Sinner

No. I wanted everything.

Chapter Fourteen

· isabel ·

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 onethousand-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 answered, “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.