Sinner Read online

  F LIVE: Are you trying to get Leon to abandon a car on the interstate?

  COLE ST. CLAIR: I’m trying to save his life before it’s too late. Come with me, Leon. We shall walk away from this car, you and I. We shall find fro-yo and make the world better.

  Leon held up a helpless hand. Only moments before it had been a jazz hand. How he was letting me down.

  LEON: I can’t. You shouldn’t. Traffic is bad now, but in a few minutes, it’ll be over. Just wait —

  I clapped my hand on his shoulder.

  COLE ST. CLAIR: Okay, I’m out. Thanks for having me on the show, Martin.

  F LIVE: Is Leon coming with you?

  COLE ST. CLAIR: It doesn’t look that way. Next time, though. Leon, enjoy the track. The account’s all settled, right? Good.

  F LIVE: Cole St. Clair, former frontman of NARKOTIKA. A pleasure, as always.

  COLE ST. CLAIR: Now, that I’ve heard before.

  F LIVE: The world’s glad to have you back, Cole.

  COLE ST. CLAIR: The world says that now. Okay. Gotta go.

  Hanging up, I opened the door. The car behind us let out the softest of honks as I climbed out. The heat — oh, the heat. It was an emotion. It owned me. The air smelled of forty million cars and forty million flowers. I felt a spasm of pure adrenaline, memory of everything I’d ever done in California and anticipation of everything that could be done.

  Leon was staring out plaintively, so I leaned in swiftly. “It’s never too late to change,” I told him.

  “I can’t change,” he replied. It crushed him.

  I said, “Stab it and steer, Leon.”

  I slung my backpack over my shoulder, walked in front of an idling black Mercedes, and headed toward the closest exit.

  Someone shouted, “NARKOTIKA forever!”

  I blew him a kiss and then I jumped over the concrete barrier. When I landed, I was in California.

  There was always room for more monsters in L.A.

  “Isabel, beautiful. Time to work,” said Sierra.

  I had been working, watering Sierra’s ridiculous plants. .blush., the tiny, concrete-floored outlet for Sierra (no.last.name’s) clothing line, always contained more plants than clothing. Sierra loved the look of the ferns and palms and orchids, but she never wanted to put in the effort to make them flourish. Her talent rested more with the torture of dead things and inanimate objects. Things that you could stick a needle in without it getting angry. Things you could hang on a rack without violating human rights.

  “I am working,” I said, stabbing a fertilizer spike into potting soil. “I’m keeping your plants alive.”

  Sierra inserted two dried palm fronds into her updo, which was several shades closer to white than my blond hair. The addition worked for her; most things worked for someone who looked like her. She was a former supermodel. Former meaning last year. That’s seven years in dog years or L.A. time.

  “Plants live on sunshine, gorgeous.”

  “Sierra,” I said, “did your parents ever explain photosynthesis to you? It’s like this: When a plant and the sun love each other very much —”

  “Christina is on her way,” Sierra interrupted. “Please, Isabel. Endless smooches. Thanks.”

  Ah, Christina. The Christina. She was a very good spender when she was in the mood, and she liked to be waited on. Well, really she liked to know that she could be waited on if she wanted it. She did not want to be hovered over. She did not want to be patronized. She didn’t want someone to hold a pair of leggings for her. She didn’t want to be asked if she wanted to see it in champagne. She wanted a selection of attendants to be present so she could make a point of not asking them for anything.

  So Sierra sent us all out to lean on the five pieces of furniture and examine our nails and text our boyfriends. All of us blond little monsters. Bangs sliced jagged and frosty, eyes lined kohl-black-sinister, lips bubblegum or cherry, all of us kissable as a plane crash.

  Although I had only been here a few weeks, I was very good at this job. It wasn’t that Sierra’s other monsters were bad at elegantly folding tunics or boredly adjusting tanks on hangers. It was that they didn’t know that the secret to selling Sierra’s clothing was to lounge on the stool near the front, not giving a damn, demonstrating to every potential customer exactly what the clothing would look like if they were to buy it and not give a damn.

  The other monsters weren’t good at this because they gave a damn.

  I was mostly focused on opening my eyes in the morning and moving my legs and eating enough food to keep my eyes opening and my legs moving. That was enough. If I added anything else to my emotional workload, I got angry, and when I got angry, I broke perfectly nice things.

  Christina arrived. Her hair was crimped this time.

  “Is this a new plant?” she asked Sierra.

  “Yes,” Sierra replied. “Isn’t it the lushest of lush?”

  Christina touched a leaf with a manicured nail. “What is it?”

  Sierra touched it, too, but in a way that told me she was thinking of how it would look in her hair. “Lovely.”

  While Christina browsed around the store, I stretched over the stool on my belly, typing the names of famous neurosurgeons into Google image search on my phone. I wore two of Sierra’s low, see-through tanks and a low-slung sisal belt and my favorite pair of leggings. Metallic and shimmery-rainbow-beautiful until you looked close and saw all the skulls. They were not Sierra’s design. Not quite her thing in general. The leggings were a little ugly, once you got over how pretty they were.

  I stopped looking at surgeons and typed in define friendliness. My mother, who had no friends, kept telling me that I had no friends other than my cousin Sofia and Grace, who lived in Minnesota. She was not wrong. My friendlessness was for a variety of reasons. For starters, I had only been at the school here for the last five months of my senior year. And second, it turned out that it was a lot harder to meet people once you’d graduated. Third, most of the girls at .blush. were older than I was and had twenty-something lives and problems and gave a damn when I did not.

  And finally, I wasn’t friendly.

  “Everything she’s wearing,” Christina said.

  Her voice was very close, but I didn’t look up. I suspected, however, that she referred to me because of the way she had said it. It was like when there were two Isabels in my class growing up. They called us Isabel C. and Isabel D., but I knew which Isabel they meant before they got to the final initial.

  I glanced up just long enough to see that Christina was staring at me in a mistrustful way. The others slithered and crawled to get her the tanks and the belt, unaware that in order to really get my look, you had to accessorize with death in the family and generalized heartbreak. The bass of the music overhead pulsed and whispered. I began to close windows on my phone. So many neurosurgeons were weird-looking. Cause or effect?

  “Isabel,” Sierra said. “Christina wants your leggings.”

  I didn’t look up from the screen. “I’m not interested.”

  “Isabel, precious. She would like to buy them.”

  I flicked my eyes up to where the Christina stood. Some celebrities don’t really look that famous in person. They’re a little dustier or shorter when the camera’s not looking. But Christina was not one of them. You’d know she was someone even if you didn’t recognize her face. Because she looked on purpose.

  It can be incredibly intimidating, even in this town.

  It was clear from her expression that she was very used to this being the case.

  But I looked from my waiting boss to beautiful Christina and I thought, I have kissed more famous lips than yours.

  I shrugged and looked back at my phone. I typed in frontal lobatomy. It autocorrected. Turns out you can’t spell lobotomy without ooo.

  “Isabel.”

  I didn’t look up. “The Artemis leggings in charcoal sort of do the same thing.” When nobody moved, I lifted a limp hand and jerked it in the direction of the
Artemis collection.

  Fifteen minutes later, Christina had bought two tanks, a sisal belt, and two pairs of Artemis leggings, all for the price of a cut-rate tonsillectomy.

  After she’d gone, Sierra told me, “You are such a bitch.” She slapped my butt fondly.

  I didn’t really like people to touch me.

  I shoved off the stool and headed toward the back. “I’m going to go sit with the orchids now.”

  “You’ve earned it.”

  What I had earned was a trophy for generalized disinterest. It felt as if it had taken all of my energy to be so limply disengaged.

  As I pulled aside the linen curtain to the back room, I heard the front door open again. If it was Christina returning to make a second effort at my leggings, I was going to be forced to get loud, and I didn’t like getting loud.

  But it wasn’t Christina I heard at the front of the store.

  Instead, a very familiar voice said, “No, no, I’m looking for something very particular. Oh, wait, I just saw it.”

  I turned around.

  Cole St. Clair smiled lazily at me.

  I gave so many damns at once that it actually hurt.

  It was impossible to understand the truth of the moment. For starters, because Cole St. Clair was like the Christina, in that he generally appeared famous and not true and not really present in any given moment. There was always a dissonance between him and his surroundings, as if he were being smoothly and handsomely projected from a distant location.

  And second: Cole was a wolf.

  I didn’t know if I was glad to see him or scared to see him. I had seen him laid out on the floor with a needle in his arm; I’d seen him shift into a wolf right in front of me; I’d seen him begging me to help him die.

  And third: He had seen me cry. I didn’t know if I could live with that.

  Why are you here? Are you here for me?

  “Heya,” he said. He was still smiling that slow, easy smile at me. He had the best smile in the world, and lots of people had told him about it. His awareness of the smile’s charms should have diminished its power, but that casual arrogance was part of its glory.

  But I had been inoculated several months before, and since then, I’d been building up resistance. I was now immune.

  We stood two feet apart. There was a buffer of history between us, and everything else pulling us together.

  “You could have called,” I said stupidly.

  He grinned wider. He gestured grandly at himself, narrowly avoiding knocking over a rack of filmy shirts. “That would’ve ruined this.”

  The entire store looked different with him standing there. Like he’d pulled the afternoon sun in the door with him.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Ta-da.” He was trying really hard to keep his Cole St. Clair smile on instead of his real one. Every time the real one came close to breaking through, my heart crashed.

  I was aware that we had an audience. Not full-on staring — they were trying to be polite about it — but soft-focus curiosity. I wanted to take this out onto the sidewalk, or into the back, or at least look at my hands to make sure they weren’t shaking like they felt they were, but I couldn’t quite put it all together.

  Here was the thing: I was in love with Cole.

  Or had been. Or was going to be. I couldn’t tell the difference.

  I didn’t know if he was here for me, though, and I couldn’t take it if he wasn’t. There was no way, actually, that he’d come all this way from Minnesota for me. Probably he just stopped by to say hi after moving here for something else. That was why he hadn’t called first.

  “Come on,” I snapped. “Out back. You have time?”

  He idled after me as if time was all he had. On the way through the opening into the back room, he raised his eyebrow at Sierra as if he was used to my tone.

  Was this really happening?

  I led him through the back room, which was cluttered with neonatal leggings and aborted tunics in every shade of khaki. Then we were out in the blue-washed alley. There was a trash bin, but it didn’t smell — it was full of cardboard and dead plants. There was Sierra’s old Beetle, but it didn’t run — it was also full of cardboard and dead plants.

  As I led him out beside the car, I talked myself down, explaining to myself all of the ways that his being here changed nothing, meant nothing, was nothing. Nothing, nothing.

  I turned around, my mouth open to say something else scathing about him not calling me before showing up in my state, in my work, in my life.

  But then he wrapped his arms around me.

  My breath stopped as if he’d slapped a hand over my mouth. I didn’t hug him back right away, because I didn’t have enough information to know how to hug him back.

  He smelled like strange airport hand soap and felt like a hole to fall into.

  Cole stepped back. I couldn’t tell from his face what was going on.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked.

  “Hello, too,” he replied.

  “Hello is what you say when you first call someone.”

  He was completely unoffended. “You don’t call someone before ta-da.”

  “Maybe I don’t like ta-das.”

  Honestly, I had no idea what I liked. I only knew that my heart was galloping so fast that my fingers were numb. Logically, I knew it was just from surprise, but I didn’t know if it was like Surprise, here is a cake or Surprise, you’ve had a stroke.

  In front of me, Cole’s smile had emptied. His eyes were going blank, which was what happened to Cole when you hurt him. The real Cole vacated the situation and left his body standing by itself.

  Cruelly, I was grateful for it, as grateful as I’d been for the brief glimpse of his true smile earlier. Because this reaction was real. It meant he really cared how I felt about this reunion. A smile I couldn’t trust, but pain — I knew what the genuine article looked like.

  “Look,” I said. “You can’t just show up and expect me to scream and giggle, because I’m not that person. So don’t look all hurt because I’m not doing that.”

  His expression poured back into his face. This new one was hungry and restless. “Come somewhere with me. Let’s go somewhere. Where is there to go around here? Let’s go there.”

  “I have to work until six.” Six? Seven? I couldn’t even remember when my workday ended at the moment. Where were we? The alley behind .blush. The ocean breeze finding my skin, the starling overhead singing dreamily on a telephone wire, a dry palm leaf drifting down to rest on the concrete. This was real. This was happening.

  He jumped from foot to foot — I had almost forgotten how he only stopped moving when things went badly for him. “What’s the next meal? Lunch? Dinner? Yes. Have dinner with me.”

  “Dinner?” To this point, my evening plan had involved battling my way back to Glendale to the House of Divorce and Separation for an evening of estrogen and laughs that were the same as tears and vice versa. “Then what?”

  He grabbed one of my hands. “Dessert. Sex. Life.” He kissed my palm — not a sweet kiss. A kiss that made my skin twist with sudden, furious desire. His mouth.

  Now I thought I was having a stroke. “Cole, stop, wait.”

  Stopping and waiting were not strong concepts for him.

  “Cole,” I said. I thought I might drown in this blue alley.

  “What?”

  I started to say stop again, but that wasn’t what I meant. I said, “Give me a second. God!”

  He let me have my hand back. I stared at him. This was Cole St. Clair: sharp-edged jaw, brilliant green eyes, tussled and spiked dark brown hair. His smile would have been famous even without NARKOTIKA. I could tell he liked me staring at him. I could tell that he liked everything about this moment. Everything about it had been designed to catch me off guard, to make me react.

  Hope and terror rose in me in equal measure.

  I asked, “Why are you here?”

  “You.”

  It was
the perfect answer said in an imperfect way. He’d answered so fast. Just like that: You. It was so easy to say just one word. I wanted him to say it again, so that the second time around, I’d have a chance to feel something.

  You.

  Me.

  “Okay,” I said. I could feel a smile trying to happen. I hid it, fast. No way did he get a smile without calling me first. “Dinner. Are you picking me up?”

  Cole laughed, a sound utterly unattainable in its pure joy. “I just did.”

  According to the clock in the taxi, I was incredibly late for my appointment with Baby North. Tardiness is not one of my multiple vices, and normally this would have bothered me. But nothing could knock me at the moment. I buzzed with the pleasant anxiety spurred by the razor line of Isabel’s mouth.

  When we had met, I had just saved my life by becoming a werewolf, and her brother had just died trying to stop being one. Isabel had been the only thing in Mercy Falls sharper than I was.

  She was the only one who knew me.

  Above me, the sun glowed in the sky, one thousand times more brilliant than the sun over Minnesota. Everything in this place was concrete and invented grass and palm spikes.

  “What’s the street again?” asked the cab driver. He wore a hat that was from a country that was not L.A., and he looked tired.

  “Ocean Front Walk,” I said. “Venice. If there are two. Probably not. But in the case of duplication.”

  “That’s not a driving street,” he replied. “It is on the beach. I will have to let you out. You will have to walk.”

  I didn’t know if it was because I hadn’t been to the West Coast for a long time, or because I hadn’t been anywhere but Minnesota for a long time, but I kept being surprised by the fact of California. As we grew closer to Baby North’s home, everything seemed familiar and dreamy, seen before on tour or in a dream or movie. The names of the streets — Mulholland Drive and Wilshire Boulevard — and the names painted on the signs — Hollywood, Cheviot, Beverly Hills — called up thoughts of blond hair, red cars, palm trees, endless summer.