Sinner

And suddenly I was just eaten by nostalgia, for a past that wasn’t mine.

I just wanted to be happy. I just wanted to make something.

“You have to take it off the table,” Jeremy said, finally. “It’s always going to be an option, otherwise. You’re going to have to give it up and mean it, or it’ll always be your solution when things go bad.”

The pickup truck pulled up beside us. Star put it in park and leaned across to gaze at me through the open passenger window. She grinned easily at me.

“Did you choose life while I was gone?”

I said, “Sure.”

Jeremy asked, “Did you mean it?”

It hurt, but sort of in a good way, to look him in the face. “Yes.”

Chapter Forty-Two

· isabel ·

That night, I arrived at Sierra’s house in the canyons with my shivered-ice eyes and my slaughter lips.

Party time.

I was in a dress that was white vinyl or leather — I couldn’t tell the difference; could anyone else? If they bothered to analyze it, it meant I was wearing it wrong, anyway. I was also wearing white sandals with enormous white heels. The only color to my wardrobe was my horror lips. No one could say I hadn’t warned them.

I used to wonder what partying was really like. When I was eleven or twelve. Everyone in movies seemed so eager to go party. All the television shows were girls wondering if they were going to be invited to this or that party, talking like there were different levels and qualities of party. I couldn’t imagine what was luring them to these places, but the desperation to get there promised that it was something good.

Now I’d been to more than my fair share of parties. And it turned out that the TV parties had not been lies. They boasted most of the features of real parties: booze, making out, music that sounded better on your own speakers. Maybe some drugs or drinking games or pool or witty banter. Possibly witty banter should have been lumped in with drinking games or with making out.

Maybe I was always too sober at these things.

The house was located in the Hollywood Hills, in a highaltitude fancy neighborhood that overlooked the lights of other, slightly less fancy neighborhoods. It was an enormous white, gated compound, a sort of mesa of smoothed concrete and windows.

Tastefully hidden floodlights guided me out of the taxi to the courtyard. Because it was Sierra’s house and Sierra’s party, the music was dreamy shoegaze. It sounded like a cross between a spilled water glass and a slow-motion electronic lynching. The place was already full of people.

God, I hated them all.

I stalked in. The irregular beat of the music and the mass of people made it feel like the ground was moving. Heads might have turned. I couldn’t tell. Being me meant that I couldn’t do more than a dismissive sweep of my eyes over any given person.

Part of the problem with parties was that I couldn’t even tell what the goal was, so I never knew when I was done. I searched for Sierra. At least if she saw me, I got credit for coming.

I walked by the big pool. It was full of splashing nymphs and was lit with color-changing lights. Pink, purple, green. A boy, half-in, half-out of the pool, grabbed my ankle with his wet hand.

“Come in,” he said.

I looked down at him. He wore glittery eyeliner. I wondered what brand of eyeliner it was that it didn’t wash off in the pool water. His wet hand on my ankle reminded me of Cole doing something very similar months and months before.

I said, very coolly, “I don’t like to get wet.”

I expected the boy to protest, but he just looked abashed and then slid under the water along with any respect I might have had for him.

In the middle of the pool, a girl floated on her back in slow, lazy circles while a guy paddled lazily beside her and kissed her hand. I wondered if there was ever a world where I might have turned out like them. I wondered if that was the person I might have been if we had never moved from California; if my brother had never died; if we had not moved away from Cole; if my parents had never gotten separated.

As I stepped away from the pool and onto the infinite tiled balcony that surrounded the house, someone wearing a green glowstick around his neck offered me a drink. It was swirled in two different neon colors, seeming at once like something I wanted to put in my mouth and something nature didn’t mean for me to ingest.

I shook my head. Once, my brother had said that alcohol made you someone else — I definitely didn’t want that. What if the someone else was worse than what I already was? And another time, my friend Mackenzie had said it just made you more of who you already were.

The world didn’t need that.

I trailed my fingers along the metal balcony as I walked.

The lights inside the house were off and everyone in the house wore glowsticks or Christmas lights or other half costumes that luminesced. I didn’t want to go in, but it was undoubtedly where Sierra would be. She was such a child. Everything here, really, was like a child’s fantasy world brought to life, made concrete.

But this was just a bunch of grown-ups in dress-up and so much pointless glitter.

I just hated —

Why couldn’t this glitter rub off on me?

Hands on my arm. It was Sierra. She’d found me, after all.

She looked alien with glow-in-thedark eyelashes and phosphorescing dots drawn down her nose and cheekbones. Her hair was braided through with fiber optics. She wasn’t a woman; she was an installation. All of her friends were similarly glow-inthedark. Sierra grabbed my arm. “Treasure! I was hoping you would come. Get a drink, get a boy, get a dream, everything’s lovely!” Her pupils were black and dazzling with two little reflections of neon pink and green. She air-kissed my cheek.

In response, I parted my lips and blinked, my lashes lingering on my cheek. I’d done that expression in the mirror before, lots. You could do it ever so much slower than you thought you should, and it only made you look more cynical.

Sierra was delighted. She introduced me to her friends and plucked at my dress, her hand right on my breast, and then she threw her head back so we could all see how she had the longest neck.

She said, “Here, you need some —”

From somewhere, she produced more of the glow-in-thedark makeup.

“Close,” she ordered.

I closed my eyes. I felt her swipe my eyelids, my lips.

“Open.” Sierra smiled toothily at me. “Now you’re one of us.”

That would never be true.

“Go,” Sierra told me, waving her hand. “Play. Then come back and tell me all the tales of the fabulous places you have been!”