If I repeated all of these things like a mantra, they would not only be true, they would start to make sense, or at least feel true, or feel like they made sense.

Hours thinned to minutes. The morning with Cole had been in color, and everything else was in black and white.

I sold a tank top.

My mother called. “Isabel? Are you wearing the white pants?”

The other day, someone had showed me a collection of portraits done by a photographer interested in familial similarities.

Each face was actually two stitched together: a father on one side, for instance, a son on the other. If one had been done of me and my mother, nothing about the altered photograph would have struck viewers as unusual. We were the same height and weight, and we both had blond hair and blue eyes and one eyebrow that hated you. It was quite possible for us to share each other’s clothing, size wise, although it rarely happened. I wasn’t interested in smart skirts, and my mother wasn’t interested in a bare midriff.

But the white pants we shared. They were high-waisted, pencil-legged, Hollywood-chic perfection. I wore them with cropped leopard-print tops that showed a tantalizing half-inch of skin. My mother wore them with a slinky black blouse that was, in my opinion, more suggestive than my version.

“Who are you trying to impress?” I asked.

“Don’t be rude,” my mother replied. “Is that a yes or a no?”

“I took them to the cleaners. There was something on them.

It was disgusting. I don’t want to think about it.”

My mother clucked. “It was coffee. I’m going to the cleaners now. I was going to take them. When are you home tonight?”

“Eight, if there’s no traffic. But I’m going right back out again with Sofia. When do you go to work?”

“Eight, if there’s no traffic.” My mother was on a series of night shifts at the moment. Part of it was because she was the new doctor in an old hospital and the night shift was given to the grunts, but part of it was because working the night shift meant she could sleep through the real world the next day. It saved on wine costs.

“Oh, well, see you tomorrow.” I wasn’t particularly crushed by this, nor was my mother. My graduation and initiation into the age of majority merely granted societal approval to our relationship.

It wasn’t that my mother was a hands-off parent. It was that she’d been so hands-on for so long that my psyche maintained the imprint of her palm even when she removed her hand from me.

The day dragged. Cole didn’t call. I didn’t call him. What did I want? I didn’t know.

If you are considering getting serious with a rock star but he is filming a reality show that will probably result in death or hospitalization for one or both of you, what do you do?

a) laugh and close the door

b) ask him gently to stop

c) close the door and give him some privacy d) explain the dangers of masturbation

e) report him to the head nurse

At the end of the day, Sierra’s husband, Mark, came in. He didn’t really serve a purpose, but he liked to come in and mess over the receipts like it was something. I wasn’t exactly sure what he actually did for a living. Something male-modelish. He had the sort of face that sold sunglasses.

“Hey, gorgeous,” he greeted me. It sounded funnier when he said gorgeous than when Sierra said it. Sierra used lush and beautiful and dreamy and lovely like other people used indefinite articles. I suspected Mark really did mean I was gorgeous, and I suspected he found all of Sierra’s monsters gorgeous. But why shouldn’t he? We were all hired to look a certain way, which was to say, we were all hired to look like Sierra, and he obviously found her attractive.

I didn’t reply, but I raised an eyebrow, which was the same thing, for me.

“What are you doing?”

“Studying.”

“What?”

I almost said masturbation, because it would be funny, but after Mark had just said gorgeous, it seemed like that would be flirting.

“How to save people from themselves.”

Mark moved some papers around. He was doing absolutely nothing except messing up a system one of the monsters had devised. “They tell you about that on the Internet?”

Everyone in the world knew that everything in the world was on the Internet. I scraped listlessly at the bottom of my consciousness for any part of me that might care enough to think of an entertaining way to report this to Mark. I found nothing.

My phone buzzed. It was Sofia.

“Sofia, what?” I kept meaning to start answering the phone with Culpeper, because I liked the masculine idea of stripping my first name. And because it sounded less mean than What?

Sofia sounded abashed. “I’m sorry to interrupt you. It’s just —”

Her apologizing for something that was clearly not even her fault irritated me even more. “Oh, God, Sofia. It’s fine. I was just being a bitch. What?”

“I was just calling because I wanted to tell you that it’s up.

The first episode, I mean, of Cole’s show.”

Already?

“You probably already know. I’m sorry. I —”

“Sofia. Stop saying sorry. What’s the URL? Oh, right. With threes instead of es. Don’t forget about tonight. Wear something red.”

After I hung up, I navigated to the website on my phone.

The screen was tiny and the speaker shitty, but it would have to do. My stomach panged with a little nervous, wretched twist.

Those crafty damns found ways to give themselves when I was least expecting them.

The episode had already begun; Cole was auditioning bass players on the beach. He had surrounded himself with dozens of speakers of all sizes. Every time a would-be player approached, Cole produced a communal bass guitar, shouted an announcement to the onlookers, and then made a little ta-da hand gesture.

The gesture must’ve been some holdover from NARKOTIKA, because every time he did it, the gathered idiot fangirls made supersonic noises.

This annoyed me. It was like they had some intimate knowledge of him that I didn’t. Didn’t they know that had nothing to do with who he really was? They thought they knew him.

Nobody knew him.

The sound of each audition spiraled out over the beach from the barracks of speakers. Leaning on the ancient, woodsided speakers closest to Cole was a thin, rangy guy with shoulder-length blond hair and aviator sunglasses. He was so incredibly scruffy that he had to be either a hippie or famous.