Sinner

It used to matter so much. It used to seem like such a struggle to not turn into my father. But now, sitting here, it seemed impossible that that could’ve ever happened. I had wasted so much time on this. I kept finding out that the monster I’d been fighting was only me.

When we were done eating, I paid cash at the counter.

The server asked, “How was the food?”

“It was an amazing thing,” I said. “You chose excellently.

Tomorrow you should wield that pad with the confidence of a mental giant.”

She smiled behind her hand at me. I wanted to thank her for the gloomy realization that in the end, I was my worst enemy, but I couldn’t think of a good way to say it. So I just gave her another Cole St. Clair smile and returned to the table.

“This was nice,” my mother said. “This was a cute find.”

They weren’t going to ask if I’d just tried to kill myself.

They weren’t going to ask about Victor. They weren’t going to ask about anything unpleasant. But I didn’t know why I was surprised. They never had before.

My father had folded his napkin into twelve geometric shapes. “We had better call a cab if we want to make it to the airport in enough time. Do you know, Cole, if cabs come here?”

“Oh,” I said, taking out the keys to the Mustang, “I can take you. I seem to have a sports car.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

· isabel ·

cole: i survived my parents it’s your turn to text me me:

cole: here’s my number in case you forgot it me:

cole: please

me:

cole: isabel please

me:

cole:

Chapter Forty

· cole ·

After I failed to do anything more interesting than putting on pants for several days in a row, Baby called me. “Time’s up, Cole. What are you doing today?”

I was too devoid of enthusiasm to be creative. I flipped open the little notebook to her original list. “Block party.”

“Great.”

Yes. Great. Block party. Fine. I could throw that together as soon as I cleaned up some of the shit I’d broken in the bathroom when I shifted several nights before. I would have to get the word out via Virtual Cole. I had been desperately trying to avoid texting Isabel until she texted me, but I couldn’t wait any longer.

Can you arrange for a colebot to win a block party today I rewrote the text ten times before I sent it. It wasn’t my strongest work, but it had to sound neither bitter nor needy. Any punctuation I added pushed it toward one or the other, so in the end I went with the good old absence of grammar to indicate indifference.

Isabel immediately texted back: Give me 30 minutes.

Her punctuation implied that I shouldn’t think this meant we weren’t fighting. Twenty-nine minutes later she texted me the winner’s name and address.

Oh, young love.

Seven minutes after that, I was done cleaning the bathroom, and nine minutes after that, T had arrived with the cameras, and fifteen minutes after that, Jeremy had arrived with his pickup truck.

When you’re in a band, you spend the first four hundred thousand years of your career dragging around your own crap.

Your speakers, speaker stands, mixing head, mics, pickups, power cables, mic cables, speaker cables, instruments, the everything.

You forget something, you’re screwed. You break something, you’re screwed. You don’t have a long enough extension cord? Screwed.

Once you hit it big, though —

You’re packing your shit into a late-model Mustang and a pickup truck and hoping you didn’t forget anything.

I was living the dream, for sure.

“I’d carry something,” T told me apologetically, his camera on his shoulder, “but I’ve got the, you know.”

“Recording device,” I replied, putting my synthesizer in Leyla’s lap. She didn’t complain, because she was fine with everything that came through the threads of fate and whatnot.

This is what I thought: Fate was a lousy lay, and I was over her. I told T, “Yeah. It’s cool. Get this side. This side. It’s my famous side.”

Then Jeremy and I drove in tandem to West Adams.

All of the houses in this neighborhood were older, the same age as the ones in my neighborhood back in Phoenix, NY. But the West Adams houses felt exotic because they were pink and lime green, and stucco and tile-roofed, and anchored by filigree metal railings. I wondered how I would have been different if I’d grown up in one of these instead.

Shayla, the L.A.-area fan who had won (apparently, Isabel had asked fans to identify which album’s liner notes featured a photo of the back of my head), was supersonic with excitement by the time we got to her house.

So were the two hundred people already there. Virtual Cole had a pretty staggering reach.

The gathered fans had pretty much already taken over every street-side parking opportunity ever, so we had to chuck our stuff out into the driveway and then decide which of us was going to go find parking and walk back.

This felt familiar, too.

“Ohmygodohmygod,” said Shayla. “CanIhugyou?”

I allowed it. I could feel her quivering as she did. When she stepped back, I smiled at her, and a slow smile spread across her face, bigger and bigger.

Sometimes, a smile goes a long way.

This was one of those sometimes. I needed a smile, a lot, and she had a great one. Not in a sexy way, but in a way full of nonjudgmental enthusiasm.

My brain was shutting off, the complicated part, and the simpler part of my brain, the concert part, was kicking in. It’s hard to explain it. It’s not nerves. It is something else.

The crowd jostled behind me, buzzed and eager. It was feeding me, evening out the ridges in my spiky, cluttered thoughts. I’d forgotten about this, somehow, this part of gigging.

I’d forgotten its hectic erasure of emotions. Here there was no room for anything besides Cole St. Clair, singer, performer, consumed.

I was grateful for it. I didn’t want my thoughts. Not right now.

Isabel —

Jeremy appeared at my elbow, his long hair tucked behind his ears and a pair of blue-tinted sunglasses balanced low on his nose. He looked like John Lennon if John Lennon had been blond and born just outside Syracuse, New York. “Cole. What’s the way?”

“Music,” I said. It was all I was thinking about just then.

These people wanted to hear us play, and I wanted to play for them.

“That’s it?”

“Loud,” I said.

Jeremy scratched his vaguely beard-y face. His hair was light enough that it was hard to tell if he was actually growing facial hair or not. “Old school.”