I didn’t answer. There was no point arguing. He knew me as well as I knew myself. He’d played bass for my thoughts for three albums.

“Victor’s dead,” I said.

“I know. I guessed.”

“It’s my fault. The whole thing. I got him into it.”

“Victor got himself into it,” Jeremy said. “We were all kids from New York. I didn’t follow you down any rabbit holes.

Victor would’ve gone without you.”

I didn’t believe that. I was very persuasive.

“How do you do it?” I asked.

“I just live, Cole. I don’t go away in my head. I deal with the crap as it happens, and then it’s gone. When you don’t think about it, it lives forever.”

I closed my eyes. I could still hear the little boy riding his bicycle down the street. It made me think about the boy on the roof, the one who had crashed his plane because it wasn’t about the landing, it was about the flying.

“I always thought you’d be the one who died,” Jeremy said.

“I kept thinking one day I’d get the call while I was sleeping. Or I’d come to get you in your room before the show and I’d be too late. Or I —”

He stopped, and when I turned to look at him, still crosslegged on the hood of the Mustang, his eyes were shiny. He blinked, and two tears shot down his face, fast and shiny as mercury.

It was possibly the worst and best that I’d felt in my life. I didn’t know what to say. Sorry? I hadn’t meant to hurt anybody else?

“Nobody told me it would be this hard,” I said.

“Why is it always harder for you?”

I shook my head. I didn’t even know if it really was harder for me, if I was just a flawed model. I wiped my nose with my arm and pointed to the Mustang beneath Jeremy.

“That’s a thing,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jeremy said, his voice much different. “Yeah, it conveyed with the house. It came with a trash compactor, too, but Star broke it.”

We both sighed.

“There she is,” said Jeremy as his pickup truck appeared at the bottom of the hill. It stopped beside the little boy, and the kid came over to talk to Star through the driver’s window. I saw her long brown arm hanging out of the side of the truck, bracelets hanging around her wristbone, and I saw her hair hanging in hanks on either side of her face, and the kid on his busted bike keeled over talking to her with his hair all scruffed up.

And suddenly I was just eaten by nostalgia, for a past that wasn’t mine.

I just wanted to be happy. I just wanted to make something.

“You have to take it off the table,” Jeremy said, finally. “It’s always going to be an option, otherwise. You’re going to have to give it up and mean it, or it’ll always be your solution when things go bad.”

The pickup truck pulled up beside us. Star put it in park and leaned across to gaze at me through the open passenger window. She grinned easily at me.

“Did you choose life while I was gone?”

I said, “Sure.”

Jeremy asked, “Did you mean it?”

It hurt, but sort of in a good way, to look him in the face. “Yes.”

Chapter Forty-Two

· isabel ·

That night, I arrived at Sierra’s house in the canyons with my shivered-ice eyes and my slaughter lips.

Party time.

I was in a dress that was white vinyl or leather — I couldn’t tell the difference; could anyone else? If they bothered to analyze it, it meant I was wearing it wrong, anyway. I was also wearing white sandals with enormous white heels. The only color to my wardrobe was my horror lips. No one could say I hadn’t warned them.

I used to wonder what partying was really like. When I was eleven or twelve. Everyone in movies seemed so eager to go party. All the television shows were girls wondering if they were going to be invited to this or that party, talking like there were different levels and qualities of party. I couldn’t imagine what was luring them to these places, but the desperation to get there promised that it was something good.

Now I’d been to more than my fair share of parties. And it turned out that the TV parties had not been lies. They boasted most of the features of real parties: booze, making out, music that sounded better on your own speakers. Maybe some drugs or drinking games or pool or witty banter. Possibly witty banter should have been lumped in with drinking games or with making out.

Maybe I was always too sober at these things.

The house was located in the Hollywood Hills, in a highaltitude fancy neighborhood that overlooked the lights of other, slightly less fancy neighborhoods. It was an enormous white, gated compound, a sort of mesa of smoothed concrete and windows.

Tastefully hidden floodlights guided me out of the taxi to the courtyard. Because it was Sierra’s house and Sierra’s party, the music was dreamy shoegaze. It sounded like a cross between a spilled water glass and a slow-motion electronic lynching. The place was already full of people.

God, I hated them all.

I stalked in. The irregular beat of the music and the mass of people made it feel like the ground was moving. Heads might have turned. I couldn’t tell. Being me meant that I couldn’t do more than a dismissive sweep of my eyes over any given person.

Part of the problem with parties was that I couldn’t even tell what the goal was, so I never knew when I was done. I searched for Sierra. At least if she saw me, I got credit for coming.

I walked by the big pool. It was full of splashing nymphs and was lit with color-changing lights. Pink, purple, green. A boy, half-in, half-out of the pool, grabbed my ankle with his wet hand.

“Come in,” he said.

I looked down at him. He wore glittery eyeliner. I wondered what brand of eyeliner it was that it didn’t wash off in the pool water. His wet hand on my ankle reminded me of Cole doing something very similar months and months before.

I said, very coolly, “I don’t like to get wet.”

I expected the boy to protest, but he just looked abashed and then slid under the water along with any respect I might have had for him.

In the middle of the pool, a girl floated on her back in slow, lazy circles while a guy paddled lazily beside her and kissed her hand. I wondered if there was ever a world where I might have turned out like them. I wondered if that was the person I might have been if we had never moved from California; if my brother had never died; if we had not moved away from Cole; if my parents had never gotten separated.