What that meant was that I had been standing there too long, my expression too naked, and I had not had Cole St. Clair up for the cameras for who knew how long.
I didn’t know what he would do, though. I didn’t know what Cole St. Clair would do right now, faced with these people.
Part of the reason I had made him was because he couldn’t coexist with them. Because he was the opposite, everything they weren’t. He was the alternative to shooting myself in the head.
It wasn’t cruel, this transformation, as long as I never went back home.
And now: this.
I needn’t have worried about a teary reunion. Both of my parents eyed the cameras timidly.
And this, finally, this was my reminder. It was still the show, after all. If they’d wanted a chance at the real me, they would have called first.
I plunged forward and seized my mother’s elbow. A little cardigan-covered bird bone. “Welcome to television! Don’t be shy! Let’s do that old mother-son thing, shall we?”
I gave her a grand old hug, a big sloppy Cole-St.-Clair thing, and then I whirled her out of my arms in a dance move before heading for my father. He stared at me as I came around the car at him like I was a bear attacking. But I didn’t hug him. I merely grabbed his hand. I shook it like a man as he stared at me, mouth agape. Then I used my other hand to form his hand into a long bro-shake with mine, complete with palm slap and fist bump at the end.
“What a glorious reunion this is,” I said, to both them and to the partygoers who still watched. I tossed my father’s limp hand away from mine. “What staggering timing. I, in fact, have just recorded a masterpiece in there. I think the two of you will agree that once you hear it played at ear-bleeding volumes, you’re really left with no choice but to move your hips.”
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.
I turned on the shower, and then I sat on the edge of the toilet, syringe in one hand, phone in the other. I dialed Isabel’s number. I didn’t know what I was going to say if she picked up.
I knew she wasn’t picking up anyway.
Trust you?
It rang through to voicemail. For a few minutes, I watched the shower pour gallons of water down the drain. I thought about how outside it was a desert. Then I stabbed the needle into myself.
Pain reminded me it was working.
I leaned my forehead on the wall and waited for it to change me or kill me, and I didn’t really care which. I did care which. I hoped it did both.
The thing I’d put in my veins scrabbled through my bloodstream to my brain. When it got there, it clawed and beat and gnawed at my hypothalamus, screaming the same message over and over:
Wolf
Wolf
Wolf
Pain snatched my thoughts away. My mind was a chemical fire, burning itself out. I crashed to the tile, shaking and sweating and retching. My thoughts immolated.
And then
It was light. Shining overhead, reflected in the ever-shifting, never-growing puddle. It was sound. Hissing water splattering the ground, soft and continuous. Scent: acid and fruit, sweet and rotten.
Wolf.
Chapter Thirty-Five
· isabel ·
I drove.
Part of me wanted to keep driving for the rest of my life.
Part of me wanted to go to Cole.
I didn’t know which was worse.
In the end, I found myself way up the coast, past Malibu.
The road here was dark and snaky, on one side the rocky coastline and the wild sea and on the other the steep, scrubby mountain cliffs. The palm trees were gone, the people, the houses. As I drove up a random canyon road, I felt like I was driving straight up into the black night sky, or into the black night ocean. I had no idea what time it was. It was the end of the world.
I finally parked the SUV at one of the scenic pullovers.
Down below, the crash of the surf made an uneven white line parallel to the shore. Everything else was dark.
I got out. Outside, the air was freezing. My knees were shaking, and so were my hands. I stood there with my arms wrapped around myself for a long minute, feeling myself tremble and wondering if an emotional shock reaction was possible when you had no emotions.
Probably it was time to admit to myself that I had emotions, and they’d betrayed me.
Then I opened up the back of the SUV, got out the tire iron, and closed the hatch again. I thought of that sick feeling in my stomach when I’d first seen Cole at the party. It was exactly the same, in retrospect, as the feeling that had crept inside me when my father’s voice had gotten strange earlier. When I’d known he was about to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.
I looked at the moon-white surface of the SUV. I tightened my grip on the tire iron.
And then I beat the hell out of the SUV.
The first dent wasn’t the best. There wasn’t anything surprising about swinging a tire iron at a vehicle and leaving a dent.
That’s what happens when you hit something metal with something else metal.
But the second hit. That was the one that sent a rush of feeling through me. It surprised me. I hadn’t known there was going to be a second swing until it happened, or a third, or a fourth. Then I realized I was never going to stop hitting this car. I smashed the doors and the hood, and I cracked the big plastic safety bumpers.
There was nothing in my head except for the knowledge that I had to drive this thing tomorrow, so I didn’t smash out the windows or the headlights or anything that might keep it off the road. I didn’t want it broken.
I wanted it ugly.
The tire iron dug down through the white paint, straight to the bare metal. Its guts were dull and utilitarian under all the gloss.
Finally, when my palm was hot from the effort of clutching the tire iron, I realized how tired I was.
I felt empty. Like I didn’t give a damn.
Which meant I was ready to go back home.
Chapter Thirty-Six
· cole ·
“Mr. St. Clair?”
I didn’t open my eyes, but I knew where I was. Well, I knew the kind of place I was. I recognized the feel of tile on my skin and the smell of bleach millimeters from my nose. The grit between my hipbone and the floor. I was on a bathroom floor.
My ears hissed.
“Cole? Do you mind if I come in?”
It took me a moment longer to realize which bathroom in particular it was. I had to backtrack, narrowing my thoughts.
Earth. North America. U.S. California. Los Angeles. Venice.
Apartment. Hell.
“Cole?” The voice seemed to consider. “I’m coming in.”
Over the hiss of my ears, I heard a doorknob jiggle. I opened my eyes, barely. The action took a lot of thought and seemed unimportant. The door was still closed. I wondered if I’d imagined the voice. I wondered if I’d imagined my own body. As difficult as the concept of opening my eyes had been, the idea of moving any of the rest of me was impossible. My mouth was the driest part of me, like my face had climbed in and coated it.
The door jumped. I was too dead to flinch.
It jumped again.
Then it burst open, its progress halted by my legs. A pair of men’s black shoes stepped in front of me, accompanied by the scent of coffee. They were not new, but they were very clean.