“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.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
• 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.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
• 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.”