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.
“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.