Sinner

As a group of older women passed by us, laughing and gripping wine bottles, I asked, “What’s your plan here, Cole?”

“Actually,” Cole replied, “it’s Leon’s plan.”

At this, Leon looked modest. “I read about it in the weekend insert.”

Cole agreed, “The place where news happens. Apparently, they are going to project a motion picture on the side of that mausoleum over there” — he gestured to the photo op — “and we will sit like so” — he crossed his fingers on both hands — “and watch it.”

The white mausoleum he indicated was massive and featureless, ideal for film projection. “Which film?”

Cole leaned forward, looking knowing. Desire stabbed me.

“Beauty and the Beast.”

He smirked. It was not actually Beauty and the Beast.

I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t like it when you call me a beast.”

Cole’s grin was so wonderful that it hurt.

Leon broke in, “Folks, maybe we should find a seat?”

As Cole leaped ahead with Jeremy, Sofia hung at my elbow.

She whispered, “Oh, Isabel, he’s so beautiful.”

Only she said it like she would say terrible.

Up ahead, the boys had found a place without too many tall people in front of it. Sofia spread the blanket and served everyone sandwiches, much to my annoyance — but the others didn’t know to tell her not to. I watched her eat hers very quietly and precisely, tearing off small pieces so she wouldn’t do it wrong with her mouth open. It just made me want to punch something. Couldn’t she see that the others didn’t care about how she chewed? How they were all prepared to like her before she handed them sandwiches?

I expected (feared?) there to be alcohol of some kind, but it turned out that Jeremy was some kind of straight-edge Buddhist, and Leon had given up drinking five years before, and Cole was also abstaining, and Sofia and I were us.

Cole, sitting beside me, put his hand on my back, under my jacket. His fingers wanted me and nothing else. I was absolutely dying.

“Would you like my jacket?” Leon asked Sofia.

“Oh, no, I’m fine,” Sofia said, though she was clearly freezing and Leon had said it in a strictly fatherly way. Probably she didn’t remember what fatherly looked like.

“Sofia,” I said, lowering my sandwich from my mouth.

The edge of the bread had a red mark on it from my lipstick. “If you don’t take that man’s jacket, I’m going to set something on fire.”

Cole immediately came to life.

Jeremy shook his head slowly. “No, man. Not here.”

He said it with such lazy, muted humor that it suddenly seemed obvious that they’d been in a band together. That he, anyway, knew Cole in a way that those fangirls did not.

I expected to feel jealous, but I felt more like I’d found another member of a survivors’ club.

Sofia took the jacket.

The movie began. It turned out to be Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which we had all seen.

At one point I glanced over to Cole, and he was just — looking at me. His eyes were narrowed like he was trying to learn something from my face. He was silhouetted by the very last of the pink sky and the tall, leaning palms. It was impossible to think that California hadn’t made him, because he looked like he had emerged from the ground here along with the palms and the peacocks and the memorial of Johnny Ramone playing his guitar.

He didn’t look away.

God, I wanted to kiss him so badly.

I wished we were alone.

But there was Sofia, who needed me, and Leon, who seemed to be Cole’s driver and date, and Jeremy, who — well, I didn’t know what Jeremy was. He seemed like he could handle himself.

Partway into the movie, Sofia excused herself for the toilets.

She was gone for too long, so I pushed myself to my feet with a sigh. I whispered, “I’m just going to go check on her.”

I found her in one of the mausoleums. The wide aisle led me under a high, domed glass ceiling. On either side of me, the skyscraping walls were divided into squares that looked like post office boxes. There were small urns attached to the front of them, because these were actually boxes of dead people.

Sofia was crying noiselessly next to an urn, Leon’s jacket still over her shoulders. My heels clicked on the floor as I marched up to her.

“This is not what grown-ups do,” I told her.

She turned her face and sniffled. “I’m not a grown-up.”

“What is even the matter?”

“I don’t know what to say to people.”

“It’s a movie. We’re not saying anything.”

“But if we were talking. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

I didn’t know the first thing about how to cure a hypothetical problem that I would have barely understood even if it hadn’t been hypothetical.

Which meant that a few moments passed, during which Sofia grew more upset and I grew more angry and thought more about dead people and how my brother was one of them, dead in a hole instead of in a clean white box in California.

“Hey,” said a voice behind me. Against all reason, it was Jeremy. He was all unthreatening and hunched over, tucking one bit of hair behind his ear. “It’s me. I came to see if everything was okay?”

“Oh, she’s . . .” upset with life.

His presence pushed Sofia over the edge. She wailed, “Now I’ve really ruined things!”

I snapped, “You have not.”

Jeremy said smoothly, “Oh, hey, no. Cole’s just on his date with Leon; they’re having a grand old time. So hey, hey, do you mind if I try something? It’s this thing I learned in, like . . .”

He’d moved around me to face her. And something about his expression must have looked more comforting than mine, because Sofia gulped down the latest batch of tears and met his eyes.

“You just get overwhelmed, right?” Jeremy asked. He gestured while he said it. He had long, long fingers. Bassist fingers.

He started to tap his breastbone with one hand, and with the other, he took her limp wrist and made her mimic the gesture on herself. “Tap here and just say something with me. Just say, like, ‘We’re all cool here. They like my smile.’ ”

What the hell.

Sofia offered him a shy smile.

What the hell times two.

“Now tap here,” Jeremy said, and started tapping his chin. I expected Sofia to refuse — I would have — but she did as he did. “And say, ‘We’re all cool here. They think I’m nice.’ ”