The parking lot was full of cars. Dozens upon dozens of them, packed in, parked sideways, parking one another in.
People had spilled into the parking lot, laughing and drinking.
A party.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.
I wasn’t really in the headspace for a party.
For a brief, selfish second, I thought about turning around and going home. Cole couldn’t be disappointed, because he hadn’t known I was coming.
But then I thought about what was waiting for me at home.
I should’ve just gone to class.
I closed my eyes, then opened them and checked my makeup in the rearview mirror. I tried to imagine what I’d find on the other side of those doors. A big party full of people having a great time, and then Cole feeling sorry for himself in a recording booth, sad and alone in a crowd. Cole always liked to see himself as alone, no matter how much the circumstances disputed it.
The only thing that made me move at all was the idea of how happy he’d be to see me. I got out of the car.
Inside, the massive warehouse seethed. Music pounded overhead. The floor was alcohol-slicked sticky. There were a million people dancing. A lot of girls. Everything smelled like beer. Over everything was a pair of giant red lips.
Then I found him.
Cole St. Clair was sitting on a sofa being carried by four other guys, and a girl was sitting on the other side of the couch, and she was famous and she was beautiful and she had her lusciously golden arm around his neck. The cameras gazed adoringly.
My stomach felt it first. I couldn’t move.
I tried to be fair. I told myself it wasn’t like he was making out with someone else. I told myself he had only sounded high on the phone, that I didn’t know for sure. I told myself that I had only thought I’d smelled wolf on him before; I hadn’t actually seen him shift since he’d come here.
I told myself it was possible he was clean and he was not a cheater and that he wasn’t NARKOTIKA’s Cole St. Clair.
But I couldn’t take my eyes off him sitting on that couch with that impossibly beautiful girl. Because he sure as hell looked like NARKOTIKA’s Cole St. Clair to me.
Humiliation and anger clawed inside me.
He didn’t know I was here.
I was going to go.
I was going to go.
I was going to go. As soon as I could look away.
Cole saw me just as I managed to rip my feet from the floor and turn, my hand fumbling in my purse for my car keys. I saw his eyes find me, just for a second, and then I knew I’d stayed too long. Because now it was going to get — “Isabel! Hey! Hey.”
I kept walking. The door to the warehouse felt miles away.
I could see it, but it never got any closer. I didn’t turn around. I kept going. People moved out of my way.
“Isabel!”
Outside, in the black night, I sucked in breaths of empty air, trying to fill this hollowed-out cavity.
“Hey.” Cole grabbed my arm, stopping me. This close, I could smell the alcohol and weed. And wolf. Wolf wolf wolf. It was all over him.
I’d never left that house in Minnesota.
I spun. “Let. Go. Of. Me.”
In the dark of the lot, his eyes were bright and glittery, but there were bags beneath them. He was tired and awake. High and low. Going up and burning down. Turning people into objects and throwing them away.
“What is your problem?” he asked.
“That question is not even remotely appropriate for this situation,”
I replied. I felt like I needed to shout to be heard over the music, but really it was just that I could feel it in my feet from inside the building.
“What situation is that? Are you going to clue me in?”
I flicked a finger at him. “You! You are the situation!”
Cole narrowed his eyes. “So the situation is awesome?”
The wire-framed industrial light on the outside of the warehouse was twitching and trembling to the beat inside. Every time I thought of him with that girl on the couch, every time I inhaled and smelled the beer, something inside me did the same thing. I didn’t know why I thought I could do this. “You know what? Just — I’m not even.”
I jerked my arm out of his hand and started back toward my car. It was parked near the edge of the lot. It hadn’t seemed so far away when I’d gotten here.
“So now it’s a crime to exist,” Cole said. “That explains a lot.”
The indignation was too much. I snapped, “Call me when you’re sober. Or actually, don’t.”
There was a long pause, long enough that I unlocked my car and opened the door.
Then he said, “Sober? I am sober.”
This was so ludicrous that I turned to face him. “Come on, Cole. Don’t insult me. I’m not an idiot.”
His face was a broad expression of absolute persecution. He spread his arms out. “I haven’t been drinking.”
“I can smell it on you!” You didn’t grow up in my house without knowing the smell of hard liquor and beer and wine. Without knowing how exaggerated it made the drunk. How they became a caricature of themselves: silent if they were quiet, a hurricane if they were irritable.
“There is beer in the building,” Cole said. “There was beer on the couch. There is not beer inside me.”
“Right. And that girl?”
“What girl?”
“You were wearing her? That one?”
Dismissively, he said, “Magdalene. She’s a sloppy drunk.
That was nothing.”
Nothing. Maybe to him. Maybe to him it didn’t count unless you were naked. But to me, who had never been someone’s girlfriend — I was so done. I had driven out here for this stupid surprise, this birthday surprise, and I was tired, and I wished I’d never come and seen it and I wished he hadn’t ever come into .blush. in the first place and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I wanted to go back to not giving any damns. I missed that Isabel.
Everything hurt. “And the wolf ?”
He didn’t answer right away. His eyes flickered an answer, swift and guilty. God, I couldn’t take it. I’d known it all along, and I’d just been playing pretend.
“So you’re just Cole again, is it?” I demanded. “Cole St.
Clair is back!”
“What? Oh. It’s not like that.”
I fired back, “Sure looks like that.”
“Looks and is aren’t the same. Otherwise they’d be the same word. Precision, Culpeper. I thought that was your thing. If you’d been here instead of always saying you weren’t going to be part of the Cole St. Clair show, you’d have seen what really happened here today. Not just been part of the audience, believing the hype.”
“Don’t try to make me feel guilty about not being a player in your life.”
“If you feel guilty, it’s because you put it there, not me. I never asked you to be on the show.”
“Asked! You didn’t have to. It’s like a giant cloud that follows me around!”
“What, so now I’m in trouble for things I didn’t even say?
For thinking I want more time with you?”
My eyes seared, like they were close to tears, even though I couldn’t feel any accompanying emotion. “Yes! You always want more from me. Be okay with na**d girls in your apartment. Be you on the Internet. Be happy with you smelling like a goddamn wolf. More, Isabel, more! Well, I don’t have any more! I’m giving you what I can give you without completely . . . And this is what you do?”
Cole laughed in a very unfunny way. “This? This? I don’t even know what this is. Breathing! Living! Being me! What a grand day this has become!” He did the little NARKOTIKA hand gesture that said he was revealing something new. “Happy birthday, Cole! Happy, happy birthday.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Telling me I screwed up!”
This was too much. “Because you did.”
He stepped right up next to me. I could tell he was angry, but I didn’t care. Wolf wolf wolf. “I. Am. Sober.”
Did he think I couldn’t smell him? “Whatever.”
“Whatever?” he echoed. “How about you take my word for it?”
“And why should I do that?”
“How about because you trust me?”
“Trust you? Does anyone do that? Of all the things I would do that are crazy, Cole, you can be sure that will never be one of them.”
Just like that, he was gone. His body was still there, but his eyes were empty. Cole St. Clair had left the building. A very tidy party trick, and the most cunning objectification of all: when he took the person that was him and threw him away. I would have felt guilty, but I had seen what I’d seen. I wasn’t making any of it up. I could smell the wolf, smell the beer, remember the girl’s arm draped possessively around his neck.
I would not feel bad.
I did not feel bad.
“Don’t call me,” I said. “Stop doing this to me. I’m not your — stop doing this to me.”
I got into my car.
I didn’t look back to see if he was still standing in the lot.
Chapter Thirty-Three
· cole ·
I was sober.
I had told the truth, and it hadn’t mattered. In the end, she’d bought into the same story everyone else had.
Did it matter if you’d changed if no one believed it?
After Isabel left, I walked through the party in a haze. I knew I said something to Jeremy. I knew I smiled at a joke some guy told me. I knew I signed someone’s hat. I didn’t remember the fine details of anything. They were all lost in the hiss in my ears.
I moved through the people until I found Magdalene on the couch beneath the giant lips, making out with one of her boys.
“Farewell, pet,” I told her. My smile was a corpse that I resurrected briefly for her. “I’m out.”
Magdalene slapped the boy away. “It’s early! I think it’s early? Don’t go.”
“I must,” I said. “Come, give me a sisterly embrace.”
She staggered to her feet. “How boring that you’re sober! Stay.”
She threw her arms around me in a way I wouldn’t have put up with from my sister, if I’d had one. I removed her fingers from my mouth. I needed to go before I felt-did-was something stupid. I needed to get out of here and I needed to call Isabel and I needed to not be angry and I needed to not think about the many ways I knew how to distract myself from this feeling — “But wait, wait,” Magdalene said. “It’s your birthday.”
“I remember.”
“You have to stay for your present.”
I looked past her. T was there with his camera, unable to hide his pleased smile. Joan had hers, too. I realized the music had been turned down for this moment. The partygoers, chattering in low anticipation, had parted in an uneven line toward one of the warehouse doors. It was rolled all the way up, and I saw the night sky and a thousand bitter stars.
Jeremy stood by the door, the only one not grinning. His face was watchful.
I asked, “Will I like it?”
Magdalene led me down the aisle of people to the door. T
backed down ahead of us to get my facial expression; Joan followed up behind.
I got there and faced the nighttime parking lot. Three floodlights lit my present.
It was my Mustang. Black and shiny and tricked-out and new — well, not new anymore. It had been new when I’d gotten it, back when I’d rewarded myself for my first album going platinum, back before I realized you couldn’t bring a Mustang or your soul on tour. It was not new, but it was still pristine. I could tell it was my Mustang from Phoenix, not just a rental, because there was still a St. Christopher medal dangling from the rearview mirror, just like when I’d left it.
It looked molten in these lights. The black of the paint reflected the black of the sky until it was just a void sitting there.
The doors opened.
My mother got out of the passenger’s side.
My father got out of the driver’s side.
T trotted around to keep getting my face.
It reflected the car that reflected the night sky that was a slice of the universe that contained infinite nothing.
There was nothing wrong with my father except his face looked a little like mine, and nothing wrong with my mother except she wore matched separates, and there was nothing wrong with the two of them together looking at me except it felt like the suburbs had moved into my heart.
“Happy birthday!” shouted a bunch of people behind me.
Jeremy stood there by the car, his shoulders pointed down, his eyes on me. He was the only person here who knew this wasn’t a gift.
I looked at my parents. They looked at me. They looked at me a lot.
I had let them think I was dead.
I had not called them when the world found out I wasn’t.
They had not changed in appearance at all, except to get dustier and older. My father had always looked brittle; now he looked cancerous. I recognized the Windbreaker he wore. I knew those shoes of my mother’s. There was nothing wrong with them except the unchanging constancy of their lives, a circle of grocery-office-Saturday-bed-linen-washing- Sundayservices - Tuesday - ratatouille - night - Thursday - church - meetingrinse-repeat.
There was nothing wrong with them except that three years ago I’d decided that I’d rather die than turn out like them.
They were really nice people.
They had driven this car all the way out here for me.
I couldn’t move, in case moving triggered emotional reunions on their part.
Magdalene, her voice loud and bright, said, “What a show this will be!”