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“Hello is what you say when you first call someone.”
He was completely unoffended. “You don’t call someone before ta-da.”
“Maybe I don’t like ta-das.”
Honestly, I had no idea what I liked. I only knew that my heart was galloping so fast that my fingers were numb. Logically, I knew it was just from surprise, but I didn’t know if it was like Surprise, here is a cake or Surprise, you’ve had a stroke.
In front of me, Cole’s smile had emptied. His eyes were going blank, which was what happened to Cole when you hurt him. The real Cole vacated the situation and left his body standing by itself.
Cruelly, I was grateful for it, as grateful as I’d been for the brief glimpse of his true smile earlier. Because this reaction was real. It meant he really cared how I felt about this reunion. A smile I couldn’t trust, but pain — I knew what the genuine article looked like.
“Look,” I said. “You can’t just show up and expect me to scream and giggle, because I’m not that person. So don’t look all hurt because I’m not doing that.”
His expression poured back into his face. This new one was hungry and restless. “Come somewhere with me. Let’s go somewhere.
Where is there to go around here? Let’s go there.”
“I have to work until six.” Six? Seven? I couldn’t even remember when my workday ended at the moment. Where were we? The alley behind .blush. The ocean breeze finding my skin, the starling overhead singing dreamily on a telephone wire, a dry palm leaf drifting down to rest on the concrete. This was real. This was happening.
He jumped from foot to foot — I had almost forgotten how he only stopped moving when things went badly for him. “What’s the next meal? Lunch? Dinner? Yes. Have dinner with me.”
“Dinner?” To this point, my evening plan had involved battling my way back to Glendale to the House of Divorce and Separation for an evening of estrogen and laughs that were the same as tears and vice versa. “Then what?”
He grabbed one of my hands. “Dessert. Sex. Life.” He kissed my palm — not a sweet kiss. A kiss that made my skin twist with sudden, furious desire. His mouth.
Now I thought I was having a stroke. “Cole, stop, wait.”
Stopping and waiting were not strong concepts for him.
“Cole,” I said. I thought I might drown in this blue alley.
“What?”
I started to say stop again, but that wasn’t what I meant. I said, “Give me a second. God!”
He let me have my hand back. I stared at him. This was Cole St. Clair: sharp-edged jaw, brilliant green eyes, tussled and spiked dark brown hair. His smile would have been famous even without NARKOTIKA. I could tell he liked me staring at him. I could tell that he liked everything about this moment.
Everything about it had been designed to catch me off guard, to make me react.
Hope and terror rose in me in equal measure.
I asked, “Why are you here?”
“You.”
It was the perfect answer said in an imperfect way. He’d answered so fast. Just like that: You. It was so easy to say just one word. I wanted him to say it again, so that the second time around, I’d have a chance to feel something.
You.
Me.
“Okay,” I said. I could feel a smile trying to happen. I hid it, fast. No way did he get a smile without calling me first. “Dinner.
Are you picking me up?”
Cole laughed, a sound utterly unattainable in its pure joy. “I just did.”
Chapter Four
· cole ·
According to the clock in the taxi, I was incredibly late for my appointment with Baby North. Tardiness is not one of my multiple vices, and normally this would have bothered me. But nothing could knock me at the moment. I buzzed with the pleasant anxiety spurred by the razor line of Isabel’s mouth.
When we had met, I had just saved my life by becoming a werewolf, and her brother had just died trying to stop being one.
Isabel had been the only thing in Mercy Falls sharper than I was.
She was the only one who knew me.
Above me, the sun glowed in the sky, one thousand times more brilliant than the sun over Minnesota. Everything in this place was concrete and invented grass and palm spikes.
“What’s the street again?” asked the cab driver. He wore a hat that was from a country that was not L.A., and he looked tired.
“Ocean Front Walk,” I said. “Venice. If there are two.
Probably not. But in the case of duplication.”
“That’s not a driving street,” he replied. “It is on the beach.
I will have to let you out. You will have to walk.”
I didn’t know if it was because I hadn’t been to the West Coast for a long time, or because I hadn’t been anywhere but Minnesota for a long time, but I kept being surprised by the fact of California. As we grew closer to Baby North’s home, everything seemed familiar and dreamy, seen before on tour or in a dream or movie. The names of the streets — Mulholland Drive and Wilshire Boulevard — and the names painted on the signs — Hollywood, Cheviot, Beverly Hills — called up thoughts of blond hair, red cars, palm trees, endless summer.
Isabel —
Los Angeles. The first time I was here, a Yankee usurper, a bumbling almost-there, I snapped a photo of a Hollywood Boulevard street sign and sent it to my mother with a text: guess what i’m famous.
Now I actually was famous, though I didn’t text my mother anymore.
I’m back.
It felt good. It was like when you had been unhappy and didn’t know it until you weren’t anymore. I had thought I was fine in Minnesota. Bored, lonely, fine.
California, California, California.
I could still feel the realness of Isabel in my arms. It was like the sun on my eyelids and the ocean scent in my mouth as I sucked the air in over my teeth. I’d been here before.
This time was going to be different.
I called my friend Sam back in Minnesota. He surprised me by answering immediately — he hated talking on the phone because he couldn’t see the other person’s face during the conversation.
“I’m here,” I told him, picking at the taxi company decal on the interior of the car window. In the front seat, my driver had a hushed and intense phone conversation in another language.
“My face is relaxed and content. My lips are curved upward.”
Sam did not laugh, because he was immune to my charms.
“Have you been to the place you’re staying yet? Is it okay?”
“I’m fine, Mother,” I replied. “I haven’t been yet. I’m going to go see Baby now.”
“I had the worst nightmare about you last night,” Sam mused. “You went around Los Angeles and bit about twenty people so you could have a pack of wolves there, too.”
There is that old chestnut that when someone tells you not to think about a specific image, you cannot not think of it. Sam had in effect forced me to consider the idea of multiple werewolves in Los Angeles, which should have occurred to me before now, but hadn’t. It was not an entirely unromantic vision.
Wolves galloping down Sunset Boulevard at dusk.
“Twenty,” I scoffed. “I would never bite an even number of people.”
“When I told you that it was a terrible idea, you told me you didn’t want to be alone.”
That did sound like me, but there was no way I’d go around biting myself new friends. While I dazzled into wolf form for only a few minutes at a time, most people had to wear their lupine bodies for months on end. Which was exactly what had happened back in Minnesota. That left me with only Sam and Grace, and they’d both decided to go to college, of all places.
Summer school. In Duluth. Who did that?
“The worst part,” Sam went on, “was that the clock was set to radio and when I woke up, your stupid song ‘Villain’ was playing.”
“What a great station you must have had it set to.” The taxi was slowing. I said, “I have to go. The future is here, decked in flowers and fruit.”
“Wait —” Sam said. “Have you seen Isabel yet?”
My fingers still felt the shape of her. “Da. We embraced.
Angels sang, Sam. Those fat ones. Cherubs. Cherubim. I must go.”
“Don’t bite people.”
I hung up. The taxi driver put the car in park. “Now you walk.”
I opened the car door. As I handed him some cash, I asked, “Want to come with me?”
He stared at me.
I got out. As I shouldered my bag on the sidewalk, a posse of young skater kids zoomed by. One of them shouted at me, “We’re skateboarding!”
The others behind him keened joyfully.
My lips still tasted like Isabel’s perfume.
The sun beamed overhead. My shadow was tiny under my feet. I didn’t know how I could stand to be in my own head until dinner.
Baby North lived in a Venice Beach house that looked like it had been built by a caffeinated toddler. It was a collection of brightly colored blocks of different sizes stacked on one another and next to one another and joined by concrete stairs and metal balconies. It faced the endless tourist-dotted beach and the touchable blue ocean. It was a more mirthful establishment than I had expected.
People were afraid of Baby North. This was because she was a home wrecker, I thought, in the sense that she had destroyed the lives of the last seven people she’d put on television. It was sort of her brand. Get a train wreck, put it on television, wait for the explosions, toss a fluttering paycheck over the scene of the wreckage.
Everyone who signed a contract with her thought they would be the one to escape unscathed with their dignity and sanity, and they were all wrong.
None of them had seemed to know it was just a performance.
I climbed the concrete stairs. When I knocked on the door, it fell open. There was no point calling for her. The music inside was so loud that nothing was for sure except the purest of the trebles in the vocals and the ugliest of the bass from the drums.
It was the sort of track sung by a girl who might possibly have been discovered on the Disney Channel.
When I stepped in, the airconditioning hit me like a punch.
I could feel every single one of my nerves tensing and considering their shape and species.
This was going to be a thing here.
It had been a very long time since I had been a wolf. And it had always taken a lot to convince my body to shift — a precipitous drop in temperature, an interesting chemical cocktail, a persuasive kick to my hypothalamus. The temperature difference now wasn’t enough to do it, but it was enough to shock my body into the seductive memory of shifting.
Werewolf, werewolf.
That would be a good song.
Inside, the ceiling soared up above the concrete floor, all the way up to the exposed ductwork. There were four pieces of furniture.
In the middle of them, Baby North stood bent over an iPad. I recognized her more from gossip blogs than our brief meeting years before. Her brown hair was cut in a heavy fringe over her deep-set eyes like a ’70s model. She wore scrunchy leggings and some kind of smocky-tunic thing made out of canvas or linen or something monklike. She was short and pretty in a disconcerting way — a way to look at, not to touch. I had no idea how old she was.
I pointed toward one of the speakers overhead. The singer was chirruping something about how we should all call her and do something before it was too late. It was relentlessly catchy.
“You know this stuff will make you go blind, right?”
When Baby turned to me, her smile was huge and genuine and world-eating. She tapped something on the iPad, and the music died instantly.
“Cole St. Clair,” she said.
Though I was sure that she wouldn’t break me, I felt a twinge. It was the way she said my name. Like it was a triumph that I was standing here.
“Sorry I’m late.”
She clasped her hands to her chest, enraptured. “God, your voice.”
A review of NARKOTIKA’s last album had summed it up like so:
The title track of Either One/Or the Other begins with twenty seconds of spoken words. The boys of NARKOTIKA are well aware that even without Victor Baranova’s insistent drums and Jeremy Shutt’s inspired bass guitar riffs, Cole St. Clair’s voice would lure listeners to an ecstatic death.
Baby said, “This is the best idea I ever had.”
My heart stuttered hard, just once, like an engine turning over. It had been a long time since I’d been on tour. Since I’d been out in public as a musician. Now, with my pulse faster, I couldn’t believe that I’d thought I might give it up for good. It felt intentional, powerful, purposeful. I’d been in stasis for a year and now I was back on solid ground.
I was not a disaster.
Isabel was going to dinner with me.
I had been taken apart and put back together again, and this version of me was unbreakable.
Baby set her iPad on one of the four pieces of furniture — a birch ottoman or house pet or something — and circled me, hands still curled up on her breastbone. I had seen this posture before. It was a guy circling a car on the auction block. She had acquired me with a not-insignificant amount of effort, and she wanted to know if it was worth it.
I waited until she’d circled once.
“Happy?” I asked.
“I just can’t believe you’re real. You were dead.”
I grinned at her. Not my real smile. My NARKOTIKA smile. One sly side of my mouth working wider than the other.
It was coming back to me.
“That smile,” Baby said. She repeated, “This is the best idea I’ve ever had. Have you been to the house yet?”
Of course I had not. I had been haunting Isabel in Santa Monica.
