He had picked me. I hadn’t asked, and he’d still picked me.

This feeling was almost worse than feeling shitty. Really, it was the difference between the two emotions that was hard to navigate. The sudden lift from crap to joy.

“You bastard,” Chad said. It was unclear if he meant me or Jeremy. He clarified, “You no-talent boy-band wannabe.”

I saluted at him with two fingers.

Jeremy joined me with his bass case. We performed a lengthy handshake, which helped ease my tremendous, painful joy. In a rather perfunctory way, I hooked my foot into the garden hose and twisted the sprinkler round. Artificial rain blasted into the garage’s interior. Now the guitarist and drummer made some noises.

Chad knew a lot of swearwords.

I turned with Jeremy and headed back to the Saturn to where Leyla waited. T was filming everything. I imagined the shot framed gloriously, soaking wet musicians in the background like a car explosion in an action movie.

“That was nearly reasonable of you,” Jeremy said. He added confidently, “They’ll call me.”

A drumstick hurtled by my head. It rattled on the concrete as it landed.

Jeremy leaned to pick it up. “But probably not you.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

· cole ·

After we’d done the episode but before Isabel was off work, I hung out with Jeremy in his old beat-up pickup truck, parked in the middle of a beach lot. It was just the two of us. I’d sent Leyla back with the Saturn because I didn’t want to see either of them ever again.

The sounds were traffic and someone else’s boom box and the surf and the slap of arms on a volleyball. I lay in the truck bed on a dry, crinkly tarp, and Jeremy sat on a tire, looking at me and the ocean. Overhead, the sun pierced the jet trails, baking cracks into the asphalt down below. I was still wound up from performing and now would’ve been a good time for a beer.

Jeremy offered me some unsweetened iced tea.

“I don’t want your witches’ brew,” I told him, but I took it anyway and set the jar down by my head. For several long companionable minutes we did nothing together. Jeremy leaned his head back and watched the sky, looking like a wizened Australian guy in the full sun. I closed my eyes and let the heat bake my eyelids. Here with Jeremy, it would be easy to pretend the last three years of my life hadn’t happened, and I could restart without any of my sins. Only then I wouldn’t have met Isabel, and I wouldn’t be here in California. I wondered if there had ever been a more direct route to this place. Maybe I’d been on it and ruined it. Maybe if I’d just stayed on the straight and narrow all along, I would’ve met Isabel at a show.

No, because she didn’t like concerts, and neither did I.

I thought of those three topless girls in my apartment and how they would never be Isabel and Isabel would have never been them.

I couldn’t keep my eyes closed because my brain was moving faster and faster instead of slower and slower. I opened them and said, “All of the girls look old now. When did that start? All I can see when I look at them is what they’re going to look like when they’re forty. It’s like the worst superpower ever.”

Thoughtfully, Jeremy replied, “Really? I always see people as kids. Since I was in, like, middle school. It doesn’t matter how they’re acting or how old they are, I can’t not imagine them as kids.”

“How awful. How can you possibly flip someone off if you’re imagining them as a toddler?”

“Exactly,” Jeremy said.

“Tell me. Why is Leyla so unacceptable?”

“You know I don’t like to judge people.”

“We all do things we don’t like.”

He picked a nub of rubber off the tire and flicked it onto my chest. “She’s not really our thing. Style-wise.”

“Musically or ethically?”

Jeremy said, “I’d rather not perjure myself.”

“Do you even know what perjure means?” I wasn’t 100

percent

on it myself. I had a very specialized knowledge base. “I want to fire her. I really do. But what’s the alternative?”

I regretted saying it as soon as it was out of my mouth.

Because the alternative was dead, and I didn’t want to talk about it. Don’t say anything, Jeremy. Don’t say his name.

So you ready to do this thing?

— What?

NARKOTIKA.

I didn’t give Jeremy time to answer. “You wouldn’t be with me if it wasn’t about the music, right? I mean, you wouldn’t be doing this with me if it was just about me jerking off on camera as a loser, right?”

“Is this about what Chad said?”

“Who’s Chad?” I asked, as if I couldn’t remember.

“Oh, him. No. I was just thinking because of . . . maybe.

Possibly. I’m on a road of self-evaluation. This is one of the side streets.”

Jeremy thought about it. He thought about it for so long that the sun moved a little overhead. A family went by us on their way to the beach. One dad was in a wet suit with a surfboard under his arm. The other dad was in the world’s geekiest swim trunks. The children trotted behind them making gleeful supersonic noises and punching each other.

“Jeremy,” I prompted, because I couldn’t take it anymore.

He said, “What we just did wasn’t about the music. The way’s never been about the music. The way is about the show.

The gig. This is just another gig. The studio was about the music.”

“Can I do the music without the way? Like, and still sell anything?”

“I think you like the way too well for that.”

“Hey.”

Jeremy said, “I’m not saying it’s bad. You’re good at it. But sometimes I think you’ve forgotten how to stop doing it. Do you think maybe you should get out of the city for a little bit?”

“Is that a suggestion or a question?”

“Just to get your head back together.”

I rocked my head to look at him. I could feel the knob at the back of my skull grinding and crackling against the tarp and the ridges of the pickup bed. It was sort of satisfying. I shook my head back and forth. Not disagreeing with Jeremy, just feeling the crunching on my head. “What makes you think my head is not entire already? What a glorious time I’m having in this state.”

Jeremy took a drink of unsweetened iced tea. He said, “Chip died.”

“Who the hell is Chip?”

“Chip Mac.”

“Are you even using words, man? Or are you just communicating with a series of clicks and whistles?”

Jeremy repeated slowly, “Chip. Mac. The guitarist Baby hired for you.”

“I didn’t know his name. How’d he die?”

“OD’d.”

It didn’t mean anything at first. Then I made the connection, but the wrong one. “That was totally not my fault.”

“No,” Jeremy agreed. “It wasn’t. He’d just gotten out of rehab, and he’d been in the hospital, too. Did you know the bass player?”

“He was just some kid.”

“Picked up for dealing last year,” he said. “I asked around.”

It was rather heartwarming to imagine Jeremy asking around on my behalf. “So, what? You think Baby was trying to get me wingmen.”

He made a noise of affirmation. It wasn’t really surprising.

It did make me feel a little strange, thinking how the guitarist was now dead and he’d just been alive and angry at me. And also thinking about how things might have been different if I hadn’t fired them that night. No wonder Baby had been so aggravated that I’d fired Chip, perfectly poised for a disaster on television. “What if I hadn’t fired them? Lucky.”

“Luck,” Jeremy scoffed softly. “There’s no luck.”

“Then what?”

“Your feet take you where you need to be.”

I thought about this. “My feet have taken me to some pretty rough places.”

“That was your dick, dragging your feet along with.”

I laughed. A flock of pelicans flew by, ungainly but beautiful, reminding me I needed to call Leon and make him ride a Ferris wheel. A word appeared in my head, unbidden: home.

Was that what this could be? Was that what I wanted?

“I don’t want to give you back to Chad,” I said.

There was a very long pause. Even by Jeremy standards.

Then he said, “I can’t tour with you, Cole.”

Just as before, when he hadn’t trusted me, it wounded. I didn’t care if the rest of the world didn’t trust me, Baby and America and all that. But Jeremy — Isabel — “I’ve changed.”

“I know,” he said, and he got out the truck keys. “But some things you can’t change.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

· isabel ·

In our clinicals today, we’d been going over codes. Codes are basically shorthand for terrible things that happen in hospitals.

They’re mostly standardized in California.

Code Red: Fire

Code Orange: Hazardous Material Spill/Release Code Yellow: Bomb Threat

Code Blue: Someone’s Heart Has Stopped

A few of the more twittering idiots in my class had been transported by fear at the idea of a code possibly going down during our clinicals. Part of me was sort of hoping for one, though. I was going out of my mind with boredom. A hazardous material spill seemed like a good time. The big thing about the codes was to not panic, anyway, and I was excellent at not feeling emotions. The point was to gather all of the information you could, and then act on it.

Baby was basically a code. I couldn’t decide if she was a Code Gray: Combative Person or Code Silver: Person With Weapon/Hostage Situation. In either case, there was no harm at all in finding out more about her. Which was why I agreed to go out to dinner with her, as long as I chose the place. I wanted it to be on my territory, not hers.

I picked Cole up and we headed to Koreatown, a place that many of Sierra’s monsters were afraid of because they were silly little weaklings who believed what their mothers told them. My mother had also told me to not go to Koreatown on my own, but she’d never been, so how would she know? The news was full of lies and, anyway, the food was great.

Everybody wanted something in Koreatown, and nobody was pretending they didn’t. It wasn’t really attractive, but it felt satisfyingly urban to me. The streets were wide and treeless; everything that wasn’t an apartment building was a strip mall, and everything that wasn’t a strip mall was made out of concrete.

There were more walls tagged with graffiti than not. Not the feel-good graffiti of Venice, either. It was all gang tags and well-done murals about ugly things. One of my favorites was a mural of wolves at a kill. There was no blood, though — just butterflies. That felt like Koreatown to me. It came at L.A.’s prettiness all real and brutal, but in attacking Los Angeles, it just became part of the prettiness. That was the hungry magic of Los Angeles. It defied all comers and turned them all into yet more Los Angeles.

I parked the SUV, swiped a credit card at the meter, and in we went on foot. On our way to the restaurant, a bunch of cute Latino guys on the opposite street corner hooted. I thought it was directed at me until one of them flipped Cole the bird and shouted “NARKOTIKA!” to make sure Cole knew it was personal.

Cole, wired and hectic from whatever had happened during his shoot today, looked over his shoulder at them. For a moment I was afraid he was going to do something that got him stabbed, but he just flashed a peace sign at them. Then he turned away, despite their shouted replies. Done with them. Just, done.

The restaurant, Yuzu, was a Japanese place located in an apocalyptic shopping mall on the edge of Koreatown. It was four half-abandoned, dimly lit levels connected by ancient escalators.

Every store that was still open had signs in Korean out front.

I liked coming here because the food was good, but also because it felt like a place that you couldn’t just use the Internet to find. You had to use something real. And you had to actually and truly not give a damn about what other people told you.

We rode an escalator up. I was wearing a lace top, and Cole’s hand had snuck under the edge of it to rest on my bare lower back. I returned the favor. His back felt smooth and cool beneath his proud to be canadian T-shirt. He was distracted, though. His eyes were narrowed as his gaze flicked from the stores to me. A little muscle moved in his jaw.

“What?” I asked. “Just say it.”

He said, “I think I’ve been here before.”

“Think? Seems pretty memorable to me.”

“I might not have been in a remembering mood.”

I didn’t like to think about Cole coming here to score while on tour, so I didn’t say anything else. We rode up the escalator in silence, then took two steps to the next escalator, and rode that one up in silence. I walked him to the front of Yuzu. Cole pointed to the sign out front, which read: we reserve the right to refuse service or admittance to anyone.

Inside, we were led past a translucent screen into a surprisingly intimate seating area. We were early, because I was always punctual or better. Baby wasn’t there yet. I slid into one side of a dim booth, and Cole threw himself into the other. He leaned across the table on his elbows, invading my personal space, knocking the paper lantern askew and sending the menus sprawling.

“Just say it,” he said. I lifted my hand. Say what?

At the head of the table, the host cleared his throat. He looked very unamused by Cole. “Something to drink?”

“Water,” Cole said. “And Coke. And more water.”




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