Sinner

I did a little dance move to demonstrate. My gaze glanced off of Jeremy’s — I couldn’t take the look in his eyes — and kept going.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” my mother said, and gave a laugh-cough.

My father touched his Adam’s apple. He was Dr. St. Clair, twice the punctuation and five times the schooling of his prodigal son, a professor version of me. “I thought it would be dinner someplace nice. . . .”

This was my idea of a nice dinner: sitting on the hood of a car eating a chili dog. This was what he meant: a chain steakhouse.

I couldn’t take this.

“And instead,” I said, “you found yourselves in Long Beach, at one of the more glorious parties of the night.” I reached for Magdalene’s hand and put it in my father’s. Then I took my mother and dragged her lightly to Magdalene’s other side. I placed her hand in Magdalene’s. Half-crouching, dramatic and theatrical, I gestured to the interior of the warehouse. My fingers were spread wide, painting an image.

“Now,” I intoned, “see that wonderland? In you shall go to frolic. This is the life! This is California! This is how the other half lives! Go! Go! Cameras! Behold their excitement!”

My parents gazed into the warehouse, looking for this bright future I’d promised.

And then, as they stood there, hands in Magdalene’s, I got into the Mustang. It was still running. Their heads barely had time to turn.

I tore out of the parking lot, slamming the driver’s-side door shut as I did. Everything behind me was left in billowing dust.

All of it gone: the night and the stars and the song that I had breathed into being.

Chapter Thirty-Four

· cole ·

I drove.

Part of me wanted to keep driving. Part of me wanted to stop.

I didn’t know which was worse.

In the end, I couldn’t focus on navigating anymore, so I just went back to the apartment. I was half afraid there would be cameras there, but the alley was dark, and so was the courtyard.

I climbed the stairs to my apartment and locked the door behind me. My fingers were starting to get cold. Everything in me felt shaky.

It took no effort at all to conjure my parents’ faces. They probably thought I hated them.

I didn’t hate them. I just never wanted to see them again. It wasn’t the same thing.

My phone buzzed a message. Standing in the tiny dark living room, I looked at it. Jeremy: ?

I wanted there to be a text from Isabel, but there wasn’t.

I had told her the truth. I had run from my past, and where had it gotten me?

The same place I’d started.

Trust you?

I didn’t know how to do this with my parents and without Isabel.

I didn’t know why to do this with my parents and without Isabel.

I felt the room cameras on me, so I crossed the floor to the bathroom and closed the door behind me. I fisted my hands.

Then I unfisted them and locked the door. Someone had taken the dismantled bedroom camera out of the sink. It was hard to remember caring about it.

There was something wrong with me.

The human body doesn’t want to get hurt. We’re programmed to feel squeamish at the sight of blood. Pain is a careful orchestration of chemical processes so that we keep our body alive. Studies have shown that people born with congenital analgesia — the inability to feel pain — bite off the tips of their tongues and scratch holes in their eyes and break bones.

We are a wonder of checks and balances to keep on running.

The human body doesn’t want to get hurt.

There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I didn’t care. There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I wanted it.

We fear death; we fear the void; we scrabble to keep our pulses.

I was the void.

What are you afraid of? Nothing.

You are not doing this you are not doing this you are not doing this

But my eyes were already clawing over the bathroom for ways out.

Trust you?

I wasn’t meant to live, probably. This was why I was wired this way. Biology formed me and then took a look and wondered what the hell it was thinking and put in a mental fail-safe.

In case of emergency pull cord.

I was crouching by the wall, breathing into my hands.

Victor had told me once that he’d never considered suicide, not even for a second, not even at his darkest moments. It’s the only life we have, he’d said.

Even when I was happy, I felt like I was always looking for the edges on life. The seams.

I was so perfectly born to die.

I looked at the cord for the bathroom blinds.

This is too much this is too big for what has happened you need to stop

I thought about the joy of recording the track earlier that day. I tried to drag it back to myself, but it was an academic exercise. Every chemical switch inside me was thrown to get out get out get out, and happiness wasn’t even possible.

I cupped my hands over my ears, like the gesture of the headphones on them, and I listened in my mind to the song that I’d made, something that hadn’t existed this morning.

My parents’ faces.

I stood up.

I needed to . . . not feel. Just for a few minutes.

That would be all I was going to get anyway.

Wolf.

Clean, unbreakable, perfect. I had been all that, and here we were.

I went into the bedroom to get the things I’d need to trigger the shift. Not just a shift, but a wild shift, a howling shift, a shift that would break me. Not all of my wolf experiments had led me to easy places. I didn’t want to go to an easy place now.

The small, logical part of me thought the meticulous process would help. Remind me of all the reasons to stay human. Give me a chance to calm down. Remind me of all of the other ways I had learned to take this feeling down inside me.

But it only seemed to feed it. Even though I was moving quite slowly and methodically, time pushed and brushed past me, both the past and the future. With no effort at all, I summoned the memories of doing this, or something like it, countless times before.

Wolf.

My mind skirted to Sam back in Minnesota, who so hated the wolf. I could hear his voice telling me how I was scrubbing out everything about me, doing this. I was wasting everything good about me. How hateful I was to throw it all away. Victor had died as a wolf, longing to be a human, and I was giving it away for nothing.

I told myself that, and I told myself that again.

But this was a prerecorded session. I already knew how it ended.

Even though I was alone in the bathroom, it felt like there was someone or something else in there with me. A dark presence hovering in the corner, floating up by the ceiling. Feeding the dark inside me, or feeding off the dark inside me. All of us users and used.