Sinner

In any case, Cole’s number on my vibrating phone screen was more than enough to make me play the bathroom card. In the hallway, I tried to breathe through my mouth. It takes a certain sort of intestinal fortitude to willingly enter another high school after you’d graduated from your own. The sheer smell of the hall triggered a variety of feelings, any one of which would have been a good topic for a therapy session.

Cole said, “Tell me you want me.”

I pushed into the bathroom. “I have a very short lunch break.”

“I forgot that you were being educated. Teach me something you’ve just been taught.”

“We’re working on professional courtesy. It turns out that no matter how friendly you are with the clients, you’re not supposed to call them sweetie.”

“You are going to make a great C-A-N. C-N-A. Right?

Although you do have a great C-A-N.”

In the mirror, my mouth smiled. It looked mean and happy.

“Doctor,” I replied. “I am going to med school. This is just a necessary evil.” Although that wasn’t strictly true. I could probably get into a fine premed program without it. But I didn’t want fine. There was very little point to fine.

“Come get me,” Cole said piteously. “In your car. My car makes me look like a loser.”

“That’s not your car,” I said, and Cole snickered at himself.

“I’ll come get you. But I’m picking the place this time.”

I hung up. I didn’t want to go back into class. I didn’t want to do my clinicals this week, either. I didn’t want to roll old people over and clean whatever was left beneath them. I didn’t want to be told by my instructor that I needed to smile when I introduced myself to clients. I didn’t want to have to put the gloves on and have that gross hand-glove feeling that happened after I pulled them off. I didn’t want to feel like I was the only person in the world who hated people.

You’re taking a class in this.

You’re going to be a doctor.

This is life.

In the mirror, I looked stark and out of place in front of the worn stall doors. I wasn’t sure if that was actually how I looked or just how I stood, with my elbows tucked so that nothing in the room would accidentally touch me. That was the rule: Nothing was to touch me.

I didn’t know why I kept letting Cole break it.

An hour later, Cole and I were headed to lunch at an obscure L.A. food establishment.

I wasn’t sure why people still got credit for “finding” obscure places to eat. Friends of your parents took you and your mother to some tiny place that made great omelets or something, and the friends preened as if they’d invented omelets, and your mother’s all, “How did you ever find this place?!” I could tell you the answer: the Internet. Five minutes, a zip code, and cursory access to the Internet would grant anyone the secrets to culinary obscurity.

It pissed me off when people called common sense a magical power. Because if it counted, I was the most magical creature I knew.

I took Cole to a place that I’d discovered with my magical powers, a hole-in-thewall pie shop that was easy to drive by if you didn’t know where you were going. Outside, the front was painted a deep purple. Inside was L.A. at its most visually appealing. The skinny eat-in area was concrete floors, sparse white walls, and reclaimed wood benches. The air was coffee and butter. The ordering area was tiny and quaint: a cooler with interesting drinks, chalkboard menu, a pie case full of delights.

I had tried them all, from the velvety citrus tarts to the salty caramel drizzle chocolate pies.

It was so far from the gross high school classroom that I’d started the day in that it felt as if one or the other must not be real.

We stood in line. I kept finding myself standing too close to Cole, close enough that my shoulder blade pressed into his chest, and then I would realize we were both inhaling and exhaling at the same time.

I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay here with him. Or I wanted to take him with me. I was sometimes so damn tired of being alone — I suddenly felt strangely and unpleasantly tearful.

I took a deliberate step to one side. Without my body to anchor him, Cole restlessly turned to the drink cooler and then to the shelves of merchandise and then back to the drink cooler and then back to the shelves of merchandise.

“I’m not really a sweets person.” He fingered a T-shirt that I could already tell he wanted to buy purely because it said the pie hole on it.

I said, “Don’t be a bastard.”

“Then tell me what to get. Apple? That’s a pie.”

“Shut up. I will order for you. In fact, you’re making me crazy pacing. Go get a table out front.”

“Da,” replied Cole, and vanished.

When I came outside, I found him at a tiny metal table in dappled shade, staring at two phones he’d set on the tabletop.

There were two other tables, one of which was occupied by a cheerful but very ugly woman and her beautiful but very pissylooking little dog. The third table was occupied by a camera guy, who I gave the finger. He waved back at me with a guileless smile.

I put Cole’s coffee in front of him and sat down with my back to the camera.

“What did you order for me?” he asked, not lifting his eyes from the devices.

“I’m not going to tell you. It’ll just have to surprise you when it comes out. It’s not apple. What’s that other phone?”

Cole glumly explained Baby’s mandate.

“That’s not that bad,” I said. “So she wants you to talk to your fans?”

“I don’t want to talk to them,” he said. “All they want to talk about is whether I’ll take their virginity or write another song like ‘Villain’ or come play a show in whatever impossibly small place they live in. Did you put sugar in this?”

“No. It’s a grown-up coffee. I made it for you the grown-up way. Also, you don’t have to be one-on-one. You could just update them in general.”

“Update them! I’m being brilliant. Now I’m being amazing.

How tedious that would be for them.”

“Oh, it’s tedious already. Baby knows I’m not on the show, right?”

Cole glanced up at the camera. “Legally, she can use the back of your head but not your face. All that” — he gestured to the street — “is too loud for him to pick up any audio, but — do you want to go inside?”

I thought about how there was a certain dark pleasure to anonymously marking my territory, letting the fangirls know that he already had someone. And my hair looked great from the back.