was way nicer, in my opinion.

But the shabby was how you knew Erik’s was an institution.

If you survived in this city without being drop-dead gorgeous, it meant you were really something. While this ordinary shop continued on with age and cunning, the brandnew, beautifully stark storefronts next door kept coming up for lease as their pretty new tenants got eaten by Los Angeles.

“Sofia,” I snapped, pulling her out of the way of a rogue Escalade. “Watch where you’re going.”

Sofia’s gaze fluttered to me, but she was still mostly watching the rest of the people on the Strip. “Did you see that woman over there? I think it was Christina —”

“Probably,” I interrupted. “Movie stars. That’s the view here.

Unless you’re one of them, I wouldn’t recommend walking out in front of traffic. It won’t stop.”

Sofia kept goggling, so I kept her arm and walked her, seeing-eye-dog-style, from our parking spot across the road to Erik’s. Once inside the dim store, I released her into the wild.

As she walked slowly past the racks, I pulled out Virtual Cole and looked to see how the world was reacting to the acoustic “Spacebar.”

Well. They were reacting well.

In fact, they thrashed and squealed and hated and shouted and clapped delightedly. The music blogs disseminated it.

Sound bites of the song provided soundtracks for animated GIFs of long-ago Cole throwing stuff out of a hotel room window.

Words flashed at the bottom: COLE ST. CLAIR IS BACK.

The four chambers of my heart were all vacant.

I updated Virtual Cole, replying and re-disseminating where necessary, but my mind was wandering back to Minnesota.

Cole dragged himself down the hallway of a house I couldn’t forget. He was a boy and a wolf and then a boy again. He begged me to help him to die. To die or to stay a wolf.

My mind moved down the hall, past Cole, into another memory in that house. My brother Jack, dying in the bedroom at the end of the hall. Crumpled on the bed, burning up, determined to stay human, or to die trying. Everything smelled like wolf and death. Maybe there wasn’t a difference between the two.

COLE ST. CLAIR IS BACK. Was the wolf back, too?

I realized I’d been trailing around after Sofia, eyes on my phone, for quite a while. I looked up to see that she was staring at a pair of strappy sandals that she would never wear. She stared at them for so long that I realized that she wasn’t actually looking at them.

“Sofia,” I said. “Are you waiting for them to speak?”

She rubbed her own cheek and blinked her dark lashes at me with an apologetic smile. “I’m just distracted. Dad’s coming for a visit!”

Immediately, I thought about the conversation in the kitchen with my parents. I couldn’t remember any of it as well as I remembered my father’s voice going strange when he told me we needed to talk. I felt like smashing some shoes off the shelves. People who say throwing shit when you’re angry doesn’t help have never thrown shit while they were angry.

“What a bucket of kittens that will be,” I said.

Sofia began to nod before she realized I was being sarcastic.

Then, all earnest, she said, “Mom said she might go out with us.”

Her face shone.

I couldn’t take the hope in her expression. “Oh, please! They aren’t getting back together, Sofia!”

My cousin looked like I’d smacked her. Her cheeks turned as flushed as if I had. “I didn’t say they were!”

“But your face said it. That’s not how the real world works.”

Predictably, her eyes shone with the threat of tears. “It’s not about that. We’re just going to spend the day together.”

“Really? Not even a little tiny bit of you thinks they will get back together?”

Sofia shook her head fiercely. She swiped the back of her hand across her eyes. They still looked fine, but she had a line of black mascara on her hand. She insisted, “I just want to spend time with him again. That’s all I care about.”

“Well, great,” I said. “I’m sure it won’t be awkward at all.”

She looked at her feet. I hated that she never fought back. I wouldn’t feel like such a jerk if she bothered to hit back. But she just smeared a hand over her skirt, smoothing it, and then over her hair, and then placed one hand in the other, like she was comforting it and sending it to sleep.

“I’m not in a good mood,” I told her.

“That’s okay.” She said it to her shoes.

“It’s not okay,” I said. “Tell me to shut up.”

A tear dripped onto Sofia’s shoe. “I don’t want to. You always say the truth, anyway.”

She didn’t mention the other half of the coin, though: that sometimes the truth wasn’t the most useful thing to add to a conversation. I knew now, minutes after I’d started the conversation, that the proper way to reply to “Dad’s coming for a visit!”

would have been, “Cool! Where are you going?”

“Right,” I said, “Yeah. Are you going to buy shoes?”

“I don’t need shoes.”

I bit my tongue before I asked her why she’d even come.

She’d come because I’d asked her. “Let’s just go before traffic gets bad. I have to get to Long Beach.”

It was hard to remember my mood of this morning. It was harder still to imagine any sort of birthday surprise going well enough to make up for the dismal expression on Sofia’s face.

The one I’d put there.

As I pushed out of the door, I almost ran into Christina.

After she swore at me and said, “Excuse you,” I realized it wasn’t actually Christina, just one of the dozens of interchangeable famous young women who frequented this place, women who looked gorgeous and slender on screen and were all knobbed elbows and big feet and huge sunglasses in person.

“Oh, please,” I told her, and clicked out onto the relentlessly sunny sidewalk.

Sofia, behind me, couldn’t look the fake Christina in the eye. Sofia’s hand was on her waist. I could tell she felt lumpy, because fake Christina was skim and Sofia was 2%. I could tell she felt sad, because her cousin was a bitch. I could tell that, despite it all, she was still a little excited about her father coming to visit.

I hated this place.