The pickup truck pulled up beside us. Star put it in park and leaned across to gaze at me through the open passenger window. She grinned easily at me.

“Did you choose life while I was gone?”

I said, “Sure.”

Jeremy asked, “Did you mean it?”

It hurt, but sort of in a good way, to look him in the face. “Yes.”

Chapter Forty-Two

· isabel ·

That night, I arrived at Sierra’s house in the canyons with my shivered-ice eyes and my slaughter lips.

Party time.

I was in a dress that was white vinyl or leather — I couldn’t tell the difference; could anyone else? If they bothered to analyze it, it meant I was wearing it wrong, anyway. I was also wearing white sandals with enormous white heels. The only color to my wardrobe was my horror lips. No one could say I hadn’t warned them.

I used to wonder what partying was really like. When I was eleven or twelve. Everyone in movies seemed so eager to go party. All the television shows were girls wondering if they were going to be invited to this or that party, talking like there were different levels and qualities of party. I couldn’t imagine what was luring them to these places, but the desperation to get there promised that it was something good.

Now I’d been to more than my fair share of parties. And it turned out that the TV parties had not been lies. They boasted most of the features of real parties: booze, making out, music that sounded better on your own speakers. Maybe some drugs or drinking games or pool or witty banter. Possibly witty banter should have been lumped in with drinking games or with making out.

Maybe I was always too sober at these things.

The house was located in the Hollywood Hills, in a highaltitude fancy neighborhood that overlooked the lights of other, slightly less fancy neighborhoods. It was an enormous white, gated compound, a sort of mesa of smoothed concrete and windows.

Tastefully hidden floodlights guided me out of the taxi to the courtyard. Because it was Sierra’s house and Sierra’s party, the music was dreamy shoegaze. It sounded like a cross between a spilled water glass and a slow-motion electronic lynching. The place was already full of people.

God, I hated them all.

I stalked in. The irregular beat of the music and the mass of people made it feel like the ground was moving. Heads might have turned. I couldn’t tell. Being me meant that I couldn’t do more than a dismissive sweep of my eyes over any given person.

Part of the problem with parties was that I couldn’t even tell what the goal was, so I never knew when I was done. I searched for Sierra. At least if she saw me, I got credit for coming.

I walked by the big pool. It was full of splashing nymphs and was lit with color-changing lights. Pink, purple, green. A boy, half-in, half-out of the pool, grabbed my ankle with his wet hand.

“Come in,” he said.

I looked down at him. He wore glittery eyeliner. I wondered what brand of eyeliner it was that it didn’t wash off in the pool water. His wet hand on my ankle reminded me of Cole doing something very similar months and months before.

I said, very coolly, “I don’t like to get wet.”

I expected the boy to protest, but he just looked abashed and then slid under the water along with any respect I might have had for him.

In the middle of the pool, a girl floated on her back in slow, lazy circles while a guy paddled lazily beside her and kissed her hand. I wondered if there was ever a world where I might have turned out like them. I wondered if that was the person I might have been if we had never moved from California; if my brother had never died; if we had not moved away from Cole; if my parents had never gotten separated.

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-thedark 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-inthedark. 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-thedark 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-thedark 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-orleather 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.