Shayla, the L.A.-area fan who had won (apparently, Isabel had asked fans to identify which album’s liner notes featured a photo of the back of my head), was supersonic with excitement by the time we got to her house.

So were the two hundred people already there. Virtual Cole had a pretty staggering reach.

The gathered fans had pretty much already taken over every street-side parking opportunity ever, so we had to chuck our stuff out into the driveway and then decide which of us was going to go find parking and walk back.

This felt familiar, too.

“Ohmygodohmygod,” said Shayla. “CanIhugyou?”

I allowed it. I could feel her quivering as she did. When she stepped back, I smiled at her, and a slow smile spread across her face, bigger and bigger.

Sometimes, a smile goes a long way.

This was one of those sometimes. I needed a smile, a lot, and she had a great one. Not in a sexy way, but in a way full of nonjudgmental enthusiasm.

My brain was shutting off, the complicated part, and the simpler part of my brain, the concert part, was kicking in. It’s hard to explain it. It’s not nerves. It is something else.

The crowd jostled behind me, buzzed and eager. It was feeding me, evening out the ridges in my spiky, cluttered thoughts. I’d forgotten about this, somehow, this part of gigging.

I’d forgotten its hectic erasure of emotions. Here there was no room for anything besides Cole St. Clair, singer, performer, consumed.

I was grateful for it. I didn’t want my thoughts. Not right now.

Isabel —

Jeremy appeared at my elbow, his long hair tucked behind his ears and a pair of blue-tinted sunglasses balanced low on his nose. He looked like John Lennon if John Lennon had been blond and born just outside Syracuse, New York. “Cole. What’s the way?”

“Music,” I said. It was all I was thinking about just then.

These people wanted to hear us play, and I wanted to play for them.

“That’s it?”

“Loud,” I said.

Jeremy scratched his vaguely beard-y face. His hair was light enough that it was hard to tell if he was actually growing facial hair or not. “Old school.”

I looked at the gathered crowd. “This is kind of old school.”

So we played music.

In a lot of ways, a block party takes a lot more work than a concert with a stage. At a big concert, you have a stage, you have lights, you have a way, and half the job of setting a mood is done for you. It’s a show before you ever step up to a microphone. But a block party — you’re just a bunch of kids in someone’s front lawn. There’s no difference between you and the audience except you hold a bass guitar or clutch a mic. Every bit of performance has to be won. Carved out of normalcy and chaos. You have to sing louder, jump higher, be crazier than anyone in the crowd.

This was the first lesson: Look like you are supposed to be there.

Fame follows the expectation of fame.

This was the second lesson: Never rush an entrance.

Jeremy took his time building us a tempo, stepping us up into a song, the bass leading into the music, not looking over its shoulder to make sure the others were coming. Leyla — damn her, I wanted Victor, I wanted Victor, I wanted Victor — came in then, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap — and I let it go and let it go and let it go.

The tension built and built and built. And then, as I did a little twist with my hand so they were paying attention, I hit a single note on my synth:

BOOM.

The crowd went wild. And when I dragged the mic closer and sang the first word into it — In the beginning, there was the dark and there was the buzz.

No, let me start over.

In the beginning, there was the suburbs and the days that looked the same stacked on each other’s backs. Then there was me, and the angels fell.

No, let me start over again.

In the beginning, there was me on a high school stage with Jeremy and Victor, and I felt like I’d never known what I’d been made for before that moment. It was not one listener or two or twenty or fifty. There was no magic number. It was this: Me.

Them. It was the drums dropping out for my keyboard to tumble up an ascending bridge. It was the heads tilted back. It was the tug and push and pull and jerk of the bass. It was whatever you plugged into the equation to equal an electrical current between us and the audience. Sometimes it took one thousand people. Sometimes it took two.

In West Adams on that summer afternoon, I crooned and screamed the lyrics at them, and they howled and screamed them back at me. Jeremy’s bass picked relentlessly up the scale.

Leyla, face sheened with sweat, thundered in the background.

We were the living, the reborn.

People kept coming. The noise of us and the noise of them kept bringing them in, closer, closer, more and more.

This is why I did it, this is why I keep doing it, this is why I couldn’t stop.

Suddenly, in the midst of this perfection, there was the scratch of a random guitar chord. Guitar? Guitar.

You have got to be kidding me.

Some pale young creature had erupted from the crowd with his guitar. He leaped up and down beside Leyla’s kit, grinding away on his instrument like the world was about to end. All enthusiasm, no malice.

At a real concert, we had security and stage dudes who took care of this. Our job as the band was merely to keep the show going as the disruption was removed.

Here there was only us.

I left Jeremy thrubbing away on the bass and Leyla holding down the beat. My mic still in one hand, I used the other to grab the guy’s arms to stop the guitaring. And then I gripped him to me and danced him forcibly to the crowd. I wrapped my arm around him to hold the mic to my mouth.

“Take him!” I shouted gladly to the crowd. “He is one of yours!”

I released him. Arms seized him like zombies. He was smiling blissfully up at the sky as they took him. I was face-to-face with the others now. Us and them, and the them was right there.

And I saw a face from the past.

It was impossible; it was Victor’s eyes, Victor’s eyebrows. My stomach was falling from a very great height.

It wasn’t Victor. It was his sister, Angie.

I hadn’t even begun to parse what this might mean when she hit me.

It wasn’t the greatest punch, but it landed pretty well — I felt my teeth cut into my lip. My mouth felt warm. Adrenaline hurried to attend to my needs. A wolf stretched and curled inside me.

Angie snatched the microphone from me, and then she hit me with it. That I felt. It hit my cheekbone solidly, and then, as one hand went up, instinct, she smashed it into the back of my head.