I wanted Isabel, but she was such an impossible thing to want.

Star touched my hair, very gingerly. “Maybe he should go to the hospital, Germ.”

I closed my eyes. I would have rather died on this counter.

“He needs to be someplace quiet,” Jeremy said. “We’ve had a bad day.”

They moved away from me, into the other room, and I heard their murmured voices. In my head, their voices were like this house, settled and modest and familiar. I heard them say he a lot, and knew they were talking about me, but I didn’t care.

People were always talking about me.

“I need a toilet,” I told Jeremy, and they both gestured around a corner.

In the bathroom I locked the door and turned on the light and the fan, and I leaned on the stand sink and rocked back and forth. There was no mirror, and so I kept seeing Angie’s face and Victor’s face and remembering every conversation Victor and I had ever conducted about drugs or wolves or suicide. I got a needle from one of my pants pockets and stripped and curled up beneath the sink and stabbed the point under my skin.

I was gone for five minutes. It wasn’t long enough to do anything but tamp down the worst of the jitters and maybe heal the bruise on my head a little. I hadn’t broken anything and the door was still locked and Jeremy wasn’t pounding on the other side of it so I couldn’t have been loud.

I got dressed and flushed the toilet as if I’d used it and then washed my hands.

I felt better. Or different. I’d been temporarily reset.

Outside, Jeremy stood pensively in the kitchen. He sighed when I walked in and then he said, “She’s going to get some Neosporin and some Korean barbecue. You still aren’t a vegetarian, right? Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

He gave me a glass of water, a clean dish towel with a bag of frozen edamame beans in it to hold to my head, and we wandered through his house, looking at his lack of furniture and material goods and plethora of bamboo mats and potted plants.

Probably it would have been insufferable if he hadn’t also had a very comfortable-looking sofa and an orange bust of Beethoven and all of the woodsided old speakers he’d brought to the very first episode.

“I like this place,” I told him, because the way he took his shoes off and walked around barefoot and proud through the house made me think he’d like to hear me say it.

“I do, too,” he said.

“You’re dating Star,” I said.

“I am.”

“She got hot. How long’s that been going on?”

“Two years.”

“Wow.”

“You were gone a long time, Cole.”

I abandoned the bag of beans in the kitchen sink and we headed back outside and downstairs to wait for Star. As we stood by the lattice overgrown with red roses, he explained how he’d bought this house with his last NARKOTIKA advance, and now he gave the money to Star to pay bills and make sure the taxes were sorted out and he worked band gigs when she said they needed more to keep things on the level.

“She takes all your money?” I asked. A hummingbird zoomed by my head.

He looked at me. “I give it to her.”

Basically, what was happening was this: I had gone away for almost two years, and when I came back, Jeremy had grown up and gotten a house and gotten happy — no, he’d always been happy, now he was just happy and with someone — and I had instead come back and become myself as I always was.

My face throbbed, or my heart did. I was so tired of being alone, but I was always alone, even with people around me. And I was so tired of being surrounded, but I was always surrounded, even when I was by myself. There was so much talk about how everyone wanted to be goddamned special. I was so tired of being the only one of my kind.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I said.

Jeremy didn’t say what? He just rubbed the edge of the dusty, busted Mustang where it poked out into the evening sun.

The hummingbird I’d seen earlier zoomed by again. It paused by the roses, but they weren’t what it was looking for.

“I don’t think I can go back out on the road. I don’t think I can take it.”

He didn’t answer right away. He climbed onto the hood of the old Mustang and sat on it crosslegged. The bottoms of his bare feet were very dirty and he wore a hemp anklet, which he plucked at. “Are we talking about tour, really?”

“What else would I be talking about?”

He said, “Is it really going on the road you can’t do? Or is it being you?”

I looked at the grass at the edge of the tiny, sun-bitten yard.

Tire prints marked the gravel and dirt. Star had taken the pickup with my phone in it. Possibly not taken. Possibly Jeremy had given her the keys.

“Cole, I think we have to talk about this.”

“You don’t want to know, Jeremy. You really don’t.”

“I think I already do, though.”

I stared off down the dusky street. Way, way down the street, a little boy was tooling around on a faded blue bicycle.

What a safe place this neighborhood seemed like. It was somehow more like California than the rest of L.A. More like the land itself. Like the dry stucco and faded wood houses and the dust-covered cars had slowly been pushed up from the dry landscape by generations of heaving quakes. It wasn’t that I liked it better than the rest of Los Angeles. It was just that it seemed like it required less work to keep it looking like this.

It seemed like a place that wouldn’t notice you as much if you had a day off or got old. It seemed like a place where it might get dark at night.

Jeremy said, “Do you know what makes it bad? It’s that you do it alone. It’s that you lock yourself in a bathroom. It’s not the thing itself. It’s that you make it secret. It’s that you only do it when you’re upset.”

I didn’t move. I just kept staring at the little boy making uneven circles at the end of his short driveway. I felt as if the world was being crumpled like paper around me. Even if I could figure out how to open the sheet back up again, it would always be wrinkled.

“There are other ways to be unhappy, Cole. There are better ways to cope than just pulling the plug on your brain.”

My voice was rougher than I expected it to be. “I’ve been trying.”

“No, you’ve been happy. You haven’t had to try until now.”