The song looped around; I had forgotten I had it set to repeat.

Isabel’s eyes opened.

“Well?” I asked.

She kissed me.

There was no build to this kiss. No gradual confession of desire conveyed through body language. It was nothing, and then everything. Her hand was on my hand, dragging it over her bare stomach and pressing my palm into her ribs and making it feel the ridge of her hipbone at her belt. Her fingers asked mine to unwrap her. I barely had any breath at all, and her mouth was taking the rest of it.

I stood up, lifting her so that she was never any farther than the earbud cord. I didn’t want her body to stop touching mine, anyway. As the song clanked and stomped jaggedly in my right ear and in her left, we kissed and kissed, her tongue warm on my tongue, her skin smooth under my fingers, her legs curved around mine.

Isabel dragged me toward the door. “Bed.”

I didn’t argue. The song looped again. I fumbled for the doorknob.

On the other side, Joan’s camera looked at us.

I had forgotten. Isabel didn’t flinch, but her eyes fluttered closed for just a moment, lashes dark on her cheek, and then when she opened them again, she was ready for the camera, all truths erased from her expression.

“Hi, Joan,” I said. “Are you staying long? Can I get you a coffee?”

Isabel removed herself from me. Joan, who, for the record, was a humorless trundle elf, merely took a few steps back to allow us to exit the bathroom.

“I’m going to go,” Isabel said.

“Oh,” I protested, “that’s crazy talk.”

But it was true that the forgotten surprise of Joan had had a somewhat deleterious effect on my favorite instrument.

Isabel removed the earbud from my ear and pulled the cord free from the MP3 player. She went to get her purse while I glowered at Joan.

“Thanks for nothing,” I said.

Joan switched off her camera. “Ditto.”

Isabel reappeared. She had reapplied lipstick. I snatched for her on her way by and missed. She stopped at the door, though, and a smile sort of lurked around her mouth. “I think you should get a new job.”

“Doing what?”

“Making music.”

Chapter Twenty-One

· isabel ·

On the way home, after the buzz of Cole had worn off, I kept finding my thoughts returning to br**sts. I’d looked at mine in the mirror before. They didn’t look anything like the three sets that I’d just seen in Cole’s apartment, and not just because they had never had Cole’s name written on them. It wasn’t the size, really. It was the shape and the placement and the level of hang and sway versus perk and vengeance. It was the size and the shape and the color of ni**les.

Different. But better? Worse? It was hard to attach a value judgment.

Ultimately, it just made me angry. What did anyone care anyway?

Cole stood around shirtless all the time. It wasn’t even really a thing for those girls to arrive without a top. It was an arbitrary decision culture had made to make our ni**les salacious.

But it was a thing. And it did matter. And I couldn’t stop seeing them. That made me angrier than anything, that I couldn’t talk myself out of reliving the moment.

“Isabel, don’t you think you should tell people when you’re going to be out late?”

My mother’s voice carried from the living room as I stepped into the foyer of the House of Dismay and Ruin. I knew what I’d see before I’d even gotten to the end of the hall and rounded the doorway: my mother reclined elegantly on the sofa, hair cascading over her shoulders, wine glass in hand.

I was not wrong, though I hadn’t guessed that my aunt Lauren would be there as well, matching wine glass in her hand.

She waved at me a little, turning her head very slowly, looking weary behind the bandage taped between her eyes. She’d just gotten a nose job, and she was always saying that sudden movements gave her a headache.

“No,” I said, standing at the end of the sofa. On the television, a bitter soldier in a helmet peered into the distance. My mother watched war movies when she was feeling low. Probably because the excessive bloodshed and bitter victories reminded her of my father. “Because I’m over eighteen.”

My mother sighed. It was not particularly disappointed. She already knew this was an argument I was good at. I knew the rest of it, actually.

mom: But you live under my roof.

me: I’m happy to move out.

mom: You’ d have to get a job for — me: Yahtzee! Also, you told me I should find some friends.

mom:

My mother also knew the rest of it. So she just tipped the wine glass at me. “Want to try?”

“Is it any good?”

“No.”

I shook my head. “What’s that smell?”

My mother looked at Lauren. Lauren answered, “Sofia’s making cinnamon rolls.”

It was ten o’clock at night. I guessed there was nothing really wrong with baking at ten o’clock, but there was nothing really right about it, either.

“Is he cute?” Lauren asked me. “You were out with a boy, weren’t you?”

I blinked at her. I’d thought about what would happen when my mom and Lauren found out that I was dating Cole, but I hadn’t really expected how unpleasant it would feel to hear Lauren talk about him. Somehow it felt like it sullied him in a way he hadn’t been before. Dusted him with the sterile House of Ruin relationship powder, the grown-up version of love.

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s like a damn panda.”

On the television, a tank shuddered as a round erupted from its gun. The camera shifted quickly to its target, a small bunker that exploded in a shower of cinder block and shattered dreams.

My mother began to cry softly. I went into the kitchen.

“Sofia, why are you making cinnamon rolls at ten o’clock at night?” I demanded.

My cousin turned from the counter. She was wearing duckprinted flannel pajama bottoms and her hair was down. She looked approximately twelve years old. Her T-shirt was covered with flour. I tried not to think about br**sts.

“I was making them for you. So you could take one to class with you in the morning.”

I opened my mouth to snap something about carbohydrates, realized I was about to be a bitch, and shut it again. Maybe Cole was a good influence on me.

“Right,” I said. It was not thanks, but it was a lot closer than I usually got. “At the end of the week we should go buy you some shoes. I’ll take you to Erik’s.”

Sofia blinked at me. Her eyes luminesced.

“Shoes are the things you put on your feet.”

“Just us? Or Cole, too?” Right after she said it, she added, “Because I don’t mind. I mean, if he comes. It’s okay. It doesn’t have to be just us. I appreciate you asking either way.

Because —”

“Sofia,” I snapped. “Stop.”

“Are you going to marry him?” Sofia asked.

“Sofia,” I snapped, with slightly more teeth. “Way to escalate.

What the hell. This is not a Disney movie. Have you learned nothing from the example of our elders?”

She turned back to the counter and began to operate the standing mixer, her shoulders slumped. Powdered sugar surrounded her in a cloud. Without looking at me, she said, “Dad called.”

Ah. This explained some of the wet-towel atmosphere in the House of Ruin. I tried to think of what an actual human would say in this situation. I asked, “Are you okay?”

Sofia began to cry, which was exactly why I generally tried to avoid being a human. I wished I had stayed with Cole.

“Yes,” said Sofia as tears dropped off her nose. “Thank you for asking.” She glopped a huge spoon of frosting from the mixing bowl onto a cinnamon roll and handed the plate to me.

“For the love of God,” I said, taking it. “Get one of those things and come on.”

“Come on where?”

“My room. Let’s go call Cole.”

We did. Up in my room, I put him on speaker and made him sing his latest song to us. When he found out Sofia was listening, he started swapping out his real lyrics for funny ones, and soon she was laughing and crying at the same time. Finally, I got up to plug my phone in because the battery was dying from all the singing, and Sofia went off to bed, happy and sad, which was at least better than just sad.

I took the phone off speaker and climbed onto my bed. I put my head on the pillow and laid the phone on my ear. “We’re alone. You can swear again.”

“I wish you were here,” Cole said.

I didn’t answer right away. Then, because it was a phone, and he couldn’t see my face, so I could be as honest as I liked, I admitted, “Me, too.”

“Isabel —” Cole said. He stopped. Then he said, “Don’t hang up.”

“I haven’t hung up.”

“Keep not hanging up.”

“I still haven’t hung up.” I heard a bird shrill on his end of the phone. “Are you outside?”

“I’m in the alley. Waiting for Leon. He’s done at midnight and we’re going to go get food on a stick and I’m going to win him a stuffed monkey on the Pier. These are the things I do when you leave me alone, Isabel.”

I said, “Don’t break Leon’s heart.”

Cole laughed. His real laugh was a funny sound — not funny like ha-ha, but funny strange. It was percussive rather than tonal. He said, “Tell me you’ll see me tomorrow.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tell me you’ll see me the next day. And the day after that.

And the day after that.”

My heart thumped convulsively. It had happened. Against my will, despite the na**d girls and the smell of wolf and all of the things that hinted at future misery, I had fallen back in love with Cole.

I said, “Good night, Cole.”

“Good night, Culpeper.”

I hung up and closed my eyes. Later, later, I knew that I’d probably regret all of this. But right now I couldn’t feel afraid. I just kept hearing his silly lyrics and his real laugh. I kept remembering the feel of his hands on me. I tried to tell myself that everybody in the House of Ruin and Misery eventually cried themselves to sleep, but right then, in that moment, I let myself imagine I wasn’t like anyone else.

Chapter Twenty-Two

· cole ·

In the morning I woke up and discovered there was really nothing wrong with the world at all, apart from waking up with barbecue breath. I boiled eggs and drank a carton of milk, and then stood on the roof deck for an hour trying to piece together a lyric that would say exactly all that while not saying exactly all that. Baby called me and said, “Why aren’t you picking up your work phone?”

It took me a moment to realize that she was talking about Virtual Me, which of course was not in my possession. I stretched and closed my eyes. The sun was straight overhead and pointed only at me. I replied, “Because I only use it for, like, connecting with the Internet. Don’t cross the streams, Baby.

Why haven’t you got me my Mustang?”

“Ha-ha, this is me laughing, Cole. I want that girl on the show.”

It felt slightly less sunny out here. “I hope by that girl you are referring to my car.”

“The Internet loves the idea that you’re dating someone.

They want to know if she’s the one, Cole. She’s a very pretty girl. Think about what it would do for viewership.”

I didn’t have to think. I knew exactly what the world would do with it, because they’d done it with every other girl they’d ever spotted me with. The idea of trying to date in public tweaked exactly the same part of my brain as the idea of speaking to my parents or old friends from home. Which was to say the same part of my brain that was always contemplating blowing myself away or jumping off a bridge or eating some pills.

It wasn’t a part of my brain I liked to engage. Until very recently, I thought I’d lobotomized it from my skull, but apparently it was still in there.

Baby said, “Convince her to be on the show and I’ll get you a Mustang.”

I laughed before I’d even though about it, because it was such an obvious devil’s bargain that there was no danger I’d fall into it.

“We need to have dinner, Cole,” Baby said. “I think that is the thing. Bring her. Tonight. Clear your schedule.”

“I’m not feeling very dinner-y,” I replied. “Seeing as my track nearly got screwed over yesterday and I had a bunch of topless girls in my apartment last night.”

“That sounds exciting. I like exciting.”

“I was being plenty exciting without that.”

“Were you?” Baby asked curiously. “Are you being exciting now?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Great. I look forward to seeing it. Dinner tonight, don’t forget. Also, pick up your other phone when I call it.”

She hung up. I called Isabel.

“Culpeper,” she answered.

It never got old, her taking my calls.

“It thrills me when you answer the phone like that,” I told her. I walked to the edge of the roof deck. I could see palm trees and more roof decks. The rest of them were empty, so it was just me and the sun. “Please tell me you are naked.”

“I’m at work, Cole.”

“Naked? Well, it is Santa Monica. Do you have Virtual Me?”

“Of course I do. You just tweeted.”

“Was I funny? Did the Colebots like it?” I watched a little boy appear on one of the roof decks one house away, on the other side of the empty rental. He had a little plane in his hand, and he was flying it up, up, up as high as he could get.