The uncomfortable feeling inside me grew and solidified. I held the doorknob. “What sort of show?”

“We’re just doing a quick little show following him and his band around while they record their next album.”

Quick

little

show

I knew he wasn’t here for me. I had known from the beginning.

But my foolish heart hadn’t. It had wanted so badly to believe him. Now it was crushed up against my ribs by the growing terrible feeling inside me.

“I’m not interested,” I said. “Like I said, we’re not really dating.”

“But even as a friend —”

“We’re not even really friends,” I said. I needed to shut this door right now, so that I could go scream or cry or smash something.

“I just knew him for a while.”

She studied my face, looking for the true answer, but I had gotten ahold of myself now, and I just gazed dead-eyed out at her from behind my eyeliner.

“If you change your mind,” she said, and flicked out a card from the pocket of her linen smock.

I didn’t change my expression, but I took it. I needed something to burn.

“It would be cool,” Baby said. “The sort of thing you’d always remember. Just think about it.”

She retreated down the sidewalk. I retreated back into the House of Dismay and Ruin. As I shut the door behind me, the house took another piece of my soul and transformed it into a piece of semi-custom cabinetry. My brain was exploding.

Sofia stood at the door to the living room. “Was that really —”

“Yes.” I snatched my phone out. Punched in a number.

“What did she —”

I clawed my hand through the air and pointed at the phone.

I heard a little tap as someone picked up on the other end.

“I thought you said you were here for me,” I snarled.

“Hello,” Cole replied. “I was just putting pants on. Unless you’d prefer me to leave them off.”

“Act like you heard what I said.”

“But I didn’t.”

“You said you were here for me. You lied.”

There was a pause. The thing about a phone call is that you can’t tell what is happening in the pause. I couldn’t tell if it was a find-a-way-to-make-this-better pause or an I-am-genuinelyconfused pause.

“What?” he asked finally.

“You’re recording an album? You’re going to be on television.

Those things are not me.”

Another pause.

“Say something.”

“Something.”

“Oh, ha. Well, listen. The problem is that you made me feel as if you came here just for me, and actually you came here to be on TV. You didn’t come for me. You came here to be Cole St.

Clair.”

Exasperated, he replied, “That is backward.”

“Funny how you didn’t mention it before,” I snapped.

“Forget about dinner. Forget about it all.”

“It’s no —”

“Don’t talk. In fact,” I said, “drop dead.”

I hung up.

Chapter Six

· cole ·

When I was a wolf, I didn’t remember anything about being me. I was reduced to my very basic self, solved for x. I was nothing more or less extraordinary than an animal.

It was what every other drug I had ever used was trying to be.

All I could think about after Isabel called was how if I was a wolf, this feeling would go away, at least for a little bit.

Instead I stood on the wire-strung balcony of the Venice house and looked out at the nighttime glitter of the city. The moon was a huge, round Hollywood set piece at the end of Abbot Kinney. Palm trees were exotic silhouettes against its face — movie-perfect, L.A.-perfect. This place: Were movies Hollywood-perfect because this place was, or had they built this place to perfection because of the movies?

Standing on the balcony, a silhouette myself against the purple sky, my depression was just another glamorous thing.

What should I have told her?

I was aware of the tiny camera pointed at my back. It was attached to the roofline and was one of several positioned throughout the compound — compound was really not the right word for it. My studio apartment, bright and wide-eyed and skylighted, occupied the second floor of a concrete block house.

The first-floor apartment was slated for another band member.

A wide deck led to a third apartment in a flat stucco house on the other side of the block. In between was a tiny yard full of plants that looked unrealistic to my foreign eyes.

Six weeks suddenly spooled out. I didn’t understand how I’d ever thought that forty-two days was a short time.

I rocked my weight against the edge of the balcony. I wished for a beer; I wished for a needle to push into my skin.

No, those weren’t me anymore. I was straight, clean, brandnew.

Baby had hired me to fail, but I wasn’t going to fail.

Isabel hadn’t even given me a chance.

I thought about how quickly I could be a wolf. How completely it would empty my mind. Just for a few minutes.

And unlike any of my other chemical salves, it left no marks and demanded nothing more from me. It wasn’t an addiction.

But I didn’t move.

Crossing my arms on the balcony, I laid my head on them, my chest slowly filling with black. My face was buried into the place where track marks had been before the wolf in me had erased them.

What was the point of being here, if not for her? What was the point of anything if I couldn’t even work out this one thing.

It was just dinner. It was just —

Isabel —

In the alley behind my apartment, I heard a car pull up and stop. A car door opened and closed. A trunk opened and closed.

The gate to the courtyard rattled.

I flicked my gaze up to an indistinct figure with a lightcolored hat struggling at the gate. He/she/it spotted me. A female voice, probably, called, “A little help, man?”

I didn’t move. I watched her/him/it work at the lock for another minute until the lockbox was persuaded to give up its key.

This had all seemed like such a fun game earlier when I’d been standing in Baby’s house. But now? Drop dead.

It felt like I’d never stopped arguing with Isabel, way back in Minnesota.

It was impossible how fast everything had gone to shit in my heart.