Sinner

I didn’t even know what the hell I’d been thinking.

“And what, Cole? I don’t really like being threatened, and for no reason. I’m working. I have a call on the other line. I don’t know what has happened, but I’m happy to help.”

I wanted to snarl This is war! but the fight was going out of me. I couldn’t believe the track was gone. I just couldn’t believe it. What a damn waste of everything.

“I want my Mustang,” I told her. “That’s how you can help.

Get me my Mustang.”

I hung up. I felt like a toothless dog.

If Victor had been here, I would’ve turned to him and said, “Let’s go get high.”

But he wasn’t. And I was on camera. And that wasn’t me anymore. That wasn’t me anymore. That wasn’t me anymore.

I looked at Jeremy.

He said, “What are you thinking?”

I said, “I wish Victor would come through that door.”

The camera was right on me. Baby was winning this game uncontested. My brain whirred, looking for some kind of traction, some way to turn this to my advantage, but nothing caught.

Jeremy said, “That’s not gonna happen. We have to work with what we have.” He paused. “What’s the way, Cole?”

It was a ridiculous question, because that ship had sailed so miserably away.

A text vibrated through on my phone. It was from Isabel. It just said, you’d better be recording something I can dance to.

I had been, but it was gone. I pictured it, the way that track would have sounded as she danced to it. Because it was both a fantasy and a memory, I knew precisely what it would feel like to have her h*ps pressed up against mine. Isabel Culpeper, perfect ten.

I wanted that gold star.

And then it was like a bank of mist cleared from my brain.

I turned to T’s camera. “You’ve been filming this whole time, right?”

“Oh, hey,” T said, looking alarmed. “You know, it’s my job, I —”

I waved my hand to cut him off. “I just wanted to make sure you had what I needed. Let’s do this thing.”

Jeremy grinned.

Chapter Nineteen

· isabel ·

That first day that I was Virtual Cole St. Clair, I spent a lot of time on the Internet. Not because I was posting updates, but because I was researching the way Cole looked on the outside. I realized I’d only heard a few of his songs, so I listened to some with one earbud while my CNA instructor showed movies in a darkened room. I listened to the rest on my drive over to .blush. I had never read an interview with him, so I queued up web pages and scrolled through them on my phone while Sierra pinned various bits of clothing on me in the back room. I listened to NARKOTIKA Behind the Band segments as she pulled them off. After she had left me to close down the shop, I watched videos of the bands Cole thanked in his liner notes or mused on as influences in interviews.

I learned that the little hand gesture I’d noticed in the first episode meant that Cole was about to reveal something new or pull off some virtuoso bit of playing or dancing. I made a note of it. Or rather, I made a mental note that he never accidentally did the hand gesture when he was with me. It wasn’t a real-Cole gesture he had co-opted for his shows. It had to have been a gesture that he invented for them.

I learned that he had a long-running inside joke with interviewers where they often asked him what he was afraid of and he always replied “nothing.”

I learned from a two-year-old interview that he wrote most of his songs in the car or in the shower or while in movie theaters or making out with soon-to-be-ex-girlfriends.

I wasn’t interested in learning much after that. So I looked up Baby North instead.

Near the end of my shift, I called Cole. When he picked up, I heard tinny music in the background, including Cole’s recorded singing voice. The sound of it gave me a strange little crawl up my skin. “Did you finish your homework?”

“Nearly. It got complicated. I really want my gold star, though.”

“There’s no partial credit,” I replied. I clicked on a hyperlink for an article on Baby. Her face smiled out at me, open and honest, beside a headline that said death by baby. “I’m practicing being you. What’s one thing you know you would never say in an interview?”

Immediately, he replied, “ ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

I didn’t have to see his face to know he was pleased with his answer. “God, you are unbelievable. Like, do these lines just come to you, or do you actually see in your head how your words look printed before you say them?”

“What a superpower that would be. Like a thought bubble?”

I demanded, “Do you say anything without thinking whether or not it sounds good?”

“I don’t even know why I’d bother opening my mouth otherwise.”

“Yeah. You know, this whole thing where interviewers ask you what you’re afraid of and you always answer ‘nothing,’ ” I said. “That’s such a lie.”

Cole was quiet. It was impossible to tell if it was because he was picturing a clever answer in the thought bubble above his head, or because he was doing something while he was talking to me, or because he had no answer.

Finally, he replied, his voice very different from before. “It’s not a lie. It’s super clever. It’s why I’m still here on this planet.

I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out with your giant brain.

It’s a riddle. Like how to get my Mustang out here from Phoenix without having to ever speak to my parents. These are puzzles, Isabel, and I think you should solve them all for me.” His voice had returned to normal. Over-normal.

“I don’t like puzzles,” I told him.

“That’s because you are a puzzle,” Cole replied, “and you don’t like your own kind. It’s okay. I don’t like other me’s, either.”

I didn’t believe him. Cole got along great with a mirror.

“Don’t you have homework?”

“Hey, you called me.”

“Tell me what to tell the world.”

“Tell them,” Cole started, then paused. “Tell them I am making them a present. And tell me that you’ll dance to it.”

Chapter Twenty

· cole ·

That night, I returned to the apartment, too tired to be restless.

I was the sort of tired that came from finishing something, from emptying myself. I’d chased this feeling before, too, with fancy drinks and cheap drinks and pills that made you slow. But just like how the drug highs could never quite match the highs of creating music, the induced lows could never match this real peace that came from having created.