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 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.
“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. Hoopearring girl looked over the back of the booth and said, “I love you anyway, Cole!” before ducking back down.
The other two girls squealed.
The other two girls squealed.
Isabel said, “Cole?”
Cole. I was back where I started. Cole St. Clair.