Sinner

If I were always making an album, I would never be unhappy.

I lay on my bed and put my headphones on and listened to the track on repeat. It was impossible to get tired of listening to a new song the first day I breathed it into life. I texted Isabel. I did my homework.

She texted back: I’m checking your work.

In the end, I’d pulled the imperfect, lo-fi audio from T’s video footage and used it as a scratchy intro. Then I’d had us rip into a harder version with the tinny operatic singing pieced through. It sounded like we’d meant for it to turn out this way all along.

I was glad Isabel was checking my work. But I didn’t need anyone else to tell me I’d gotten a passing grade.

I drifted off with the song still playing in my ears. I dreamed about drifting off with the song still playing in my ears.

I woke to the sound of my door opening.

Isabel —

I heard a breathy giggle.

Not Isabel.

I had locked the door, I thought. I had been tired, but I remembered the action of turning the bolt.

My headphones hissed; my music player battery had died. I pulled them off an ear and heard another little snort. The giggles were traveling in packs. I felt like I was living a memory.

My wolf ears heard hands scrubbing over walls. Smelled perfume and sweat. The light came on.

Three topless girls stood in my living room area, peering at me through the see-through IKEA bookshelf into my bedroom.

One of them had artfully written my name across her br**sts.

COLE on one. CLAIR on the other. ST. in small letters on her breastbone.

“I think you have the wrong place,” I told them pleasantly, not sitting up. This inspired another round of giggles. They remained in my apartment. They remained topless. I remained in bed.

In the old days, this wouldn’t have been a problem. Bored and horny and high, I would have entertained them all if not myself, and then passed out on the deck.

But now I was not only on camera, but I very much wanted Isabel Culpeper to keep taking my calls. I was working arduously and single-mindedly toward my gold star, and there was nothing about this situation that was going to get me that.

“I’m sure I locked that door,” I said, sitting up.

One of the girls held up a key. She flashed a million-dollar smile at me.

Oh, Baby.

The girl with my name written large informed me that she was a virgin.

“I’m proud of you,” I said. I held up a finger and called Isabel, keeping one eye on my half-naked visitors. “Pumpkin, do you have Virtual Cole with you?”

“Pumpkin,” repeated Isabel.

“Da. Yes. Pumpkin.” I got up, glad that I had fallen asleep fully clothed.

“I do, but I’m driving. I’m pretty sure there’s a cameraman following me. Isn’t that funny?”

The girls drifted closer. They were astonishingly drunk.

Every camera in the apartment had a shot of boob. I was so untempted that I felt positively saintly. I wasn’t sure how I could be so slain by Isabel clothed and so disinterested in these girls.

“Everything about today is funny,” I replied. “Could you please broadcast to the world that there are better ways to show your support of my album-making efforts than showing up on my doorstep? Also, why are you driving? Surely there is nowhere in the world you long to drive to at this hour besides me.”

I heard a petulant honk from outside the window. The three girls and I all looked out the window. Isabel’s SUV was pulling up in the alley behind the apartment. A van pulled up behind with Joan inside.

The timing was tediously coincidental.

“I think you ought to go,” I told the girls, who were all invading my personal space in very unself-conscious ways. I began to herd them back the way they came. I paused to pry one from my arm. “It’s about to get unpleasant.”

As if on cue, the door burst open, the sound in perfect timing with the explosion of my heartbeat.

Isabel Culpeper clicked in, sporting a cropped leopard-print top, black leather pants, and a pair of boots with heels to stab usurpers. She also wore crocheted gloves that went up to her elbows. Nothing about her was out of place. There was not an integer in this world to represent how many times sexier she was than the half-naked girls.

I could not believe that Baby had had the gall to ruin the moment with three topless fans. I felt rather old and weary just then. How many lives had I lived in order to get to a place where these gigglers were merely an inconvenience?

Isabel pursed her red lips. The girls looked at her with the fearlessness of the drunk. Joan and her camera peeked in the doorway.

“Did you broadcast my special request?” I asked Isabel.

I felt strangely nervous that Isabel wouldn’t believe my innocence.

“I did,” she said. “Pumpkin.” Her eyes had found my name jiggling on the intruders. I was no prude, and history will support this claim, but at the moment I was very uncomfortable with the number of bare br**sts in the room. It was as if all of my hard-won cynicism had been murdered, orphaning a far more naive sixteen-year-old Cole, nervous that his crush wouldn’t agree to go out with him.

This seemed like a very dangerous place for that Cole to reemerge.

Please don’t be angry. You have to know this isn’t real. Please, Isabel — I wasn’t sure what I could say, not with Joan’s camera watching us carefully from just outside the apartment. The cameras inside the apartment watched carefully from everywhere else.

“I think you should give me that key,” I told the girls. “And you shouldn’t accept keys from strangers. You never know what you’ll find on the other side of the door.”

“Chop-chop,” Isabel suggested, her voice so cool that a nearby semitropical plant dropped dead.

“Are you his girlfriend?” the girl with the key asked, her voice ugly. “Because really —”

Isabel interrupted, “Don’t say anything we’ll both regret later. You can give the key to me, actually.”

She held out an imperious gloved hand. The girl relinquished the key with a sort of hiss. The virginal one crept by Isabel. The third spit at Isabel’s boots on her way out.

There was a pause. The spitter stopped just beyond Joan, a challenge in her face.

Isabel laughed, nasty and dismissive. I suddenly had a very clear idea of what she must have been like in high school.

“Oh, please,” she said.

She slammed the door shut, right in Joan’s face.

Silence.

My heart was thudding in my chest. I almost couldn’t believe how nervous I was, when I’d done nothing wrong, when I didn’t care what anybody thought, when I had spent so long being numb.