Sinner

by Maggie Stiefvater

  I felt intensely validated. I’d judged him right. Decent was decent.

  The hostess sat us at a tiny table. Across the sidewalk was the beach, and beyond it, the black ocean. I felt dreamy and drunk.

  We nearly knocked heads as we sat, and I thought about writing some lyrics down in my tiny notebook (Like lovers or lawyers/biting and smiling). Instead I watched some skateboarders sail by us. “Do you like it here?”

  There was too long of a pause, and when I looked at Leon, he smiled ruefully and cut his eyes down to the table. He gently unfolded his napkin. He had sturdy hands, blunt and sure.

  “I’ve been here a long time.”

  “Did you like it when you first came?”

  Leon said, “What is it you see when you look at it?”

  “Magic,” I replied.

  He pushed the menu toward me. “If you tell me what you want, I’ll order for you. While you enjoy the ocean.”

  He meant so that I wouldn’t have to talk to the waitress with my famous voice, or look at her with my famous face. Now I really looked at him. He must’ve been a handsome bastard when he was my age. He’d still be handsome, now, if he squared his shoulders and acted like he had some testicles. “You drive around a lot of famous people?”

  “A few.”

  “You didn’t even know who I was when I got into your car, and now you’re protecting me from waitresses?”

  Leon said, “I Googled you after you got out.”

  It was warming to hear I still had some currency on the Internet.

  He continued, “The news stories about when you disappeared were … Do you mind me mentioning it?”

  I shrugged. Everything was cool as long as he didn’t say Victor’s name. As long as he didn’t ask me where Victor was.

  “Well, it caused a big fuss.”

  “I’m really not that famous,” I said, although I was a little all that famous. “Most people can’t recognize me on sight. And if they do, they either think I’m just someone who looks like me, or they don’t have the guts to talk to me, or they don’t care that it’s me.”

  Really, it wasn’t exhausting to be recognized. It was exhausting to feel alone in a crowd.

  Leon studied me pensively. I could tell that he, in any case, did not like being recognized as Leon the driver. He dreaded the supermarket line chitchat. He waited until the postal service lady had knocked on the door, left the package, and gotten in her vehicle to open his door. His dog dying had been bad, I could tell, but the worst part for him had been trying to figure out how to handle the pity of the vet assistants.

  “I know what you’re saying,” I told Leon, and by you, I meant your face. “You hate small talk. It makes everything seem irrelevant. I agree. It’s ridiculous. We should only talk about big things, you and I.”

  “I’m not good at small talk.” Leon downgraded hate to something slightly kinder, but didn’t disagree. “Do I have big things to talk about?”

  “You told me your life story in the car. That’s big.”

  “You asked me for that.”

  “Did I? That doesn’t sound like me.”

  The waitress returned. I ordered a BLT without incident. Leon ordered a milk shake without incident. When his shake arrived, he cradled it in his hands, savoring it. He seemed to regard it as a guilty indulgence, something only permitted in the middle of the night with a stranger.

  He looked glum, which wasn’t the point of this exercise, so I asked, “So, Leon. I know you’re not a fan of this city, but where would you tell me to go, as a tourist?”

  “Haven’t you been here before?”

  I had been here before. “I was on tour.”

  “No time to explore?”

  There had been time to explore. I’d explored a few streets in Koreatown and one in Echo Park and another in Long Beach, and then I’d explored a Rite Aid for some syringes, and then I’d explored my hotel balcony and my hotel floor and, finally, the tile of the hotel bathroom. Then Victor had come got me out of my own puke and cleaned me up for the show.

  I’d been in Los Angeles before, but it hadn’t mattered. Really, I’d never left my own head.

  “The Pier, I guess,” Leon said, but dubiously, like he was repeating advice he’d heard from someone else. “That’s supposed to be nice at sundown. Malibu? That’s about forty-five minutes up the coast.”

  “Malibu is not L.A., Leon,” I said sternly. I looked out at the purple-skinned beach. I imagined running on that sand with paws instead of feet. It would be just as good on my own feet, I thought. “I think you should visit your own city.”

  “Maybe I will,” Leon said, in a kind way that meant that he wouldn’t. Our food arrived. Leon accepted the tomato from my BLT.

  “Seems strange to order a lettuce and bacon sandwich. But she would’ve held the tomato if you’d asked.” He shook salt on the slice. He looked as happy as he ever had as he put it in his mouth.

  “I forgot I didn’t like them,” I replied. “They’re a member of the deadly nightshade family, did you know? Slightly poisonous to dogs.”

  And wolves. Just enough to give me a stomachache.

  “Chocolate, too,” Leon said, looking at his milk shake, and I remembered that his dog had died. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “All questions are personal.”

  “I …”

  “That means, yes, Leon, ask it.”

  Just as long as it wasn’t about Victor.

  “Why did you come back?”

  It felt like a trick question. My hard-won hermitage — begun by me, secured by Jeremy — was no small thing. It was a chance to be someone else, and how many of those do you get? And yet I’d left it behind.

  I came back because I had to. Because there was nothing wrong in the world except that I was getting older in it. Because Sam and Grace had told me I should go if that was what I wanted.

  What I wanted was:

  I wanted.

  Isabel —

  I wanted to make something. At the beginning of all of this, I had just been a kid with a keyboard. It was less the game of it, and more those hours I spent falling from song to song.

  “I want to make an album,” I said. “I miss making music.”

  I could tell he approved of my answer. The waitress brought the check.

  Leon said, “I liked that song.”

  “Which — oh? Yeah?”

  “You were right. Jazzy.” Leon made the subtlest jazz hands ever and I reflected them back at him, but bigger. “Did you ever do anything else with the lady who sang?”

  Lady was not how I would have referred to Magdalene. I’d had the hardest crush on her back then. I said, “She’s too famous for that now. You haven’t heard of her? She’s in the movies.”

  He shrugged. Probably not his sorts of movies. “I bought one of your albums, too.”

  “Which one?”

  He considered. “It had a lady’s undergarments on the front?”

  He seemed uncomfortable, so I told him, “If it makes you feel any better, it was our bassist, Jeremy, wearing them.”

  Nostalgia chewed on me. No, not chewed. Nibbled. Just nibbled.

  “Well,” Leon said, eyes on our combined funds by the check, “I guess that’s that. I better get you back.”

  I pointed at the ocean.

  “Pacific,” Leon said, with no smile, but a glint in his eyes.

  “I think we should take off our shoes.”

  Leon frowned. “I’m not really that kind of person.”

  I knew that he wasn’t. At least, I knew he wasn’t the sort of person to abandon a car in the middle of the L.A. freeway. And that seemed to lead naturally to the sort of person who wouldn’t roll up their pants and take their shoes off with an unfamiliar rock star at five A.M.

  “Don’t give me that look. I’m not asking you if you want to get matching tattoos. I’m asking if you want to take a manly stroll on the beach. How long is it until sunrise?” I asked.

  He look
ed at his tasteful watch. “Probably thirty minutes.”

  “What’s thirty minutes more to see the sun rise over the ocean?”

  “We’re going to wait longer than that if you’re hoping to see the sun rise over the Pacific.”

  “Don’t be pedantic, Leon.”

  We faced off. He looked weary, tired, made soft by life, and I thought he was beyond my charms. But then he shook his head and bent to untie his shoes.

  I triumphantly whipped off my sneakers. As Leon carefully untied his laces and cuffed the bottom of his slacks, I waltzed onto the cool sand. Up here, it was dry and soft and weightless. Beside me, Leon tipped his head back to watch a helicopter fly along the coast, north to south. The boys with the kite had disappeared, and it seemed like the beach was finally going to sleep, right when it was time to wake up.

  I led Leon to the packed sand at the ocean’s edge.

  “Hot damn,” I hissed. The water was freezing. I could feel every nerve inside me twitching and shaking and considering shifting into a wolf.

  “Cold,” remarked Leon.

  Gritting my teeth, I hopped from one foot to the other until the nausea passed and my body remembered that it was human, only human.

  “I remember reading that ocean temperature was sixty-four or sixty-five around here,” Leon said. He experimentally stepped a little deeper into the briny deep. “Feels colder, doesn’t it?”

  Now that I was used to it, it wasn’t that bad. I kicked my toes in the sand and felt something squirm away from the contact.

  “We’re not alone,” I said. “Something’s down there.”

  Leon knelt, careful to keep his slacks dry, and dug quickly. He made a few soft sounds of disappointment until he straightened with a handful of sand.

  “Think one’s in there,” he remarked, holding it out to me.

  I sorted through the sand until I found the creature: a white-backed insect or crustacean nearly the size of a quarter. It had a lot of legs. “It’s an alien.”

  “Sand crab,” Leon said. “It won’t hurt you.”

  “It sure is ugly.”

  “Ugly never hurt a thing.”

  I scoffed. “Oh, ugly has hurt some things. It’s just that pretty hurts more.”

  “Amen.” Leon tossed the crab gently into the surf.

  We walked in silence for a little bit, no sound but the ocean and the cars moving on the street. Above us, the sky grayed and then pinked. In a few hours, I could call Isabel, and then I would switch on that dusty keyboard and start to make something real. As a flock of pelicans soared by us in the half-light, I thought about how beautiful this place was and how lucky I was and how all I had to do was not screw things up in any way.

  I eased my little notepad out of my back pocket. Leon was looking at me as I did, so I said, “What?”

  “You’re just something else, is all,” Leon said. “Most people aren’t. What did you write there?”

  I turned it around so he could see what I’d written.

  Lovers and lawyers

  Lips and teeth

  Tally that memory

  Give it a price

  Is that your dream?

  Here’s a check

  Something clever here

  Pelicans are clever

  He was charmed. “Lyrics? You just wrote those now? Will those really become a song?”

  “Maybe. That pelican stuff is some of my finest work.”

  Without any discussion, we both stopped and gazed out over the water. The sun rose behind us, but haze or smog filtered out most of the orange, making the ocean a slowly developing blue-and-purple portrait.

  “You should take a photo,” I told Leon. “Don’t tell me you’re not that kind of person. You can always delete it after you get home. I won’t know.”

  Leon shot me a look, but he got his phone out. He told me, “Go on, then, pose.”

  “What? It’s not supposed to be a photo of me. It’s supposed to be a photo of this glorious morning. Or of you in this glorious morning. A memento.”

  He was amused. “I know what I look like. Go on.”

  I flipped amiable devil horns at him as he took the photo. I said, “I consider this day seized.”

  He checked his watch. “And it’s only just started.”

  Cole had gotten a bag of stale powdered donuts for breakfast. Or possibly more than one bag. When I arrived at the house the next morning, I discovered a note taped to the gate. It said: 24-13-8. Follow the sugar, princess.

  And then there was, no shit, a trail of small, white donuts leading around the side of the concrete house.

  Shaking my head, I entered the numbers into the combination lock. Then I followed the donuts. A sliding door to a house on the other side of the yard stood open, but the donuts didn’t lead to it. A girl with blond dreads and dirty eco-cargo pants did yoga in the yard. She opened her eyes only long enough to give my outfit a brief gaze that managed to convey that she hated everything about my consumer lifestyle. The donuts didn’t go anywhere near her, either.

  As I got to the last donut, Cole manifested on the deck above me. He was beautifully shirtless, skin tinted light blue by my enormous sunglasses, and he wore the same pair of jeans I’d seen him in the day before. His hair was a mess. He was already a blur of motion, leaning hard on one side of the deck and then the other until he spotted me.

  My heart lurched. I tried to call up that image of him collapsing behind the keyboard instead. The memory of him seizing beside a needle.

  Not his face above me as he said, long ago, That is how I would kiss you if I loved you.

  I wasn’t going to get in too deep. That was the thing.

  “Stairs,” he told me, pointing. “I ran out of donuts.”

  I could tell that he was in brain-on-fire mode. “Is there anything better than donuts up there?”

  Yoga girl’s eyes continued to judge me — and now Cole as well.

  If she didn’t look away soon, I’d give her something really worth judging.

  “Me,” Cole said. He pointed to the corner of the roof. “Camera, camera, camera. PSA. Just saying. Camera. Also, camera.” He craned his neck to look over the roofs. His back muscles stretched gloriously and distractingly. “Did you see anyone coming?”

  I climbed the stairs. On the deck, the view all around was the flat roofs of California Avenue. “No. Is someone coming?”

  “No. Probably not. I don’t know. Come, come, come. Up, up, up.”

  “Nice of you to get dressed for the occasion.”

  Cole’s eyes darted to himself; he plucked at the skin on his chest. “Am I not wearing — I’m wearing pants! In, in. Come into my lair.”

  The apartment was unexpected. It was a uniquely West Coast magic trick, I’d discovered: Take a building that looked like a small garage and turn the inside into a vast, airy living space.

  I could tell at once that this streamlined studio had been furnished for Cole, not furnished by Cole. An artsy bookshelf studded with California knickknacks separated the bedroom from the living area. Framed vintage travel posters and fake vintage neon lights decorated the walls. In the living room, a rather fancy-looking keyboard sat on a stand, a thin layer of dust shimmering on the speaker beside it.

  The keyboard was what made this moment real for me. This was really happening.

  There were so many cameras. Several at knee height.

  The only evidence of Cole’s form of interior decorating was in the tiny kitchen area: The arm-length counter was spread with three half-drunk soda bottles, an open bag of chips, and the end of a hot dog lying on an exhausted bun.

  “This is disgusting,” I said.

  I was as close to the trash can as he was, but I stood there until Cole made a little mreh noise and swept the lot of it into the bin.

  “Was that breakfast? Should I have had the donuts outside?” I asked.

  In response, Cole seized my arm. Rather dramatically, he dragged me into the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind us. My
reflection appeared simultaneously in the mirror and the all-glass shower.

  “Hey —”

  Cole put a finger to his lips and shut the door behind us. “Cameras. Cameras, cameras, cameras.”

  “But not in here?” I spun. Like the rest of the apartment, the bathroom was light and airy. Plenty of room for a rock star and me. I inhaled, and could only smell air freshener and soap, no wolf scent. I had to admit that I was more relieved than I thought I would be.

  “Well, that one,” Cole said dismissively, gesturing at a camera lying in the basin of the chic sink. It was unplugged and half disassembled, an examined corpse.

  “Where did it come from?”

  He stepped into the shower without turning it on, slapping his bare feet against the tile inside. “Over the bed. I want to see how long it takes them to notice it’s missing. Come in, child, and see the wonders that await.”

  “Are you being funny, or are you talking about the shower?”

  Cole pressed himself back against the shower wall so that I could see that he had folded towels over the tiled seats inside it. A yellow plastic kitchen stool served as a tiny table. He made a grand gesture.

  This was breakfast.

  With a noisy sigh, I stepped into the shower and sat. Cole sat down opposite. The table held a bowl with a few donuts in it — these were the waxy chocolate sort, not the sort to lure girls into an apartment. A mug held two eggs and a single kiwi fruit. In the middle was an empty glass; Cole reached out and placed it one inch closer to me than him.

  “This is fancy,” I said. “Would you like to explain the dishes?”

  Cole cracked his knuckles and pointed to the food in turn. “Here we have the glazed miniature chocolate bathroom cakes with a paraffin topping. These here are a duo of free-range eggs that are probably hard-boiled, or at least were wet for a long time. This here beside them is a furry, green egg. And this —”

  He produced a two-liter Diet Coke from the edge of the shower and filled my glass. As it began to foam over the edge, he put his finger in it to stop the fizzing.

  “No glass for you?” I asked.

  Cole sucked his finger before taking a swig directly from the bottle. “I’ll rough it.”