Sinner

Sudden recognition, and something more pained and empty, flickered across Cole’s face. The latter so fast that only I saw it. “Oh. That. Look, that was a time long time ago. That’s not going to happen this time. I’m clean. I just want to have a nice dinner here with my girlfriend.”

I could have killed him for the casual way he threw the word out there, in the middle of all of this. Girlfriend.

The host was unsmiling. “Clean is not rumor.”

Now Cole was losing his good humor. “And what is the rumor, my friend?”

The girl with the dyed hair said, “You have moved on from China White to something better.”

Baby kept smiling. The world loved a loser.

“I am here,” Cole said levelly, “for some goddamn sushi.”

“Get out,” the host replied. He stepped back to allow us room out of the booth. “You are not welcome.”

“Well, my friend,” Cole said, gruesomely expansive, “that seems like rather shitty business sense. Do you normally do background checks on your patrons before they sit down? Is this a saintly restaurant? Only for nuns? Buddha? Any lesser angels who wander into Koreatown? However do you stay open turning away all the sinners?”

He had acquired the full attention of the sushi chefs and the waitress. They stared at both of us. I knew forever on after this, no matter what happened, I was going to be Cole St. Clair’s girlfriend to them. There was absolutely no good ending to this.

I could never get sashimi here again.

“Most sinners do not linger in our memory like you,” the host said coolly. “Out.”

I snapped, “What did you do, Cole?”

Baby watched each of us, back and forth, like a tennis match.

“It was a long time ago,” he repeated.

The host said, “Not long enough.”

I was as humiliated as I would have been if I had done something.

“This is perfect. Let’s just go.”

Something burned furiously in Cole’s eyes, but he shoved out of the booth and tossed his napkin contemptuously on the table. “Rumor works both ways,” he told the host.

One of the guys behind the counter twisted his knife in the air slowly, just so the light caught it.

“Oh, I see you. I am terrified,” Cole said. “Keep your shorts on. We’re going.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so embarrassed.

One of the perks about not giving a damn. I couldn’t even put words together.

I had spent so many afternoons doing homework at Yuzu, just being alone there where nobody knew me or what my facial expression normally looked like, and now my time there had gone from present to past in just a few minutes.

Out in the deathly fluorescent end-of-the-world mall, Cole told Baby, his voice cool and remote, “Rematch. I’ve lost my appetite.”

“Are you sure?” Baby asked as we headed back down the escalator. “Now would be a good time to shoot some good TV.”

“Yeah,” Cole said. “Yeah, I’m sure. I can think of something better.”

Baby said, “Do it, then. I’ve got the greatest surprise for your birthday, but you have to earn it.”

We parted ways with her on the sidewalk. It was shockingly concrete white after the dim, timeless mall. We didn’t speak until we were back to the SUV.

“What was that?” I spat. “What did you do to those people?”

In the passenger seat, Cole shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“How can you not know? I saw your face. You know.”

“Isabel, I don’t remember.”

“Don’t lie to me!” I snapped. “I saw it! What did you do?”

“Victor and I —” In the passenger seat, Cole pinched his nose and, a second after, threw his fingers outward like he was chucking an idea away from himself. He had been restless before. Now he was rattling around inside his own body.

I guided the SUV through a traffic light, past an apartment building with a pagoda roofline. “I hope that means you’re trying to figure out how to tell me why I can’t ever go back to my favorite restaurant.”

Cole said, “Isabel, Jesus, give me a second.”

“Also,” I snarled. Now the rage was developing properly.

“Girlfriend?”

“What, you want an apology for that, too? There’s probably an application I should’ve filled out before I was supposed to say it, right? Jesus. Of all the things —”

Of all the things. Maybe he’d had girlfriends before, but I’d spent a lot of time intentionally being no one’s. And now I didn’t even know if he’d been saying it just to put a suspicious waitress at ease or because he thought I was really his girlfriend. And I didn’t even know, after that, if I even wanted to be. I didn’t know if it mattered if your boyfriend wasn’t a mess if everyone else in the world thought he was.

Cole rested his temple on the window, his eyes cast toward the cloudless sky. “I’m trying,” he said finally. “I’m trying and it doesn’t matter to anyone. I’m always going to be him.”

“Who?”

“Cole St. Clair.”

It seemed on the surface like a stupid thing to say, but I knew exactly what he meant. I knew just how it felt when your worst fear was that you would be yourself.

Chapter Twenty-Five

· cole ·

Here’s what I knew: If I went back to the apartment by myself now, I’d go into the bathroom and slide a needle under my skin, and even though it was not drugs, even though it was so much cleaner than drugs, it would remind me of that person I had been not so long ago. The person who had gone to Koreatown to score and trashed a sushi restaurant when things went sour. I couldn’t take hating myself like I’d hated myself then.

So I begged Isabel to take me back with her, at least for a little while.

And she must have known me, because she did, even though she was angry.

Isabel’s mother lived in one of those houses that would be a lot nicer if the houses that flanked it weren’t nice in exactly the same way. It didn’t look like California to me — it looked like Upper Middle Class, USA. Isabel backed her huge SUV into the driveway; she did it so neatly and proficiently that I was sure she must have intended to crush the flower bed on the right.

When she climbed out into the evening yard, her lips parted dismissively, and I knew I was right. This was guerrilla warfare: Isabel versus the suburbs. She hadn’t figured out yet that the only way to succeed was retreat. Or maybe she had, only her retreat was blocked. So she had decided to go down fighting.