NARKOTIKA was me, but it had also been Jeremy and Victor.

After an hour, “Gasoline Love” was sounding more like “Turpentine Disinterest.”

I was in a pretty bad mood by the time my guest stars arrived.

“I thought about bringing coffee,” Leon said as he stepped in. The shocked cameras swung to him — impotently, because Leon hadn’t signed a release, and wouldn’t. “But I thought that kids these days probably drank these newfangled things instead.”

He offered me an energy drink. I was unreasonably glad to see him.

“Leon, I love you,” I said, accepting the can. “Marry me and make an honest man of me.”

“Oh, well,” Leon said. He offered another one to Jeremy, who shook his head but said, “Thanks anyway, man.” He’d brought a mason jar of green tea.

Leyla sniffed and took a drag of her kombucha. “Who’s this?”

“Special guests,” I replied.

She said, “Every guest is special,” but halfheartedly.

Then Leon’s passengers stepped in: the two cops from the first episode. In uniform. One of them, I knew, had actually ended her shift a half hour before arriving here, but had agreed to come in uniform to improve the general appearance of the shot. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew no one would recognize them without the uniforms.

I hoped Baby was impressed by my sheer cunning. Surely she had to realize just how no-holds-barred brilliant it was to bring the cops back. I had really wanted to ask Leon to be in it as well, but I knew he would say yes to make me happy and then would hate it when he was recognized in the grocery store.

So I hadn’t asked him, even though, in my head, Leon would make a great recurring character on the show. Everybody’s dad/

brother/uncle/guy.

But I wanted Leon to be happy. That was the mission. Well, one of them.

I exchanged pleasantries with the cops, just polite introductory things like asking them if they had ever gone skydiving or petted a hairless dog. Then we got down to business.

The trick was that I had to find parts for the cops that they could perform in the studio without any particular skill. Sure, the one cop could play the bass badly, but that wasn’t going to cut it for a studio track. They could do percussion, though. It would get in the way of the drums, but really, anything that irritated Leyla was a bonus.

I got the cops all set up on the stomp-clap routine, and it turned out the girl-cop (Darla? Diana?) had opera training, so we went a bit wild with that. Dante had no concept of how to use a mixing board, or maybe he just had no idea of how to mix us, but that was all right, because someone whose name sounded like mine was a wizard with a synth and could run a voice through there like no one’s business.

It was turning into something quite good. It wasn’t a single, but it was beginning to sound like one of those off-thewall tracks some fans got religious over, the cult classics that somehow managed to get played long after the big ones had burned everyone else’s speakers out. A few hours in and I was feeling pretty good about life. This was not quite the point — Isabel was the point — but it was a subpoint, and it was working well.

Then the power went out.

In the false darkness, Jeremy and I looked at each other.

Girl opera cop swore, just one short, filthy word, sort of like a scream. Someone sighed. I thought it was Leon.

To the darkness, I said, “Tell me you had this on autosave, Dante.”

Dante did not reply, because he couldn’t hear me. Without any power, he was just a guy behind a glass wall.

Leyla took a drink of her kombucha — I heard her do it, and it infuriated me. Jeremy tucked a piece of hair behind his ear.

Then the power came back on.

The headphones still weren’t working, so I ripped them off and charged into the engineering room. Every computer was beeping and whirring as it came back to life.

“Give me good news,” I said.

Dante looked at me. There was a thin rim of white all the way around his pupils. He shook his head.

“Any of it?”

He said, “The drum track?”

It took a long moment for the truth to sink in: Everything weird and one-of-a-kind we had just done was gone. We could redo it, but it would sound like we had redone it. It was like today had never happened. Like someone had just taken my time and thrown it away. Like the pressing deadline that was always there had been shoved closer.

“And it didn’t occur to you to save along the way,” I said.

“You’re working with a six-figure project, and you didn’t think at some point after the drum track, I will hit these buttons here on this fancy machine and save it?”

“I did save,” Dante insisted. “The power cutting off has messed things up. Like, it’s corrupted stuff. That machine won’t even start back up again.”

I wasn’t even certain which machine he was pointing at. I was certain that Baby had done this. I was also certain that she had done it to get me to implode on camera. I was even more certain that she was going to get what she wanted.

“Show me,” I said. “Show me the corrupted files.”

Dante scrolled through a bunch of empty screens. “It’s gone, man. I don’t know. . . .”

“That is the most obvious thing you have said all day. Is this your job? Have you seen one of these things before? Tell me how it is that we still have a drum track.”

If he had been in on the plan, he was doing a good job of looking shell-shocked now. He fumbled through some more screens and muttered, “That’s, like, the last save that it paid attention to; I don’t know, I don’t know. . . .”

I gestured toward T, who stood at my shoulder. “I hope you’re happy that your total incompetence is being broadcasted to the planet.”

I stormed out. In the recording room, Jeremy was packing away his bass because he knew me, and Leyla was still sitting behind her drums because she didn’t.

“We could redo it,” the bass cop suggested.

Girl opera cop shook her head. She knew.

Leon clapped his hand on my shoulder and then got his car keys.

“It was meant to be,” Leyla said. She didn’t look surprised, but it was hard to tell if that was because she was in on Baby’s plan, or because she was baked, or because she really did believe that it was meant to be.

“I know that you’re trying to get me to kick your drum set in,” I warned her, “but I’m onto you.”

Jeremy told the cops how glad he was that they had come and that at least the cameras had caught their contributions. He made sure that he had their telephone numbers. He shook Leon’s hand. He closed the door behind them all. He was good at this.

I called Baby. “This is not the way to get me on your good side.”

Baby said, “What?”

“Oh, come on.”

“I’m not a mind reader.”

“I know you want drama. But you mess with the album again,” I said, “and —” I stopped because I couldn’t think of what to end the sentence with. I didn’t have half an ounce of leverage.

I was right back where I’d started. I’d thought I’d been so clever to circumvent the system, to make an album without a label as overlord, and here I was again, just merchandise.

I thought about how she’d been so concerned at the beginning.

I kicked over one of the microphone stands. It barely made a sound in this pointless, generic studio. This wasn’t a place to make music. It was a place to record commercials for music.

I didn’t even know what the hell I’d been thinking.

“And what, Cole? I don’t really like being threatened, and for no reason. I’m working. I have a call on the other line. I don’t know what has happened, but I’m happy to help.”

I wanted to snarl This is war! but the fight was going out of me. I couldn’t believe the track was gone. I just couldn’t believe it. What a damn waste of everything.

“I want my Mustang,” I told her. “That’s how you can help.

Get me my Mustang.”

I hung up. I felt like a toothless dog.

If Victor had been here, I would’ve turned to him and said, “Let’s go get high.”

But he wasn’t. And I was on camera. And that wasn’t me anymore. That wasn’t me anymore. That wasn’t me anymore.

I looked at Jeremy.

He said, “What are you thinking?”

I said, “I wish Victor would come through that door.”

The camera was right on me. Baby was winning this game uncontested. My brain whirred, looking for some kind of traction, some way to turn this to my advantage, but nothing caught.

Jeremy said, “That’s not gonna happen. We have to work with what we have.” He paused. “What’s the way, Cole?”

It was a ridiculous question, because that ship had sailed so miserably away.

A text vibrated through on my phone. It was from Isabel. It just said, you’d better be recording something I can dance to.

I had been, but it was gone. I pictured it, the way that track would have sounded as she danced to it. Because it was both a fantasy and a memory, I knew precisely what it would feel like to have her h*ps pressed up against mine. Isabel Culpeper, perfect ten.

I wanted that gold star.

And then it was like a bank of mist cleared from my brain.

I turned to T’s camera. “You’ve been filming this whole time, right?”

“Oh, hey,” T said, looking alarmed. “You know, it’s my job, I —”

I waved my hand to cut him off. “I just wanted to make sure you had what I needed. Let’s do this thing.”

Jeremy grinned.

Chapter Nineteen

· isabel ·

That first day that I was Virtual Cole St. Clair, I spent a lot of time on the Internet. Not because I was posting updates, but because I was researching the way Cole looked on the outside. I realized I’d only heard a few of his songs, so I listened to some with one earbud while my CNA instructor showed movies in a darkened room. I listened to the rest on my drive over to .blush. I had never read an interview with him, so I queued up web pages and scrolled through them on my phone while Sierra pinned various bits of clothing on me in the back room. I listened to NARKOTIKA Behind the Band segments as she pulled them off. After she had left me to close down the shop, I watched videos of the bands Cole thanked in his liner notes or mused on as influences in interviews.

I learned that the little hand gesture I’d noticed in the first episode meant that Cole was about to reveal something new or pull off some virtuoso bit of playing or dancing. I made a note of it. Or rather, I made a mental note that he never accidentally did the hand gesture when he was with me. It wasn’t a real-Cole gesture he had co-opted for his shows. It had to have been a gesture that he invented for them.

I learned that he had a long-running inside joke with interviewers where they often asked him what he was afraid of and he always replied “nothing.”

I learned from a two-year-old interview that he wrote most of his songs in the car or in the shower or while in movie theaters or making out with soon-to-be-ex-girlfriends.

I wasn’t interested in learning much after that. So I looked up Baby North instead.

Near the end of my shift, I called Cole. When he picked up, I heard tinny music in the background, including Cole’s recorded singing voice. The sound of it gave me a strange little crawl up my skin. “Did you finish your homework?”

“Nearly. It got complicated. I really want my gold star, though.”

“There’s no partial credit,” I replied. I clicked on a hyperlink for an article on Baby. Her face smiled out at me, open and honest, beside a headline that said death by baby. “I’m practicing being you. What’s one thing you know you would never say in an interview?”

Immediately, he replied, “ ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

I didn’t have to see his face to know he was pleased with his answer. “God, you are unbelievable. Like, do these lines just come to you, or do you actually see in your head how your words look printed before you say them?”

“What a superpower that would be. Like a thought bubble?”

I demanded, “Do you say anything without thinking whether or not it sounds good?”

“I don’t even know why I’d bother opening my mouth otherwise.”

“Yeah. You know, this whole thing where interviewers ask you what you’re afraid of and you always answer ‘nothing,’ ” I said. “That’s such a lie.”

Cole was quiet. It was impossible to tell if it was because he was picturing a clever answer in the thought bubble above his head, or because he was doing something while he was talking to me, or because he had no answer.

Finally, he replied, his voice very different from before. “It’s not a lie. It’s super clever. It’s why I’m still here on this planet.

I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out with your giant brain.

It’s a riddle. Like how to get my Mustang out here from Phoenix without having to ever speak to my parents. These are puzzles, Isabel, and I think you should solve them all for me.” His voice had returned to normal. Over-normal.

“I don’t like puzzles,” I told him.

“That’s because you are a puzzle,” Cole replied, “and you don’t like your own kind. It’s okay. I don’t like other me’s, either.”

I didn’t believe him. Cole got along great with a mirror.

“Don’t you have homework?”

“Hey, you called me.”

“Tell me what to tell the world.”