Sinner

But the white pants we shared. They were high-waisted, pencil-legged, Hollywood-chic perfection. I wore them with cropped leopard-print tops that showed a tantalizing half-inch of skin. My mother wore them with a slinky black blouse that was, in my opinion, more suggestive than my version.

“Who are you trying to impress?” I asked.

“Don’t be rude,” my mother replied. “Is that a yes or a no?”

“I took them to the cleaners. There was something on them.

It was disgusting. I don’t want to think about it.”

My mother clucked. “It was coffee. I’m going to the cleaners now. I was going to take them. When are you home tonight?”

“Eight, if there’s no traffic. But I’m going right back out again with Sofia. When do you go to work?”

“Eight, if there’s no traffic.” My mother was on a series of night shifts at the moment. Part of it was because she was the new doctor in an old hospital and the night shift was given to the grunts, but part of it was because working the night shift meant she could sleep through the real world the next day. It saved on wine costs.

“Oh, well, see you tomorrow.” I wasn’t particularly crushed by this, nor was my mother. My graduation and initiation into the age of majority merely granted societal approval to our relationship.

It wasn’t that my mother was a hands-off parent. It was that she’d been so hands-on for so long that my psyche maintained the imprint of her palm even when she removed her hand from me.

The day dragged. Cole didn’t call. I didn’t call him. What did I want? I didn’t know.

If you are considering getting serious with a rock star but he is filming a reality show that will probably result in death or hospitalization for one or both of you, what do you do?

a) laugh and close the door

b) ask him gently to stop

c) close the door and give him some privacy d) explain the dangers of mast***ation

e) report him to the head nurse

At the end of the day, Sierra’s husband, Mark, came in. He didn’t really serve a purpose, but he liked to come in and mess over the receipts like it was something. I wasn’t exactly sure what he actually did for a living. Something male-modelish. He had the sort of face that sold sunglasses.

“Hey, gorgeous,” he greeted me. It sounded funnier when he said gorgeous than when Sierra said it. Sierra used lush and beautiful and dreamy and lovely like other people used indefinite articles. I suspected Mark really did mean I was gorgeous, and I suspected he found all of Sierra’s monsters gorgeous. But why shouldn’t he? We were all hired to look a certain way, which was to say, we were all hired to look like Sierra, and he obviously found her attractive.

I didn’t reply, but I raised an eyebrow, which was the same thing, for me.

“What are you doing?”

“Studying.”

“What?”

I almost said mast***ation, because it would be funny, but after Mark had just said gorgeous, it seemed like that would be flirting.

“How to save people from themselves.”

Mark moved some papers around. He was doing absolutely nothing except messing up a system one of the monsters had devised. “They tell you about that on the Internet?”

Everyone in the world knew that everything in the world was on the Internet. I scraped listlessly at the bottom of my consciousness for any part of me that might care enough to think of an entertaining way to report this to Mark. I found nothing.

My phone buzzed. It was Sofia.

“Sofia, what?” I kept meaning to start answering the phone with Culpeper, because I liked the masculine idea of stripping my first name. And because it sounded less mean than What?

Sofia sounded abashed. “I’m sorry to interrupt you. It’s just —”

Her apologizing for something that was clearly not even her fault irritated me even more. “Oh, God, Sofia. It’s fine. I was just being a bitch. What?”

“I was just calling because I wanted to tell you that it’s up.

The first episode, I mean, of Cole’s show.”

Already?

“You probably already know. I’m sorry. I —”

“Sofia. Stop saying sorry. What’s the URL? Oh, right. With threes instead of es. Don’t forget about tonight. Wear something red.”

After I hung up, I navigated to the website on my phone.

The screen was tiny and the speaker shitty, but it would have to do. My stomach panged with a little nervous, wretched twist.

Those crafty damns found ways to give themselves when I was least expecting them.

The episode had already begun; Cole was auditioning bass players on the beach. He had surrounded himself with dozens of speakers of all sizes. Every time a would-be player approached, Cole produced a communal bass guitar, shouted an announcement to the onlookers, and then made a little ta-da hand gesture.

The gesture must’ve been some holdover from NARKOTIKA, because every time he did it, the gathered idiot fangirls made supersonic noises.

This annoyed me. It was like they had some intimate knowledge of him that I didn’t. Didn’t they know that had nothing to do with who he really was? They thought they knew him.

Nobody knew him.

The sound of each audition spiraled out over the beach from the barracks of speakers. Leaning on the ancient, woodsided speakers closest to Cole was a thin, rangy guy with shoulder-length blond hair and aviator sunglasses. He was so incredibly scruffy that he had to be either a hippie or famous.

Text appeared on the screen beneath his face: Jeremy Shutt, former NARKOTIKA bassist.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about this bit of Cole’s past appearing in his present. It felt like one step closer to that ragged rock star who’d collapsed onstage.

Mark pushed himself on the counter beside me to watch; I tilted my phone so he could see better.

A crowd had gathered around Cole. He was so electric, his body language so magnetic, that even on this tiny screen I could feel the tug of his spell. I envied the ease of it until I remembered that he’d had a lot of practice — he was meant to be exciting to watch from even the cheap seats in an auditorium.

Cords snaked like vines across the sand; Cole was encouraging people to plug in their own speakers. A variety of tiny iPod speakers studded the ground, as well as bigger, fancier speakers some people must have brought. It looked like an electric tree studded with weird fruit.

And the bass players kept coming.

I didn’t know how they all knew to show up. Maybe Baby had used her contacts. Maybe Cole had. Maybe there was a core group of NARKOTIKA fans blogging his every move. Or maybe it was just because he had such a huge crowd and so many speakers and had somehow turned Venice Beach into his playground.