Sinner

by Maggie Stiefvater

  As I stepped away from the pool and onto the infinite tiled balcony that surrounded the house, someone wearing a green glowstick around his neck offered me a drink. It was swirled in two different neon colors, seeming at once like something I wanted to put in my mouth and something nature didn’t mean for me to ingest.

  I shook my head. Once, my brother had said that alcohol made you someone else — I definitely didn’t want that. What if the someone else was worse than what I already was? And another time, my friend Mackenzie had said it just made you more of who you already were.

  The world didn’t need that.

  I trailed my fingers along the metal balcony as I walked. The lights inside the house were off and everyone in the house wore glowsticks or Christmas lights or other half costumes that luminesced. I didn’t want to go in, but it was undoubtedly where Sierra would be. She was such a child. Everything here, really, was like a child’s fantasy world brought to life, made concrete.

  But this was just a bunch of grown-ups in dress-up and so much pointless glitter.

  I just hated —

  Why couldn’t this glitter rub off on me?

  Hands on my arm. It was Sierra. She’d found me, after all. She looked alien with glow-in-the-dark eyelashes and phosphorescing dots drawn down her nose and cheekbones. Her hair was braided through with fiber optics. She wasn’t a woman; she was an installation. All of her friends were similarly glow-in-the-dark. Sierra grabbed my arm. “Treasure! I was hoping you would come. Get a drink, get a boy, get a dream, everything’s lovely!” Her pupils were black and dazzling with two little reflections of neon pink and green. She air-kissed my cheek.

  In response, I parted my lips and blinked, my lashes lingering on my cheek. I’d done that expression in the mirror before, lots. You could do it ever so much slower than you thought you should, and it only made you look more cynical.

  Sierra was delighted. She introduced me to her friends and plucked at my dress, her hand right on my breast, and then she threw her head back so we could all see how she had the longest neck.

  She said, “Here, you need some —”

  From somewhere, she produced more of the glow-in-the-dark makeup.

  “Close,” she ordered.

  I closed my eyes. I felt her swipe my eyelids, my lips.

  “Open.” Sierra smiled toothily at me. “Now you’re one of us.”

  That would never be true.

  “Go,” Sierra told me, waving her hand. “Play. Then come back and tell me all the tales of the fabulous places you have been!”

  “Right,” I replied. “Off to play right now. Ta.”

  It wasn’t that I had been dismissed, but I felt dismissed. Sierra really did think I was going to flit off with my newly fluorescent face and meet her cool friends. This was a party of children, and children loved other children.

  Maybe I didn’t even know how this was done.

  I made my way through a dark living room (a pale sofa was smeared gently with glow-in-the-dark paint) to a dark kitchen (the counter was spattered with luminescence) and then a dark somewhere else (no glowing besides a glass coffee table imperfectly reflecting my face). The music was coming from everywhere. The air smelled like oranges and pretzels and neon pink.

  As I wandered slowly through conversations between people who had just met, I thought about how L.A. was a place to not be alone. Every place was a place to not be alone, but L.A. was a city that gloried in connections, that eased them and facilitated them. It was a city that made it more obvious how goddamn impossible it was for you to make connections if you couldn’t make them in L.A. This was a place for smiling at strangers and holding hands and kissing strangers, and if you weren’t doing those things it was because you did not smile and you did not hold hands and you did not kiss. The strangers part was irrelevant.

  How long had I been here?

  “Isabel!”

  It was Mark, Sierra’s Mark. He was in a group of guys that all kind of looked like him, pretty and harmless and tan and cheerful. They were visible because they stood beside a wall of windows. Behind them, the ground sloped off and L.A. moved restlessly.

  “You guys aren’t glowing in the dark,” I said.

  “We’re bright enough,” Mark replied. His friends laughed. I didn’t. “You want a drink?”

  “Something not glowing?” I asked. “Does plain water exist in this place?”

  “Water!” said one of his friends. His goatee was immaculate. “Here? That’s not kosher, man.”

  “I think it is probably the only kosher thing here,” I replied testily. “Do you actually know anything about Jewish people?”

  “I’m circumcised,” he replied. “That’s Jewish, right? Oh, wait, Jesus, are you Jewish?”

  I looked at him. I did the slow blink. I parted my lips. He watched. I said, “I thought you were getting me some water.”

  He scrambled off to find it. Mark laughed in admiration. “Well done.”

  I narrowed my eyes in acknowledgment. Really, the secret was to say pretty much nothing at all, and when you did open your mouth, say something awful. Then they all did what you wanted.

  Mark hurried to fill the silence. “Grubb here and I were just talking about, like, this guy who landed a fighter jet after the wing had fallen off. Apparently, it fell, like, right off and he landed it anyway.”

  Grubb said, slow as lava, “Isn’t that the craziest thing you’ve ever heard?”

  I said, “Crazy.”

  Mark touched his neck and his chin, but he was looking at my neck and my chin. “Where is Lars with your drink? He’s taking forever.”

  “Just as well. I wouldn’t trust him with anything someone else poured anyway,” I said. I didn’t look away from Mark’s eyes. It wasn’t that I wanted to flirt with him, or that I wanted him, I just wanted to see what I could do. “Might have glowworms in it.”

  Mark’s teeth grazed his bottom lip as if he were thinking about the water, but I didn’t think it was a beverage he was imagining. My heart beat a little faster with the power of it. It was a tease, but what could it hurt? I just wanted to know. I wanted to know that if I wanted someone else, could I get him, and how much effort would it take? Was it as easy as just being there, saying nothing, letting them imagine who you really were?

  “Look, let’s go find you one,” Mark said. “You can watch me pour it. No glowworms.”

  My palms were suddenly sweaty. This wasn’t actually a tease. Not anymore. This was a real thing.

  I wondered how Cole felt when he slept with a girl on tour. Was it this? The game. The chase. The kick to the ego, the warmth in my guts, the knowledge that my lips wanted to be kissed and I wanted someone to unzip this dress and see how good I looked in my bra.

  I could tell him I’d get the drink myself. I could wait for Lars, although there wasn’t a chance in the world Lars was going to bring something nonalcoholic, because I knew guys, even if I didn’t know him.

  I just wanted something to happen. I just wanted to stop walking around this party alone, waiting for … I didn’t even know. When I would know I was done. When I would know I had partied, past tense.

  I said, “Let’s go find something.”

  “Be right back, man,” Mark told Grubb.

  Right back. Right back. Because this was nothing.

  I followed Mark. To my surprise, he really did lead me to the bar, where he drew a glass of water. He offered it to me, his gaze holding mine. He waited. My heart was jerking. I wanted to accomplish something, anything, even if that something was making out with Mark.

  I said, “Where am I going to drink this?”

  It was all Mark needed. He said, “Come on, I’ll show you something.”

  Something turned out to be a circular-walled concrete observatory at the end of one of the stretching balconies. It turned out to be a little bedroom inside, with a curving custom mirror on one wall and a chic red mattress just inches from the floor, all lit by skylights that let in the floodlights. It
turned out to be Mark closing the door behind us and taking my glass from me and setting it on a low end table.

  Then he grasped either side of my waist on the vinyl-or-leather dress and kissed me.

  It was probably vinyl. There was no way it was real leather at the price I’d paid for it. But on the other hand, I’d gotten it at the secondhand shop. So it could have been someone’s expensive castoff.

  We were still kissing. He was as fierce and urgent about it as Cole had been. It didn’t matter that Mark didn’t really know me. He still approached my mouth as if it were limited edition, going out of style, get it now before it’s all gone. It was somehow freeing and depressing to know that love didn’t seem to have anything to do with passion.

  He gripped my hips, hard, and it didn’t feel disagreeable. So this was what it was like to be an object. This was what it was like to objectify. If he had no name, how did it change things? If he had no face? If he was only his hands or only his pelvis pressed up against mine —

  He pulled back, just for a second.

  “Don’t say anything,” I said.

  He laughed under his breath.

  “No, seriously. Shut up.”

  He shut up.

  There was nothing unpleasant, physically, about making out with this person. In fact, the opposite, if I was reductive. My mouth parted beneath his. My belly pressed into his abs. His fingers teased down the zipper on the front of my dress, and my breath skipped when he kissed the edge of my breast. I felt like someone else. From the outside, I thought we probably were a very pretty couple. This seemed like a very grown-up, L.A. moment to have. Two pretty people kissing in an observatory built to study people, groping beside a bed meant for things beside sleep. I knew he would take off my dress if I let him, and I didn’t see why not. It probably wouldn’t be bad, even if it wasn’t good. It would be a chic and distinct story, anyway.

  His shirt had tugged up. He was ripped and not offensive in any way. This was fine. I was fine.

  Beneath his right palm, the material of my dress had made uneven waves. Surely vinyl wouldn’t move like that? I really didn’t know. Now I felt like I was going to have to look this up online.

  He unzipped my dress straight down to my belly button.

  So, I guessed this was happening. I kept waiting to feel half naked.

  Mark leaned back.

  “God,” he said, “you are beautiful.”

  His voice sounded precisely like it did when he walked into the back room in the evenings to do paperwork. Precisely like it had when he’d asked me if I knew Cole. Which was to say, precisely like Mark, because he was Mark. What was the point to him even saying that? Possibly he’d misunderstood what this was all about.

  I said, “I told you to shut up.”

  He laughed.

  I didn’t. I slapped his hand away and tugged up my zipper. “We’re done here.”

  “What?” he said. “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  I expected him to protest, but he just ran a hand through his hair. His lips were smeary neon. From me. That was from my lips. Finally, he said, “Well, damn.”

  Part of me wanted to tell him, No, really, let’s still go through with it. Because now I was just stuck with this bad taste in my mouth, and a dim feeling of hating him or hating me or hating everything.

  “It was probably a bad idea anyway,” Mark said. “I’m not drunk enough.”

  The more he spoke, and the longer it had been since he’d touched me, the more the truth was sinking in: I had almost slept with my boss’s husband. I had made out with my boss’s husband at a party. I was that girl.

  “You should go,” I told him. My voice was this side of the crypt, but only barely. “Sierra’s looking for you.”

  When he looked at me, his expression was confused for a second, and then it turned to something like pity. He laughed, but it wasn’t a funny laugh, and it was at me or him. I felt naive and stupid. “No. She’s not.”

  I leveled my gaze on him, blue eyes cold-dead behind their mask, and waited until the uncertainty crept back into his eyes. Then I said, “I have to fix my lips.”

  By the time I had fetched my purse, he was gone, the door barely cracked. I stood in front of the mirror and observed my neon-smeared lips. I cleaned them up and carefully drew my cool pink lips back on and readjusted my hair around my face and tugged the zipper of my dress until I looked the same as I had before.

  Then I took my phone out of my purse. I redid my eyeliner, careful not to smudge the neon blue Sierra had put on my eyelids.

  I took a breath.

  I dialed Cole’s number.

  “Are you sober?” I asked.

  “Oh, come on. That’s what you —”

  “Cole. Are you?”

  A pause to convey irritation. “Yeah.”

  I kept my voice very even, but it took a lot of effort. “Please come get me.”

  When I got to the party, I had to park way down the street, and then after I got in, it took me a while to find Isabel. Inside the house, the lights were out and black lights were wired up to make all of the girls glow in the UV. Outside, it was all glitter and experimental dancing because they were that sort of people. I was recognized, because it was that sort of party, but no one cared, because it was that sort of party. The music made me want to punch a hippie.

  Isabel stood by the pool in a group of people who moved their arms with the enthusiasm and gracelessness of the inebriated. She was posed. One shoulder down, chin up. Her eye makeup was black and thick except for a line of neon blue that matched her eyes. Her mouth was a glass creation, still and chiseled. She wore a white leather dress that made her look one thousand times more sophisticated than most humans. Surrounded by all this glitter, in this noise and silliness, in a world that I clumsily and loudly inhabited, she was beautiful.

  The guys in the group gazed at her with fearful awe. They looked at the face she wore right now and saw a stunning ice queen. Something to be thawed.

  All I could see was how sad she was.

  As I got closer, I heard their voices. The others were hysterical and loud. Isabel’s voice, lower, sounded bored and over it.

  I walked up behind her. They saw me before she did. “Hi, princess,” I said, loud enough for them to hear me. “The world called. They want you back.”

  She turned to me and her face, just in the split second when she saw me — I was murdered by it. Not because it was cruel, but the opposite. For one fraction of another fraction of a second, I saw naked relief on her face. Then it was gone behind the mask. But I still had it inside me.

  “What, are you going?” asked one of the other girls. She was blond and blue-eyed like Isabel, but slightly older and several degrees softer looking.

  Isabel’s hand was between her leg and mine. Without any fanfare, I threaded my fingers through hers. “Yes, yes. I’m very needy. Don’t tell anyone.” I flashed a smile at her, a needy one, and the girl’s eyebrows shot up.

  “I’ll see you on Thursday,” Isabel said. How easily she hid her misery in plain sight. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her so upset. She might have said something else. I didn’t know. I was leading her away, out of there, through the people, through the gate, down the road, toward the Mustang. We were out of neon and into the dark, but I didn’t let go of her hand.

  We got to the car.

  “I want to drive,” she said.

  I did not want to give her the keys. Wordlessly, I handed them over.

  She drove too fast, and she braked too late, but the thing about Isabel Culpeper was that she always managed to pull herself up before she went over the edge.

  “Whose party was that?” I asked.

  Isabel’s mouth went thin. She didn’t look away from the road. “My boss.”

  She floored the Mustang away from a light. We were going to die. I was ceaselessly turned on.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  The e
ngine snarled away in the silence. I didn’t think I’d ever been in a car without the radio turned on before. It felt like the end of the world.

  “Why can’t I do it?” she asked, suddenly angry. We screamed around a turn. It was possible this night would end with the car getting impounded, but it seemed like a bad idea to tell her.

  “Do what?”

  “Just forget about everything. Just go somewhere and get smashed and pretend like there are no problems or consequences. I know why. Because there are still problems and consequences. And going and — and — partying doesn’t make them go away. I feel like I’m the only sane person in the world. I don’t get why this whole world runs on stupidity.”

  Her voice was getting flatter instead of louder. “You do it. I saw you drunk. And I know you became a wolf again. I can smell it. I’m not an idiot.”

  I didn’t answer for a long time. I knew it maddened her more, but I didn’t know what to say. It was too raw that she hadn’t trusted me, and too raw that, in the end, I hadn’t been trustworthy after all.

  I had been sober, but I had also been a wolf, and that was worse.

  Isabel didn’t look away from the road. She tore around another turn. “Be afraid. Why aren’t you ever afraid?”

  “What do you want me to be afraid of?”

  The tires scuffed as we scudded to a noisy, bouncing stop at an unoccupied red light.

  “Dying. Failure. Anything.”

  I’m afraid you won’t pick up the phone.

  I said, “Where are we going, Isabel?”

  I sort of meant right then, but I also sort of meant more.

  She repeated, “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to go home?”

  She didn’t answer. That was a no. That was good. I didn’t want to take her home.

  “Do you want to go to my place?”

  “I don’t want to be on camera.”

  That, at least, I knew how to take care of.

  Cole didn’t quite take me home. He directed me to park the Mustang behind his place, but when we got out, he led the way away from the gate and toward the house next door.