I was on my way back.”
“Not that,” Cole said. Then repeated, “Not that. After. Come back with me.”
He wasn’t talking about making out. He was talking about sex.
I said, “I have to take Sofia back home.”
“I’ll pick you up,” Cole said.
My body hummed an answer for me. I tried to think clearly. “How would I get home?”
“Home?” Cole echoed, as if he had no idea what the word meant. “Stay. I’ll take you back in the morning. Isabel —”
“Stay!” I whispered, suddenly hot. It wasn’t staying that I was afraid of. It was that I might like staying, and then what happened when one of us got tired of the other? I’d seen those sorts of fights often enough at the House of Misery to know I didn’t want it. Two days ago, he hadn’t been here, and now he wanted me to spend the night with him. Maybe he was a cool-ass rock star who’d laid a ton of girls, but I was just a possibly ex-Catholic girl who had gotten to third base a few times. “What do you want from me?”