· isabel ·

I went to .blush. I did my job. I sold a lot of leggings. Sierra reminded me of her upcoming party.

I went to class. I did my clinicals. I rolled over a lot of old people and cleaned up a lot of soiled beds.

I went home. My mother made an appointment for my SUV to go to the body shop. My aunt gifted me a bouquet of therapist business cards. I had been in therapy for years, though.

Talk was cheap. I wanted both of them to scream at me for my SUV — my father would have. But he wasn’t there.

Wouldn’t ever be there.

Cole texted me. Talk?

I texted back. No.

He texted back. Sex?

I texted back. No.

He texted. Anything?

I didn’t reply. He didn’t text again.

Rinse and repeat. Job. Class. Home. Job. Class. Home.

I didn’t text Cole, but I kept updating Virtual Cole. I’d have to see him in order to give his phone back, and I didn’t think I could survive that. And I didn’t have it in me to screw him over by holding his Internet presence hostage. And anyway, updating Virtual Cole was the only thing that I had to remind me that life had ever changed at all.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

· cole ·

I called Grace right before I went into the diner. Actually, I called Sam, but Grace answered his phone.

“It’s the end,” I said. “I’m going to breakfast with my parents.”

“I had the worst dream about you last night,” Grace mused.

“Did I go around L.A. biting people? Because that already happened.”

“No,” she replied. “You came home.”

I hadn’t noticed until just that moment that my friendly neighborhood camera crew was sitting on the curb right around the corner. That meant my parents were already here.

I was not convinced I could do this, no matter what Leon said. The weather condition of my heart was murk.

Grace had been talking. She was still talking. She finished, “That’s really all there is.”

“Any advice?”

“Cole, I was just giving you advice.”

“Say it again. The summary version. The abstract.”

“Sam just told me to tell you that the most important thing is to not do what you did to them on the episode.”

“That won’t happen,” I replied, “because I doubt they’ll leave the keys in the car again. Wish me luck.”

She did, but I didn’t feel lucky. I went into the diner.

I spotted them immediately in one of the red vinyl booths.

They looked like a strange album cover, a perfectly matched older couple perfectly mismatched with the lime green wall behind them. I had picked this diner as a meeting place because I thought it might be more their style, but it was possible my parents didn’t match anything in this town.

They’d spotted me. They didn’t wave. That was fair. I deserved that.

I stood at the head of the booth.

“Hello, jolly parents,” I said. There was a very long pause. My mother dabbed her cheek with her napkin. “Can I join you?”

My father nodded.

The cameras settled across the way from us. My parents eyed them. In unison, they slid menus across the table to me.

As I sat, my father said, “We didn’t order yet.”

My mother asked, “What’s good here?” which was much better than any of the other questions I was afraid she was going to ask, like “Where have you been?” or “Why didn’t you call us?” or “Where is Victor?” or “Are you coming home?”

The problem was that I wanted to answer something like, I’m unsure of this fine establishment’s specialties, but I imagine that friendly staffer there will enlighten us! and then whirl over to seize a busboy for a bit of dramatic theater. But something about how they’d opened the conversation — in the roles of my parents — seemed to block this option. It forced me to be their son. It forced me to be that other me. The old me.

“I haven’t been here before,” I replied. Meekly. Gutlessly.

My voice was a stranger to me. They were dressed the same as the last time I’d seen them, or maybe all of their clothing looked the same. Put my older brother in the booth beside me, and the St. Clair family would be as it always had been. I didn’t know why I had come. I couldn’t do this.

“We saw where you were staying,” my mother said. “It seems like a nice neighborhood.”

Venice Beach was paradise on earth, the precise shape and color of my soul, but there was no way to explain it to them.

Not in terms they would understand. They would ask how people survived without garages and why the sidewalks were so ill kept.

My parents shuffled their menus. I moved the saltshaker and the pepper shaker, and lined up sugar packets and sweetener packets according to color.

“It only says poached on this one,” my father said to my mother in a low voice. “Do you think they will do this with sunny-side up?”

God, they even smelled like they always did. The same laundry detergent.

If I could just think of something to say in their language, maybe I could survive this.

The server came over. “Are you folks ready to order?”

She was bird-boned, like my mother, and about fifty. She was dressed like an old-fashioned fifties diner waitress, complete with apron. She held a little notepad and pencil. Her eyes looked tired of everything.

“What is the best thing?” I asked her. “Not just the best thing. The best-best thing. The thing that makes you tie that apron on in the morning each day and think, That is why I am going to work today, to serve that thing to customers who have not yet had that thing and, oh, what a memorable day those unaware initiates are about to have? That is the thing I would like to order. Whatever that is.”

She just blinked at me. She blinked at me for so long that I took her notepad and pencil out of her hand. I wrote THE

AMAZING THING on our ticket. I handed it back to her.

“I trust you,” I added.

She blinked at me more. “What about your folks?”

“They trust you, too,” I said. “Wait.” I snatched the pad back and added BUT NO CHOCOLATE. I put $55 in the total box.

I handed back the pad and pencil.

My parents stared at me. The server stared at me. I stared back. I had nothing better to say, so I performed the Cole St.