Linger (20 page)

• ISABEL •

At three in the afternoon, we had Kenny's to ourselves. It still smelled like the morning's greasy breakfast offerings: cheap bacon, soggy hash browns, and a vague cigarette odor, despite the lack of a smoking section.

Across the booth from me, Cole slouched, his legs long enough that I kept accidentally hitting them with my feet. I didn't think he looked like he belonged in this hick diner any more than I did. He looked like he'd been put together by a swank designer who knew what he was doing — his distinctive features were brutal and purposeful, sharp enough to hurt yourself on. The booth seemed soft and faded around him, almost comically old-fashioned and country in comparison, like someone had dropped him here for a tongue-in-cheek photo shoot. I was sort of fascinated by his hands — hard-looking hands, all steep angles and prominent veins running across the back of them. I watched the deft way that his fingers moved while he did mundane things like putting sugar in his coffee.

“You a musician?” I asked.

Cole looked at me from under his eyebrows; something about the question bothered him, but he was too good to reveal much. “Yeah,” he said.

“What kind?”

He made the kind of face real musicians make when they're asked about their music. His voice was self-deprecating when he said, “Just a bit of everything. Keyboards, I guess.”

“We have a piano at my house,” I said.

Cole looked at his hands. “Don't really do it anymore.” And then he fell silent again, and it was that silence, heavy and growing and poisonous, that rested on the table between us.

I made a face that he didn't see because he didn't bother lifting his eyes. I wasn't big on making small talk. I considered calling Grace to ask her what I should say to a reticent suicidal werewolf, but I'd left my phone somewhere. Car, maybe.

“What are you looking at?” I demanded finally, not expecting an answer.

To my surprise, Cole stretched one hand out toward me, extending his fingers so that his thumb was closest, and he regarded it with an expression of wonder and revulsion. His voice echoed his expression. “This morning, when I became me again, there was a dead deer in front of me. Not really dead. She was looking at me” — and
now
he met my eye, to see my reaction — “but she couldn't get up, because before I'd shifted, I'd ripped her open. And I guess, well, I guess I was eating her alive. And I guess I kept doing it after, because my hands … they were covered with her guts.”

He looked down at his thumb, and now I saw that there was a small ridge of brown beneath the nail. The end of his thumb trembled, so slightly that I almost didn't see it. He said, “I can't get it off.”

I rested my hand on the table, palm up, and when he didn't understand what I wanted, I stretched my arm a few inches farther and took his fingers in mine. With my other hand, I got my nail clipper out of my purse. I flicked out the hook and slid it under his nail, scraping the bit of brown out.

I blew the grit off the table, put the clippers back in my purse, and let him have his hand back.

He left it where it was, between us, palm down, fingers spread out and pressed against the tabletop as if it were an animal poised for flight.

Cole said, “I don't think your brother was your fault.”

I rolled my eyes. “Thanks, Grace.”

“Huh?”

“Grace. Sam's girlfriend. She says that, too. But she wasn't there. Anyway, the guy she tried to save that way lived. She can afford to be generous. Why are we talking about this?”

“Because you made me walk three miles for a cup of old coffee. Tell me why meningitis.”

“Because meningitis gives you a fever.” His blank look told me that I was starting in the wrong place. “Grace was bitten as a kid. But she never shifted, because her idiot father locked her in the car on a hot day and nearly fried her. We decided that maybe you could replicate that effect with a high fever, and we couldn't think of anything better than meningitis.”

“With a thirty-five percent survival rate,” Cole said.

“Ten to thirty percent,” I corrected. “And I already told you — it cured Sam. It killed Jack.”

“Jack is your brother?”

“Was, yeah.”

“And you injected him?”

“No, Grace did. But I got the infected blood to give to him.”

Cole looked impatient. “I don't even have to bother to tell you why your guilt is self-indulgent, then.”

One of my eyebrows shot up. “I don't —”

“Shhh,”
he said. He drew his outstretched hand back toward his coffee mug and stared at the salt and pepper shakers. “I'm thinking. So Sam never shifts at all?”

“No. The fever cooked the wolf out of him, or something.”

Cole shook his head without looking up. “That doesn't make sense. That shouldn't have worked. That's like saying you shiver when you're cold and you sweat when you're hot, and so to stop you from shivering for the rest of your life, we're going to put you in a pizza oven for a couple minutes.”

“Well, I don't know what to tell you. This was supposed to be Sam's last year, and he should've been a wolf right now. The fever worked.”

He frowned up at me. “I wouldn't say the fever worked. I would say that something about meningitis made him stop shifting. And I'd say something about getting shut in a car made Grace stop shifting. Those are maybe true. But saying that the fever did it? You can't prove that.”

“Listen to you, Mr. Science Guy.”

“My father —”

“The mad scientist,” I interjected.

“Yes, the mad scientist. He used to tell a joke in his classes. It's about a frog. I think it's a frog. It might be a grasshopper. Let's go with frog. A scientist has a frog and he says, ‘Jump, frog.' The frog jumps ten feet. The scientist writes down
Frog jumps ten feet
. Then the scientist chops off one of the frog's legs and says, ‘Jump, frog,' and the frog jumps five feet. The scientist writes
Cut off one leg, frog jumps five feet
. Then he chops off another leg, and says, ‘Jump,' and the frog jumps two feet. The scientist writes down
Cut off two legs, frog jumps two feet
. Then he cuts off all the frog's legs and says, ‘Jump,' and the frog just lies there. The scientist writes down the conclusions of the test:
Cutting off all a frog's legs makes the subject go deaf
.” Cole looked at me. “Do you get it?”

I was indignant. “I'm not a total idiot. You think we jumped to the wrong conclusion. But it worked. What does it matter?”

“Nothing, I guess, for Sam, if it's working,” Cole said. “But I just don't think that Beck had it right. He told me that cold made us wolves and hot made us humans. But if that was true, the new wolves like me wouldn't be unstable. You can't make rules and then say that they don't really count just because your body doesn't know them yet. Science doesn't work that way.”

I considered. “So you think that's more frog logic?”

Cole said, “I don't know. That's what I was thinking about when you came. I was trying to see if I could trigger the shift in a way other than cold.”

“With adrenaline. And stupidity.”

“Right. This is what I'm thinking, and I could be wrong. I think that it's not really cold that makes you shift. I think it's the way your brain reacts to cold that tells your body to shift.
Two entirely different things. One is the real temperature. The other one is the temperature your brain says it is.” Cole's fingers headed toward his napkin and then stopped. “I feel like I could think better with paper.”

“No paper, but —” I handed him a pen out of my purse.

His entire face changed from when I had first found him. He leaned over the napkin and drew a little flowchart. “See … cold drops your temperature and tells your hypothalamus to keep you warm. That's why you shiver. The hypothalamus does all kinds of other fun things, too, like … tells you whether or not you're a morning person, and tells your body to make adrenaline, and how fat you should be, and —”

“No, it does not,” I said. “You're making this stuff up.”

“I am not.” Cole's expression was earnest. “This was polite dinner table conversation where I grew up.” He added another box to his napkin flowchart. “So let's pretend there's another little box here of things that cold makes your hypothalamus do.” He wrote
Become a wolf
in the new box he'd drawn; the napkin tore a bit as he did.

I turned the napkin around so that his handwriting — jagged, erratic letters piled on top of one another — was right side up for me. “So how does meningitis fit into this?”

Cole shook his head. “I don't know. But it might explain why I'm human right now.” Without turning the napkin around again, he wrote, in big block letters across his hypothalamus box:
METH
.

I looked at him.

He didn't look away. His eyes looked very, very green with the afternoon light on them. “You know how they say drugs mess up your brain? Well, I'm thinking they were right.”

I kept looking at him, and saw he was so obviously waiting for me to remark on his drug-life past.

Instead, I said, “Tell me about your father.”

• COLE •

I don't know why I told her about my father. She wasn't exactly the most sympathetic audience. But maybe that was why I told her.

I didn't tell her the first part, which was this: Once upon a time, before being a new wolf tied up in the back of a Tahoe, before Club Josephine, before NARKOTIKA, there was a boy named Cole St. Clair, and he could do anything. And the weight of that possibility was so unbearable that he crushed himself before it had a chance to.

Instead, I said, “Once upon a time, I was the son of a mad scientist. A legend. He was a child prodigy and then he was a teen genius and then he was a scientific demigod. He was a geneticist. He made people's babies prettier.”

Isabel didn't say
That's not so bad
. She just frowned.

“And that was fine,” I said. And it had been fine. I remembered photographs of me sitting on his shoulders while the ocean surf rushed around his calves. I remembered word games tossed back and forth in the car. I remembered chess pieces, pawns lying in piles by the side of the board. “He was gone a lot — but hey, I didn't care about that. Everything was great when he was home, and my brother and I had good childhoods. Yeah, everything was great, until we started to get older.”

It was hard to remember the first time Mom said it, but I'm pretty sure that was the moment it all started to fall apart.

“Don't hold me in suspense,” Isabel said sarcastically. “What did he do?”

“Not him,” I said. “Me. What did
I
do.”

What had I done? I must've commented cleverly on something in the newspaper, done well enough in school to get bumped forward a grade, solved some puzzle they hadn't thought I could solve. One day, Mom said for the first time, half a smile on her long, plain face that always looked tired — perhaps from being married to greatness for so long — “Guess who he's taking after.”

The beginning of the end.

I shrugged. “I left my brother behind in school. My dad wanted me to come to the lab with him. He wanted me to take college classes. He wanted me to be him.” I stopped, thinking of all the times I'd disappointed him. Silence was always,
always
worse than shouting. “I wasn't him. He was a genius. I'm not.”

“Big deal.”

“It wasn't, to me. But it was to him. He wanted to know why I didn't even try. Why it was I went running the other way.”

“What was the other way?” Isabel asked.

I stared at her, silent.

“Don't give me that look. I'm not trying to find out who you are. I don't care who you are. I just want to know why it is you are the way you are.”

Just then, the end of the table jostled, and I looked up into the bright, pimpled faces of three preteen girls. They had three matching pairs of half-moon eyes curved up in three matching expressions of excitement. The faces were unfamiliar but their
postures were not; I immediately knew, with sinking certainty, what they were going to say.

Isabel looked at them. “Uh, hello, if this is about Girl Scout cookies, you can leave. Actually, if it's about anything, you can leave.”

The ringleader preteen, who had hoop earrings — ankle holders, Victor had called them — thrust a pink notebook at me. “I
cannot
believe it. I
knew
you weren't dead. I knew it! Would you sign that? Please?”

The other two chorused “
omigod
” softly.

I guess what I should've been feeling was dread at being recognized. But all I could think while looking at them was that I'd agonized in a hotel room to write these brutal, nuanced songs, and my fan base was three squealing ten-year-old girls wearing
High School Musical
T-shirts. NARKOTIKA for kindergartners.

I looked at them and said, “Excuse me?”

Their faces fell, just a little, but the girl with the hoop earrings didn't withdraw the notepad. “Please,” she said. “Would you autograph it? We won't bother you after that, I swear. I died when I heard ‘Break My Face.' It's my ringtone. I love it so bad. It's, like, the best song, ever. I cried when you went missing. I didn't eat for days. And I added my signature to the petition for people who believed you were still alive. Oh my God, I can't even believe it. You're
alive
.”

One of the girls behind her was actually crying, blinded by the sheer emotional good fortune of finding me with my heart still beating.

“Oh,” I said, and proceeded to lie smoothly. “You think
I'm — yeah. I get that a lot. It's been a while. But no, I'm not.” I felt Isabel's eyes on me.