“I’m sending a car for you. An episode’s happening.”

Jeremy asked, “What’s the way?”

I said, “I have no idea.”

· · ·

Magdalene took me down to her studio space in Long Beach. I couldn’t even call it studio space. I didn’t know what to call it.

It was a warehouse near the Long Beach Airport, all concrete floors and giant doors meant for driving semitrucks through. It was big enough to fit an entire Venice block. Half of it was lined with sky blue supercars. I didn’t know what most of them were.

Flat cars with big engines and spoilers that looked like torture devices. The concrete floor between them was marked with big loops of tire marks, some smeared sideways.

The other half was a studio. It was the biggest, fanciest studio I’d ever seen, and I’d seen some pretty big and fancy studios.

There were isolation booths for singers and isolation booths for drum kits and a piano and an upright hipster piano and a rack of synthesizers and an array of guitars and bass guitars and cellos all propped up in stands, waiting to be used. The walls were covered with acoustic padding and the ceilings were hung with microphones on tracks. For a second, I thought I smelled a hint of wolf among the mixing consoles, but then it was gone and maybe it had just been me. Above me, a huge pair of shiny 3-D lips, complete with lip ring, hung on the wall. They were larger than any of the cars and red as the blood in my beating heart.

It was excessive even for excess. I turned to Magdalene. She was already drinking something out of a tiny little glass.

Quick tip: Things in tiny little glasses punch harder than things in big ones.

She smiled at me. It was a smile that had seen ten thousand cameras. Two of the ten thousand were already trained on her.

“You want something? I probably have something that will interest you.”

“I’m clean,” I told Magdalene.

“Good for you.” Magdalene laughed, and her laugh was a little hoarse, like mine was when I’d been touring a lot. “The world needs more priests.”

I wondered if Baby was hoping we’d fight. I let it pass.

“Look at all these toys you have here.”

The most insane part was that this place was clearly a concrete manifestation of her imagination. She was so over the top — huge hair, huge eyes, tight sparkly tank top, elaborate belly-button piercing, belt wider than my hand, bell bottoms, and combat boots — that she fit right in.

“Wait till the boys get here,” she said. “Play me something.”

She gestured to the piano. It was a ninefoot Steinway.

Because seven-foot Steinways are for posers.

There is only one option if you are presented with a ninefoot concert grand Steinway, especially if it is sky blue, as this one was.

I sat at it.

I wasn’t always a rock star. It wasn’t synthesizer lessons I’d asked my parents for.

I played a little fragment of Bach. Intentionally slow and stilted and soft, like a creepy clown or a joke involving Bach.

The piano was incredibly tuned. It practically played itself.

“Come now, Cole,” Magdalene purred, leaning on the piano. She rolled her eyes toward the cameras. “We’re all alone here. Surely you don’t have nerves.”

I smiled at her — the Cole St. Clair smile — and trilled out another snatch of messy Bach, fast but proficient, and then I crashed into the chords of “Spacebar.”

Magdalene grinned wildly, recognizing them at once. She pulled the glass from her lips and sang the chorus as I got to it: “Hit it, hit it, hit it!”

Each time she repeated “hit it,” she ratcheted up the scale.

Man, she had a set of pipes. And she’d gotten better since we’d first recorded that track, too. She tapped out a beat on the edge of the piano as I tripped and plummeted through the refrain of “Spacebar,” trying to translate the synth chords into a piano bit on the fly. It had been a million years since I’d played it.

But it was still catchy.

Whoever had written this song had known what they were doing.

My reflection smiled cunningly at me from the sheen of the open piano lid.

Magdalene kept singing.

And oh — oh, it was good to be playing again. To hear someone else riffing off your tune, to throw a bit of an improvisation back at them, to come back again and again to those same crashing four chords that, for two glorious weeks, America had sung over and over until they were dreaming them.

Then we’d sold the rights to a car commercial and moved on to something else.

Magdalene screamed up the last bit of the scale at the same time that I crashed down to the very bass range of the Steinway, and when the last ringing note died, she got herself another drink.

I wondered if she was supposed to be the disaster at the sidelines.

I heard slow clapping. Jeremy and Leyla had arrived, as had “the boys” — the sound techs. The oldest of the techs was the one clapping. An assistant had been filming us with his phone.

He asked, “Can I put that on the Internet?”

Magdalene said callously, “Why not? He’s written something better for later, anyway.” Then she turned to me. I was still a bit destroyed by hurling myself onto the shores of the tune. She put a small hand on my cheek. “Ah, Cole. I forgot what talent sounded like.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

· isabel ·

I could say that I had never missed a CNA class before and that I was making an exception for Cole, but I’d be lying. I had always considered class to be a negotiable concept. The only thing that mattered was the grade. Ever since I hit high school, I constantly skated that fine, dangerous line between knowing all of the material and getting in trouble for failing to participate.

Still, so far the only time I’d cut CNA class had been on my dead brother, Jack’s, birthday, but I hadn’t really been thinking about that when I cut. I was just thinking that sitting in someone else’s high school for another six hours was going to make me violently and physically ill.

I cut this time for another birthday: Cole’s. I didn’t want to surprise him until he’d actually had time to get some work done, though, so I found myself with a beautiful stretch of day with nothing to fill it. Ordinarily, these huge swaths of time would invest me with anxiety and hatred of the planet, but today, the hours seemed benevolent. I decided to pick up Sofia from her erhu lesson and make her buy some sexy boots before I drove myself to Long Beach and Cole.