Linger

And there was a hell of a crowd.

It was a huge deal, but it was a gig I didn’t even want to do. There wasn’t really any other kind these days. They all ran together until all I could remember were gigs where I was high and gigs where I wasn’t and gigs where I had to pee the whole time. Even when I was playing the music on the stage, I was still chasing something—some idea of life and fame that I’d imagined for myself when I was sixteen—but I was losing interest in actually finding it.

While I was carrying in my keyboard, some girl who called herself Jackie gave us some pills I’d never seen before.

“Cole,” she whispered in my ear, as if she knew me instead of just my name. “Cole, this will take you places you haven’t been.”

“Baby,” I said, shifting my duffle so that I wouldn’t hit it on the rat’s maze of walls beneath the dance floor, “it takes a lot to do that these days.”

She smiled wide, teeth tinted yellow in the dull light, like she knew a secret. She smelled like lemons. “Don’t worry—I know what you need.”

I almost laughed, but instead I turned away, shouldering my way through a half-closed door. I looked over Jackie’s high-lighted hair to shout, “Vic, c’mon!” I dropped my gaze back to her. “Are you on it?”

Jackie ran a finger up my arm, tracing around the tight sleeve of my T-shirt. “I’d be doing more than just smiling at you if I was.”

I reached down and touched her hand, tapping it until she understood what I meant and opened her palm. It was empty, but she reached into the pocket of her jeans to pull out a wad of plastic wrap. Inside, I saw a collection of electric-green pills, each stamped with two Ts. They got an A-plus for pretty factor, but who knew what they were.

In my pocket, my phone buzzed. Normally I would’ve let it go to voicemail, but Jackie, standing two inches away from me, breathing my air, gave me an incentive to interrupt the conversation. I fished the phone out and put it against my ear. “Da.”

“Cole, I’m glad I got you.” It was Berlin, my agent. His voice was gritty and fast as always. “Listen to this: ‘NARKOTIKA takes the scene by force with their latest album, 13all. Brilliant but frenetic front man Cole St. Clair, thought by many to be losing his edge’—sorry, man, that’s just what they said—‘comes back stronger than ever with this release, proving that his first release, at sixteen, was no fluke. The three—’ are you listening, Cole?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, you should. This is Elliot Fry saying this,” Berlin said. When I didn’t reply, he said, “Remember, Elliot Fry, who called you a surly, overactive toddler with a keyboard? That Elliot Fry. Now you guys are golden. Total turnaround. You’ve arrived, man.”

“Brilliant,” I said, and hung up on him. I turned to Jackie. “I’ll take the whole bag. Tell Victor. He’s my purse.”

So Victor paid for them. But I’d asked for them, so I guess it was still my fault.

Or maybe it was Jackie’s, for not telling us what they were, but that was Club Josephine for you. The place to find the new high before anyone knew how high it took you. Unnamed pills, brand-new powders, shining mysterious nectar in vials. It wasn’t the worst thing I’d made Victor do.

Back in the dim lounge, waiting to go on, Victor swallowed one of the green pills with a beer while Jeremy-my-body-is-a-temple watched him and drank green tea. I took a few of them with a Pepsi. I don’t know how many. I was feeling pretty bitter about the transaction by the time we got onto the stage. Jackie’s stuff was letting me down—I was feeling absolutely nothing. We started our set, and the crowd was wild, pressed up against the stage, arms outstretched, screaming our name.

Behind his drums, Victor screamed back at them. He was high as a kite, so whatever Jackie had sold us had done it for him. But then it never took as much to get Victor high. The strobes lit up bits and pieces of the audience—a neck here, a flash of lips, a thigh wrapped around another dancer. My head pounded in time with the beat that Victor laid down, my heart scudding double time. I reached up to slide my headset from my neck to my ears, my fingers brushing the hot skin of my neck, and girls began to scream my name.

There was this one girl my eyes kept finding for some reason, skin stark white against her black tank top. She howled my name as if it was physically painful for her, her pupils dilated so wide that her eyes looked black and depthless. She reminded me of Victor’s sister inexplicably, something about the curve of her nose or the way her jeans were slung so low, held up by nothing but the suggestion of hips, though there was no way Angie would be anywhere near a club like this.

Suddenly I didn’t feel like being there. There was no longer a rush at hearing my name screamed, and the music wasn’t as loud as my heart, so it hardly seemed important.

This was where I was supposed to come in, singing to break the nonstop take-you-to-the-moon pattern of Victor’s beat, but I didn’t feel like it, and Victor was too gone to notice. He was dancing in place, fixed to the ground only by the drumsticks in his hands.

Right in front of me, among a throng of bare midriffs and sweaty arms thrust into the air, there was a guy who didn’t move. Illuminated sporadically by the strobes and lasers, I was fascinated by how he stayed still, despite the press of bodies all around him. He held his ground and watched me, his eyebrows drawn down low over his eyes.

When I looked back at him, I remembered again that scent of home, far away from Toronto.

I wondered if he was real. I wondered if anything in this whole damned place was real.

He crossed his arms over his chest, watching me while my heart scrabbled to escape.

I should have been paying more attention to keeping it in my chest. My pulse sped, and then my heart burst free in an explosion of heat; my face smacked against the keyboard, which wailed out a pulse of sound. I grabbed for the keys with a hand that no longer belonged to me.

Lying on the stage, my cheek setting fire to the ground, I saw Victor giving me this withering look, like he’d finally noticed that I’d missed my cue.

And then I closed my eyes on the stage of Club Josephine.

I was done being NARKOTIKA. I was done being Cole St. Clair.

CHAPTER SIX

• GRACE •

“You know,” Isabel said, “when I told you to call me on the weekend, I didn’t mean for you to call me so we could go tramping through the trees in subfreezing temperatures.”