She handed me a Coke. One of those glass bottles, satisfyingly cold in your hand before you even cracked the cap. Baby watched me tip my head back to drink before she put hers to her lips. She was still appraising me. Looking at my throat and my hands.

She thought she knew me.

“Oh, I have —” She used just her pinky to pull open a drawer, and she withdrew a notepad. One of those tiny ones, palm-sized, that urged you to be brief. “This is what you wanted?”

I was pleased she remembered, but I just nodded coolly as I accepted the pad. I slid it into my back pocket.

“Look, kid,” she said, “this is going to be hard.”

My eyebrows twitched at “kid.”

“I want you to know that I’m here whenever you need me.

If the pressure gets to be too much, I’m just a phone call away.

Or if you want to come over, that’s fine, too. The house is only a mile from here.” Her concern looked genuine, which surprised me. From her body of work, I’d expected an infant-devouring monster.

“Right,” I said. “You told me. See, I already have your number programmed.”

I flipped my phone around so that she could see her number and above it, in the name field, Nervous Breakdown/Death.

Baby laughed out loud, absolutely delighted.

“But I am serious. You’d be surprised how the cameras can get to you,” she added. “I mean, they won’t be on you all the time, of course. Mostly just for the episodes. A little bit in the house, you and the band. You pretty much tell them where and when you need them. But, you know, the viewers can be pretty cruel. And with your background . . .”

I just flashed my NARKOTIKA smile at her again. I’ve seen it, this smile of mine. In magazines and on blogs and in liner notes and in the ever-fond gaze of the mirror. I’ve heard it takes more muscles to frown than smile, and I’m sure it’s true when it comes to this particular expression. It’s just a twitch of the lips, really, just a narrowing of the eyes. Without a single word, it tells the other person that not only have I got them figured out, but I also have it figured out, where it stands for the world.

I mostly use it when I can’t think of anything clever to say.

“It’s been a bit much for others,” Baby admitted, as if we didn’t both know the fate of her previous television subjects.

“Especially if they have a history of . . . well, substance problems.”

I kept smiling. I swallowed the rest of my Coke and handed her the bottle.

“Let’s see the house,” I told her.

She smashed the Coke into a recycling bin the color of the sky. “What’s the hurry? You East Coasters are always in a rush.”

I was about to tell her I had dinner plans, and then realized I didn’t want to tell her who I had them with. “I’m excited to see this future you’ve planned for me.”

Chapter Five

· isabel ·

“I made sandwiches,” my cousin Sofia said as soon as I walked in the door to the House of Dismay and Ruin that evening. She said it so fast that I knew that she had been waiting for me to walk in the door so that she could say it to me. Also, I knew that even though she said sandwiches, what she meant was please look at this culmination of a culinary process involving more than four hours of preparation.

I asked, “In the kitchen?”

Sofia blinked huge brown eyes at me. Her father — one of the numerous males who had been jettisoned from our collective lives — had aptly named her after the drop-dead gorgeous actress Sophia Loren. “And a little in the dining room.”

Great. A sandwich that filled two rooms.

But there was no way I couldn’t accept one, even if I was meeting Cole for dinner. Sofia was my cousin on my mom’s side. She was a year younger than me and lived in breathless fear of failure, time passing, and her mother falling out of love with her. She also adored me for no reason I could discern. There were plenty of other people more worthy of her adulation.

“They wouldn’t all fit in the kitchen?” I kicked off my slouchy boots at the front door, where they landed on a pair of my mother’s slouchy boots. The empty coat rack rocked, tapping against the sidelights before righting itself. God, this place was soul-sucking. Although I’d been here for twenty-one Tuesdays, I still wasn’t used to it. The McMansion was sterile enough to actually remove pieces of my identity every time I returned to it, insidiously replacing them with wall-to-wall white carpet and blond hardwood floors.

“I didn’t want to be in anyone’s way if they wanted to make something else,” Sofia replied. “You look pretty today.”

I waved a dismissive hand at her and walked into the dining room. Inside, I discovered that Sofia had spent the afternoon preparing a long, color-coordinated buffet bar of homemade sandwich toppings. She’d carved flower-shaped tomatoes, roasted a turkey, shaved a cow’s butt. Conjured four different flavored vinaigrettes and aiolis. Baked two different kinds of bread in two different shapes.

It was arranged in a spiral with the vegetables in the very center. Her phone and huge camera lay at the end of the table, which meant she’d already put it on one of her four blogs.

“Is it all right?” Sofia asked anxiously. She crumpled a napkin in her lily white hands.

This was usually the part where people assumed Sofia suffered from heavy parental expectation. But the only thing I could tell that my aunt Lauren expected of Sofia was for her to be as stressed out as she was, and Sofia seemed to be doing that admirably.

She was a finely tuned instrument that hummed in emotional resonance with whomever she was standing closest to.

“It’s a gross overachievement as usual,” I said. Sofia sighed in relief. I circled the table, examining it. “Did you vacuum the entire upstairs, too?”

Sofia said, “I didn’t get the stairs.”

“God, Sofia, I was joking. Did you really vacuum?”

Sofia peered at me with giant, luminescing eyeballs. She was such an imaginary animal. “I had time!”

I attacked a piece of bread with a serrated knife. Goal: sandwich.

Side effect: mutilation. When Sofia saw my struggle, she hurried around the table to help me. Like a slow-motion murder scene, I wrestled the knife out of her hand and cut two uneven slices on my own. Aunt Lauren had no problem with her being so goddamn subservient, but it bothered the hell out of me.