Skill? Skill isn’t what hurts people. A lack of mercy is.

I deserved to be hit, too. I deserved everything she was giving me.

I killed him, I killed him, I killed him

“You asshole!” Angie shouted at me, and she wasn’t wrong, even taking Victor out of the equation. She punched me again with the microphone.

T came in close, but not to help: to film.

Angie hurled her entire body at me. She wasn’t a very large person, but justice and physics were on her side. We careened back through Leyla’s kit, both of us falling. Above me was blue sky and the edge of Shayla’s roof and at least two cameras and now her face blocking everything — She still smelled like the same shampoo she’d used when I’d dated her, back when Victor was alive, and I had never hated myself as I did in that moment, not in the darkest and most disgusting holes I had lowered myself into on any of my tours.

“Angie,” Jeremy said, as urgent as I’d ever heard him. “Angie, come on.”

My back stung something fierce, like I’d been sliced in two with a cymbal. I tasted blood. She needed to hit me harder, because I could still feel everything.

I couldn’t stop seeing Victor’s face mirrored in Angie’s.

What I’d done to both of them would never go away.

“Angie,” Jeremy said again, out of my view. “Think about what you’re doing. This is TV. This is your record, forever. This isn’t the way.”

Leyla loomed over me. She gripped my hand and pulled me up. She didn’t say: This is the future growing the seeds you sowed in the past. She asked, “Are you okay, man?”

I stood there in the middle of Shayla’s flat lawn, and suddenly there was no stage. It was just a bunch of drunk people standing in front of an old house. It was an ex-girlfriend looking defeated, a bloody microphone hanging in one of her hands. I’d scuffed the hell out of my patch of grass by jumping up and down while I sang. I looked at it, and at Angie, and then at Shayla. My face still felt warm, and I suspected from both that and the way she was looking at me that I was bleeding a lot. I’d stopped feeling anything, though.

“Sorry I wrecked your lawn,” I said. “Tell the next band to put down a rug or some other shit.”

She clutched her hands together. “Should we call the cops? 911?”

Angie just stared at me. The microphone hung in her hand.

She said, “You ruined him.”

Then she dropped the mic and walked into the crowd.

It seemed obvious that this represented the end of the set, but the thought of taking all this stuff down and finding a way to put it back in the Mustang suddenly seemed like a huge amount of trouble. Finding the Mustang, period, seemed like an enormous quest. There is a wave that leads you to a gig, but after it’s crashed you onto the shore of the show, there’s no similar wave that takes you away, especially after your knees are buckling and you can feel every one of your teeth loose in your head. After you can see nothing but your dead drummer and every girl you ever slept with and hated yourself for in the morning.

Shayla was still going on about the cops, but I didn’t know what good they would do unless they were going to retrieve the car. I could hear my heartbeat in my forehead or maybe my temple.

Jeremy’s voice went on, smooth and easy, echoed by Leyla.

I should’ve thought of a way to wrap up this episode neatly, but I guessed they would probably edit that punch into something glorious.

T’s camera eyed me. I told it, “That’s a wrap.”

It was the best I could do. Hills and valleys. My mind curled up in the shadow of mountains I’d climbed and then plummeted from.

Jeremy took my arm. “Cole,” he said, “come on, man.” He looked at T. “You’ve got enough on there. Turn it off.”

Chapter Forty-One

· cole ·

Jeremy drove his old pickup truck while I sat in the passenger’s seat, leaning my head against the door. We didn’t speak. I was hoarse anyway.

He lived in a house out in the Hollywood Hills. Even though it was not far geographically from the city, it seemed like a different state. The narrow streets snaked up the steep hills, crowded with mailboxes, yucca plants, orange trees, dusty pickup trucks, and BMWs. The houses were mismatched shabby contemporaries from the twenties, one-hundred-year-old denizens of an older Los Angeles.

The streets kept getting narrower and steeper, the turns becoming more and more improbable, until finally we came to the place Jeremy shared with his girlfriend. The light green house was low-slung and lattice-covered. A eucalyptus tree grew beside it, appearing at one with the house, which seemed appropriate for Jeremy. A dusty and very busted Mustang from several decades before mine was parked half-in, half-out of a metal carport.

Jeremy parked on the street. “I think you should leave your work phone in here.”

I stared at him, not understanding. Then I said, “Isabel has it.”

Jeremy frowned. Mentally, he catalogued my online presence over the past several weeks.

“Yes,” he said simply. He pulled up the parking brake and put it in gear. “Well, leave anything else having to do with the show in the car, too.”

We climbed crooked concrete stairs, me slower than him.

Inside, the house was everything I would have expected from Jeremy: modest, airy, and very spare. He led me into a galley kitchen full of ugly, pristine ’70s appliances, and I leaned on the doorjamb and felt sorry for myself while he rummaged in drawers for a dish towel.

“Hold still,” he said. I rested my cheek on the counter while he dabbed at the side of my face. The towel came up covered with dirt and grime.

“Jesus Christ! Jeremy! Cole? St. Clair?”

This was how I found out that Jeremy’s girlfriend was the ukulele player for a band that had opened for us two years before. She stood in the doorway to the kitchen in a bra and shorts. Probably some girls would’ve been bothered by suddenly discovering guests while in this condition, but everything about her posture indicated she was not one of them. The last time I had seen her we had been in Portland doing a benefit concert for orphans.

“Hi, Star,” I mumbled.

Star looked at Jeremy. “Did you do that to him?”

Jeremy probed my forehead with his fingers. “Do you know if we have a first-aid kit?”

Star joined him and bent over me. She smelled like patchouli, sweet and dreamy. I could see her bare legs and Jeremy’s bare legs. The way they stood together was so comfortable, so unaffected, that I suddenly felt incredibly shitty about all of my life choices. I wanted — I wanted — I must’ve hit my head harder than I thought.