Linger (21 page)

“What?” Now the hoop-earring girl's face fell. “You look just like him. Really cute.” She flushed a shade of red so deep it had to be painful.

“Thanks.”
Please just go away.

Hoop-earring girl said, “You're really not him?”

“I'm really not. You don't know how much I've heard that, since the news story.” I shrugged apologetically.

“Can I at least take a picture with my phone?” she asked. “Just so I can tell my friends about it?”

“I don't think that's a good idea,” I said, uneasy.

“That means
get out of here
,” Isabel said. “Like, now.”

The girls shot Isabel foul looks before turning and huddling around one another. We could still hear their voices clearly. “He looks just like him,” one of the girls said wistfully.

“I think it
is
him,” hoop-earring girl said. “He just doesn't want to be bothered. He ran away to escape the tabloids.”

Isabel's eyes burned on me, waiting for an answer.

“Mistaken identity,” I told her.

The girls had gotten back to their seats. Hoop-earring girl looked over the back of the booth and said, “I love you anyway, Cole!” before ducking back down.

The other two girls squealed.

Isabel said, “Cole?”

Cole.
I was back where I started. Cole St. Clair.

As we left, the girls took my pic with their cell phones, anyway.

Beginning. of. the. end.

• SAM •

I had never worked so hard on my music as I did the first two hours in the studio: Once Dmitra had decided that I wasn't an Elliott Smith wannabe, she shifted into high gear. We went over verses once, twice, three times, sometimes just trying a different arrangement, sometimes recording additional strumming guitar to go over my fingerpicking, sometimes adding percussive effects. On some tracks, I recorded over my voice with harmonies, sometimes more than once, until I was my very own pack of Sams crooning in polyphonic splendor.

It was brilliant, surreal, exhausting. I was beginning to feel how little sleep I'd gotten the night before.

“Why don't you take five?” Dmitra suggested after a few hours. “I'll work on mixing what we've done so far and you can get up, piss, get some coffee. You're starting to sound a little flat, and your girlfriend looks like she misses you.”

Through the headphones, I heard Grace say indignantly, “I was just sitting here!”

I grinned and slid the headphones off. Leaving both them and my guitar behind, I came back into the main room. Grace,
looking as exhausted as I felt, lounged on the sofa with the dog at her feet. I stood next to her while Dmitra showed me the shape of my voice on the computer screen. Grace hugged my hips and rested her cheek on my leg. “You sound amazing from out here.”

Dmitra clicked a button, and my voice, compressed and harmonized and beautified, came through the speakers. I sounded — not like me. No … like me. But me, if I was on a radio. Me from outside myself. I stuffed my hands into my armpits, listening. If it was that easy to make a guy sound like a proper singer, you'd think everybody would be in the studio.

“It's brilliant,” I told her. “Whatever you've done. It sounds brilliant.”

Dmitra didn't turn around as she kept clicking and sliding. “That's all you, baby. I haven't really done much yet.”

I didn't believe her. “Right. Yeah. Hey, where is the bathroom?”

Grace jerked her chin toward the hall. “Turn left at the kitchen.”

I ran a hand over Grace's head and tweaked her ear with my fingers until she released me, and then I headed down the rat's maze of halls past the kitchenette. Now, in the hallway, lined with framed and signed album covers, I could smell the cigarette smoke. On the way back from the bathroom, I took my time going back to the studio, looking at the albums and signatures. Karyn might've believed that you could tell everything about someone by what sort of books they read, but I knew that you could tell even more by the music they listened to. If the wall was to be believed, Dmitra's tastes seemed to run toward
electronica and dance. She had an impressive collection that I could admire even if the bands weren't really my thing. I made a note to joke with her about her impressive selection of Swedish album covers when I got back to the studio.

Sometimes, your eyes see something your brain doesn't. You pick up a newspaper and your head gives you a phrase that you didn't consciously read yet. You walk into a room and you realize something's out of place before you've bothered to properly look.

I felt that happening now. I saw Cole's face, or something that reminded me of it, though I didn't know where. I turned back to the wall and swept my eyes across the album covers again. Slower, this time. Scanning the artwork, the printed titles and artists, looking for what had triggered the image.

And there it was. Bigger than the others, because it was not an album cover but rather the glossy front of a magazine. On it, a guy leaped at the viewer, and behind it crouched his band members, staring at him. It was a famous cover. I remembered seeing it before. I remembered noticing the way the guy jumped toward the camera with his limbs completely outstretched, like the flight was all that mattered, like he didn't care what happened when he landed. I remembered, too, the main headline on the magazine, done in the same font that the band used on their album —
BREAKING OUT: THE FRONT MAN OF NARKOTIKA TALKS ABOUT SUCCESS BEFORE
18.

But I had not remembered the guy having Cole's face.

I closed my eyes for a single moment, the cover still branded in my vision.
Please
, I thought.
Please let it just be an uncanny resemblance. Please don't let Beck have infected someone famous.

I opened my eyes, and Cole was still there. And behind him, out of focus, because the camera only cared about Cole, was Victor.

I made my way slowly to the studio; they were listening to another one of my tracks, which sounded even better than the last. But it seemed suddenly disconnected from my life. My real life, the one that was dictated by the rise and fall of the temperature, even now that my skin was firmly human.

“Dmitra,” I said, and she turned around. Grace looked up, too, frowning at something in my voice. “What's the name of the front man of NARKOTIKA?”

I'd already seen all the proof I needed, but I didn't think I would really believe it until I heard someone say it out loud.

Dmitra's face cracked into a grin, softer than she'd been the entire time we'd been in the studio. “Oh, man, that was a great concert. He is crazy as a fox, but that band was …” She shook her head and seemed to remember that I'd asked a question. “Cole St. Clair. He's been missing for months.”

Cole.

Cole was Cole St. Clair.

And I had thought that my yellow eyes were hard to hide behind.

It meant there were thousands of eyes out there looking for him, waiting to recognize him.

And when they'd found him, they'd find all of us.

• ISABEL •

“Where do you want me to drop you off? Back at Beck's house?”

We were sitting in my SUV, which was parked in the far corner of the Kenny's parking lot so no rednecks would open their car doors into it. I was trying not to look at Cole, who seemed huge in the front seat, his presence taking up far more room than his physical body.

“Don't do that,” Cole said.

I slid my eyes toward him. “Do what?”

“Don't pretend like nothing happened,” he said. “Ask me about it.”

The afternoon light was dying quickly. A long, dark cloud slashed through the sky in the west. Not a rain cloud for us. Just bad weather on its way somewhere else.

I sighed. I didn't know if I wanted to know. It seemed to me that knowing would be more work than
not
knowing. But it wasn't like we could really put the genie back in the lamp now that it was out, could we? “Does it matter?”

Cole said, “I want you to know.”

Now I looked at him, at his dangerously handsome face that even now called, in unsafe and dulcet tones,
Isabel, kiss me, lose yourself in me
. It was a sad face, once you knew to look for it. “Do you really?”

“I have to know if anybody other than ten-year-olds know who I am,” Cole said. “Or I really will have to kill myself.”

I gave him a withering look.

“Should I guess?” I asked. Without waiting for him to answer, I remembered his deft fingers and thought of his pretty face and said, “Keyboardist for a boy band.”

“Lead singer of NARKOTIKA,” Cole said.

I waited a long beat, waited for him to say
kidding
.

But he didn't.

• COLE •

Her face didn't change. Maybe my target audience really was preteens. It was all very anticlimactic.

“Don't look at me like that,” she said. “Just because I didn't recognize your face doesn't mean I haven't heard your music. Everyone and Jesus has heard your music.”

I didn't say anything. What was there to say, really? The entire conversation felt very déjà vu or something; like I'd known all along I was going to have it with her, here in her car, the afternoon growing cold under the clouds.

“What?” Isabel asked, leaning over to look me straight in the face. “
What?
You think I give a crap about you being a rock star?”

“It's not about the music,” I said.

Isabel pressed her finger into the crook of my elbow, on my track marks. “Let me guess. Drugs, girls, lots of swearing. What is there about you that you haven't already told me? This morning you were lying naked on the floor and telling me you wanted to kill yourself. So, what, you think that me knowing you're lead singer of omigod NARKOTIKA is going to change anything?”

“Yeah. No.” I didn't know what I was. Relieved? Disappointed? Did I want it to change things?

“What do you want me to say?” Isabel asked me. “
‘You're going to corrupt me, get out of my car'
? Too late. I'm already way beyond your influence.”

At that, I laughed, though I felt bad for doing it because I knew she'd take it as an insult, though really it wasn't. “Oh, believe me, you are not. There are tiny, dirty rabbit holes that you have not been down that I have. I have taken people down into those tunnels with me, and they've never come out.”

I was right. She was offended. She thought I found her naive.

“I'm not trying to piss you off. I'm just giving you fair warning. I'm far more famous for that than my music.” Her face had gone utterly frosty, so I thought I was getting through to her. “I am, quite possibly, utterly incapable of making a decision that is not self-serving in absolutely every way.”

Now Isabel started to laugh, a high, cruel laugh that was so sure of itself that it kind of turned me on. She put the car in reverse. “I keep waiting for you to tell me something that I don't already know.”

• ISABEL •

I took Cole home, knowing full well it was a bad idea — and maybe doing it
because
it was a bad idea. By the time we got there, it was a dazzling evening, almost tacky in its beauty, the entire sky painted a color pink that I'd only ever seen here in northern Minnesota.

We were back where we'd first met, only now we knew each other's names. There was a car parked in the driveway: my dad's smoke blue BMW.

“Don't worry about it,” I said as I pulled up on the other side of the circular driveway and put the SUV in park. “That's my dad. It's a weekend, so he'll be in the basement with some hard liquor to keep him company. He won't even know we're home.”

Cole didn't comment, just slid out of the car, into the chilly, cloud-covered air. He rubbed his arms and looked at me, his eyes blank and dark in the shadows. “Hurry,” he said.

I felt the bite of the wind and knew what he meant. I didn't want him to be a wolf right now, so I grabbed his arm and turned him toward the side door, the one that opened right at the base of the second staircase. “There.”

He was shuddering by the time I shut the door behind him, trapping us both in a stairwell the size of a closet. He had to crouch, one hand braced against the wall, for about ten seconds while I stood over him with my hand on the doorknob, waiting to see if I'd have to open the door for him as a wolf.

Finally, he stood up, smelling wolfish but still wearing his own face. “That's the first time I've ever tried
not
to be a wolf,”
he told me. Then he turned and went up the stairs without waiting for me to tell him where to go.

I followed him up the narrow stairway, everything about him invisible except for the flash of his hands on the loose rail. I had this feeling that he and I, in this moment, were a car crash, and instead of putting on the brakes, I was hitting the accelerator.

At the top of the stairs, Cole hesitated, but I didn't. I took his hand and went past him, pulling him after me to another set of stairs, leading him all the way up to my room in the attic. Cole ducked to keep from hitting his head on the steeply slanted walls, and I turned and grabbed the back of his neck before he had time to straighten.

He smelled incredibly of wolf, which my head read as a weird combination of Sam and Jack and Grace, and Beck's house, but I didn't care, because his mouth was a drug. Kissing him, all I could think about was needing to feel his lower lip between my lips and his hands gripping my body to him. Everything in me was tingling, alive. I couldn't think about anything except the hungry way he kissed me back.

Far away downstairs, something
thumped
and
smashed
. Dad at work. It was a different planet, though, than this one with me and Cole. If Cole's mouth transported me so far from my life, how much further would the rest of him take me? I reached for Cole's jeans, my fingers fumbling over the waist-band, and unbuttoned the button. Cole closed his eyes and sucked in a breath.

I broke away and backed onto my bed. My heart was
pounding a million miles an hour, watching him, imagining his weight pressing me down into the mattress.

He didn't follow me.

“Isabel,” he said. His hands hovered by his sides.

“
What?
” I said. I was, again, out of breath, and he didn't even look like he was breathing. I thought about how I'd jogged that morning, hadn't been anywhere yet to reapply makeup, fix my hair. Was that it? I pushed myself up onto my elbows; my body was shaking. Something was rippling up inside of me that I couldn't identify. “What, Cole? Spit it out.”

Cole just kept looking at me, standing there with his jeans unbuttoned and his hands half fisted by his sides. “I can't do this.”

My voice came out derisive as I swept my eyes down him. “Doesn't look that way.”

“I mean, I can't do this anymore.” He buttoned his jeans and kept looking at me.

I wished he wouldn't. I turned my face away so that I didn't have to see the expression on his face. It felt condescending, whether or not he meant it that way. There wasn't anything he could say that wouldn't feel condescending.

“Isabel,” he continued, “don't sulk. I
want
to. I really want to.”

I didn't say anything. I stared at a feather from one of my pillows that had escaped onto my pale lavender bedspread.

“God, Isabel, don't make this harder, okay? I'm trying to remember how to be a decent person, okay? I'm trying to remember who I was before I couldn't stand myself.”

“What, you didn't screw girls back then?” I snarled. A fat tear ran out of one of my eyes.

I heard him move; when I glanced up, he had turned to look out the dormer window, his arms crossed over his chest. “I thought you said you were saving yourself.”

“What does that matter?”

“You don't want to sleep with me. You don't want to lose your virginity to some screwed-up singer. It'll make you hate yourself for the rest of your life. Sex does that. It's pretty awesome that way.” His voice was bitter now. “You just don't want to feel anything, and it'll work great for about an hour. But then it'll be worse. Trust me.”

“Well, you're the expert,” I said. Another tear ran down my face. I hadn't cried since the week that Jack died. I just wanted Cole to go. Of all the people I might have wanted to see me finally cry, Cole St. Clair, king of the world, was not one of them.

Cole braced his arms on either side of the window; the last of the light coming through the clouds just barely illuminated his face. Not looking at me, he said, “I cheated on my first girlfriend. A lot. While I was on tour. When I got back, we fought about something else, so I told her I'd cheated on her with so many girls I couldn't remember their names. I told her that I'd seen enough now to know she wasn't anything special. We broke up. I guess I broke up with her. She was my best friend's sister, so I basically forced them to choose between me and each other.” He laughed, a terrible, unfunny laugh. “And now Victor is out there in the woods somewhere, stuck as a wolf. Stuck as a guy becoming a wolf. I'm a great friend, aren't I?”

I didn't say anything. I didn't care about his ethical crisis.

“She was a virgin, too, Isabel,” Cole said, finally looking at me again. “She hates me. She hates herself. I don't want to do that to you.”

I stared at him. “I didn't ask for your help, did I? Did I invite you here for
therapy
? I don't
need
you to save me from myself. Or from you. How weak do you think I am?” For a brief moment, I didn't think I was going to say it. Then I did. “I should've just left you to kill yourself.”

And again that face, always that face. Where he should have been looking at me like I'd hurt him, and there was … nothing.

Tears were burning down my cheeks, pricking when they met under my chin. I didn't even know what I was crying for.

“You're not that girl,” Cole said, sounding tired. “Trust me, I've seen enough of them to know. Look. Don't cry. You're not
that
girl, either.”

“Oh, yeah? What girl am I?”

“I'll let you know when I figure it out. Just don't cry.”

The fact that he was pointing out my crying made it suddenly intolerable for him to see me doing it. I closed my eyes. “Just get out. Get out of my room.”

When I opened them again, he was gone.

• COLE •

Descending the stairs from her room, I was tempted to go outside and find out if the shivering gut-wrench I'd felt as I came
in really meant what I thought it did. But I stayed in the warmth of the house. I felt like I knew something about myself that I hadn't before, a bit of knowledge so new that if I became a wolf now, I might lose it and not remember it whenever I became Cole again.

I wandered down the main stairs, mindful that her father was somewhere in the house's depths while Isabel stayed up in her tower alone.

What would it be like, growing up in a house that looked like this? If I breathed too hard it would knock some decorative bowl off the wall or cause the perfectly arranged dried flowers to weep petals. Sure, my family had been affluent growing up — successful mad scientists generally are — but it never looked like this. Our lives had looked … lived in.

I made a wrong turn on the way to the kitchen and found myself in the Museum of Natural Minnesota History instead: a massive, high-ceilinged room populated by an army of stuffed animals. There were so many that I would've doubted their realness, if not for the musty barnyard smell that filled the room. Weren't there animal extinction laws in Minnesota? Some of these animals looked pretty damned endangered; I'd never seen them in upstate New York, anyway. I peered at some sort of exotically patterned wildcat, which peered back at me. I remembered a snatch of earlier conversation with Isabel, back when I'd first met her — something about how her father had a penchant for shooting.

Sure enough, there was a wolf perpetually slinking by one of the walls, glass eyes glittering in the dim room. Sam must've been rubbing off on me, because suddenly, it seemed like a
particularly horrible way to die, far away from your real body. Like an astronaut dying in space.

I glanced around at the animals — the line between them and me felt very thin — and pushed out a door on the other side of the room, one that I hoped would lead me back toward the kitchen.

I was wrong again. This was a plush round room, elegantly lit by the dying sunset coming through windows that made up half of the curving walls. At its center was a beautiful baby grand piano — and nothing else. Just the piano and the curving, burgundy walls. It was a room just for music.

I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd sung.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd missed it.