Clair smile.

She grinned abruptly, like she couldn’t help it. “Okay,” she said, in a totally different voice than before. “Okay, young man.

You’re on.”

As she headed back to the counter, I turned back to my parents.

And here was the strange thing. I wasn’t sure if the server had been enchanted, or if Grace’s advice had worked a spell, or if it was just that somehow I had finally drawn the logical line between Leon, the server, my parents, and everyone else in the world.

Because in just the amount of time it had taken to place my order, my parents had transformed. Suddenly, instead of my parents, I just saw two people in their late fifties, tourists in this glittering, strange place, tired from sleeping in an unfamiliar hotel room, eager to get back to routine. Their eyes were the same brand of weary as the server’s. Life had not gone as planned, but they muddled through.

There was nothing terrible about them. They had no particular power over me. No more than anyone else.

It had never been them. It had always been me.

This realization was like a word I had to be taught every time I heard it. The definition never seemed to sink in.

They were just ordinary people.

I said, “How was the drive here?”

It was like they had been waiting all week for me to ask them.

The story poured out of them. It took a long time, and it was really boring, and it didn’t include any of the details I would have included, and did include a lot of the details I wouldn’t have. And in the middle of it, the server brought us all passion fruit iced tea, and she gave my mother some fancy crepes, and she gave my father an omelet with avocados, and she gave me a waffle with a Cole St. Clair smile drawn on it with whipped cream.

None of it was life changing; we didn’t talk about a single important thing. But none of it was terrible, either, unless boring counted. We had nothing in common, and at the end of this meal, we’d go our separate ways — me one way, my parents another, the server a third.

It used to matter so much. It used to seem like such a struggle to not turn into my father. But now, sitting here, it seemed impossible that that could’ve ever happened. I had wasted so much time on this. I kept finding out that the monster I’d been fighting was only me.

When we were done eating, I paid cash at the counter.

The server asked, “How was the food?”

“It was an amazing thing,” I said. “You chose excellently.

Tomorrow you should wield that pad with the confidence of a mental giant.”

She smiled behind her hand at me. I wanted to thank her for the gloomy realization that in the end, I was my worst enemy, but I couldn’t think of a good way to say it. So I just gave her another Cole St. Clair smile and returned to the table.

“This was nice,” my mother said. “This was a cute find.”

They weren’t going to ask if I’d just tried to kill myself.

They weren’t going to ask about Victor. They weren’t going to ask about anything unpleasant. But I didn’t know why I was surprised. They never had before.

My father had folded his napkin into twelve geometric shapes. “We had better call a cab if we want to make it to the airport in enough time. Do you know, Cole, if cabs come here?”

“Oh,” I said, taking out the keys to the Mustang, “I can take you. I seem to have a sports car.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

· isabel ·

cole: i survived my parents it’s your turn to text me me:

cole: here’s my number in case you forgot it me:

cole: please

me:

cole: isabel please

me:

cole:

Chapter Forty

· cole ·

After I failed to do anything more interesting than putting on pants for several days in a row, Baby called me. “Time’s up, Cole. What are you doing today?”

I was too devoid of enthusiasm to be creative. I flipped open the little notebook to her original list. “Block party.”

“Great.”

Yes. Great. Block party. Fine. I could throw that together as soon as I cleaned up some of the shit I’d broken in the bathroom when I shifted several nights before. I would have to get the word out via Virtual Cole. I had been desperately trying to avoid texting Isabel until she texted me, but I couldn’t wait any longer.

Can you arrange for a colebot to win a block party today I rewrote the text ten times before I sent it. It wasn’t my strongest work, but it had to sound neither bitter nor needy. Any punctuation I added pushed it toward one or the other, so in the end I went with the good old absence of grammar to indicate indifference.

Isabel immediately texted back: Give me 30 minutes.

Her punctuation implied that I shouldn’t think this meant we weren’t fighting. Twenty-nine minutes later she texted me the winner’s name and address.

Oh, young love.

Seven minutes after that, I was done cleaning the bathroom, and nine minutes after that, T had arrived with the cameras, and fifteen minutes after that, Jeremy had arrived with his pickup truck.

When you’re in a band, you spend the first four hundred thousand years of your career dragging around your own crap.

Your speakers, speaker stands, mixing head, mics, pickups, power cables, mic cables, speaker cables, instruments, the everything.

You forget something, you’re screwed. You break something, you’re screwed. You don’t have a long enough extension cord? Screwed.

Once you hit it big, though —

You’re packing your shit into a late-model Mustang and a pickup truck and hoping you didn’t forget anything.

I was living the dream, for sure.

“I’d carry something,” T told me apologetically, his camera on his shoulder, “but I’ve got the, you know.”

“Recording device,” I replied, putting my synthesizer in Leyla’s lap. She didn’t complain, because she was fine with everything that came through the threads of fate and whatnot.

This is what I thought: Fate was a lousy lay, and I was over her. I told T, “Yeah. It’s cool. Get this side. This side. It’s my famous side.”

Then Jeremy and I drove in tandem to West Adams.

All of the houses in this neighborhood were older, the same age as the ones in my neighborhood back in Phoenix, NY. But the West Adams houses felt exotic because they were pink and lime green, and stucco and tile-roofed, and anchored by filigree metal railings. I wondered how I would have been different if I’d grown up in one of these instead.