Chapter Thirty-One

· cole ·

I sat in the recording booth with the headphones, my legs resting on the music stand in front of the swivel chair, and listened to the track. I’d added my vocals to the chorus at the last moment.

I sounded good. The whole thing sounded good. Not just good, but good.

Though it had been hours and hours and I should have been exhausted, I felt like I’d just woken up. My heart had burst into frenzied life. Or my brain. Or my body.

Sometimes when I was done with a track, I had this moment where I knew it was going to take over the world. Was it about subjectivity? Knowing you’d just done something that would sound good played overhead at a roller-skating rink? Or was it a kind of telescoping sixth sense that only traveled through speaker cables?

I took out my phone. I called Sam, who didn’t pick up, and left a voicemail that was only the song. I called Grace and did the same.

I didn’t feel any more complete than I had before. I called Isabel, even though I knew she was in class. I didn’t expect her to pick up, but she did.

“I have just done something magnificent,” I told her. I wanted her there with me, in a raw, sudden, endless way that was like the song in my head. “Come bask in my glory.”

“I’m in class,” she said in a low voice. “Paraphrase it.”

I’d taken off my headphones, but the music kept playing through them. I could feel the bass pulsing a beat against my thigh. It felt like the end of the world. Or like the creation.

Something was exploding. I needed angels to attend me. It was not good for man to be alone in this state. “I just did.”

“Use your words.”

My words were I need you right now I need to kiss you I want to have you here I want to just have you but I struggled to translate.

“I’ve just recorded my first real track since I died and it is going to eat every dance floor in the country and it’s not even the best one I’ve written so far and someone is paying me to go into the studio and record the others and I can’t wait, I just can’t wait, I want to do it tonight, and I want you here because it is stupid to do it by myself.”

I didn’t know how many of those words I said out loud, or if those were even the ones I used. My brain was tripping over itself, all sudden adrenaline and feeling and music music music, and my mouth couldn’t keep up.

“Are you high?” Isabel asked suspiciously.

I laughed. I was high, but not the way she thought. “I did it.

I made a thing, Isabel!”

“Well done. I alr — dammit. I have to get off the phone.

Just remember” — she paused, and I thought I heard honking, but probably it was just voices at her class. I tried to tell myself that I was lucky that she had even picked up at all — “when a client is a different faith than you, it’s not an opportunity for you to evangelize, even if he’s on his deathbed.”

“Am I a CNA now?” I asked.

“Yes,” Isabel said. She hung up.

In the headphones on my lap, I heard the track loop back around to the beginning. I felt like I had put my foot on a gas pedal and had nowhere to go. Up up up.

Magdalene threw open the door. She grinned wildly. “Now,”

she said, “we celebrate.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

· isabel ·

It was taking forever to get to Cole. First it was an accident, and then a huge event of some kind in the city, and then rush hour, and then another accident. The cars inched and stuttered along the freeway. My forty-five-minute drive turned into an hour and a half turned into two hours. The sky pinked and then blazed and then blackened.

My mood went from bad to worse to the worst.

I told myself it would be worth it for the look on his face when I appeared in the studio, assuming he was even still at the studio when I got there.

I turned up my radio as loud as I could stand, trying to drown out the continuous loop of the scene with my parents in the kitchen. All the words were gone, leaving just their gestures behind. Like a television show with the sound turned down.

The name of the episode: “The Culpepers Get a Divorce.”

I didn’t know why I cared. My father hadn’t even been living with us. I was about to go off to college. They hated each other, and this is what grown-ups who hated each other did. It changed nothing, except for making it all official.

I couldn’t convince myself not to give a damn, though.

I focused on navigating to Magdalene’s studio instead. It hadn’t been a hard thing to find the address on the Internet, but I wasn’t sure what to expect. It looked like an old warehouse in the photos. An old warehouse in the middle of nowhere.

When I got there, it looked like a dance club.

The parking lot was full of cars. Dozens upon dozens of them, packed in, parked sideways, parking one another in.

People had spilled into the parking lot, laughing and drinking.

A party.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

I wasn’t really in the headspace for a party.

For a brief, selfish second, I thought about turning around and going home. Cole couldn’t be disappointed, because he hadn’t known I was coming.

But then I thought about what was waiting for me at home.

I should’ve just gone to class.

I closed my eyes, then opened them and checked my makeup in the rearview mirror. I tried to imagine what I’d find on the other side of those doors. A big party full of people having a great time, and then Cole feeling sorry for himself in a recording booth, sad and alone in a crowd. Cole always liked to see himself as alone, no matter how much the circumstances disputed it.

The only thing that made me move at all was the idea of how happy he’d be to see me. I got out of the car.

Inside, the massive warehouse seethed. Music pounded overhead. The floor was alcohol-slicked sticky. There were a million people dancing. A lot of girls. Everything smelled like beer. Over everything was a pair of giant red lips.

Then I found him.

Cole St. Clair was sitting on a sofa being carried by four other guys, and a girl was sitting on the other side of the couch, and she was famous and she was beautiful and she had her lusciously golden arm around his neck. The cameras gazed adoringly.

My stomach felt it first. I couldn’t move.