But he wasn’t. So all I could think was: Isabel, don’t fall in love with him again.

Chapter Thirteen

· cole ·

“Dinner,” I told the phone as I walked back to the apartment. I was holding a nine-dollar orange juice that Baby’s budget had paid for. The sign outside the juice store had said change your future with sunshine in a glass. My future was looking pretty great already, and I couldn’t wait to see what would happen if I added orange juice to it. “That’s the next meal.”

“What?” said Isabel. There was something satisfying, really, about just calling her number and having her pick up.

“Dinner. Next meal. You. Me. What a delicious plan we have.”

“I can’t,” Isabel replied. “I promised my cousin Sofia that I’d go out with her. She’ll become a creepy old lady if I don’t take her out.”

“I like it when you’re noble. You could come to my place,” I said. It was hard to tell if the orange juice was changing my future, because I hadn’t known where I was heading before I started drinking it. “There is room in the shower for three.”

“I am not taking my cousin to your shower for a good time.

What sort of lesson does that teach her? You could come out with us.”

I didn’t know what kind of a person this Sofia was, but I didn’t feel up to small talk. Right now I was basking in the contentment of having done a job well and having earned a damn orange juice. “What sort of music is playing tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“You live in L.A. and you don’t know?” I actually didn’t know who was playing, either, but it felt like something that I would know if I actually lived here.

“I don’t like concerts. People jump around and smell, and the music sounds like crap.”

“I don’t know if I can talk to you if you’re going to be spewing this blasphemy all the time.” I paused to look at a sign that advertised a professional phrenologist. The sign also featured a line drawing of a bald man in profile with stars around his head.

It was hard to understand what the product on offer was. “Have you never been to a concert that you liked?”

“Let me think about it; no, no, I haven’t. Have you ever been to one you actually like? Or do you just think you ought to like them?”

“That’s a ridiculous question,” I replied, although possibly it wasn’t. I hadn’t been to a lot of shows until I was the show, and it turned out that the music industry disapproved of you missing your own concerts, even if you didn’t think they were a good time. “Is Sofia real?”

“What? I don’t even know why she is the way she is. Nothing in her childhood seems to support her level of neuroticism.

Wait. You mean is she a real person? I didn’t invent a cousin to get out of dinner, Cole. I’d just tell you.”

I asked, “Are you going to pick up next time I call you?”

“I did this time, didn’t I?”

“Say yes.”

“Yes. Conditionally yes.”

I finished the orange juice. I was trying to be magnanimous in light of the discovery that tonight wasn’t going to involve Isabel Culpeper’s lips. This juice had changed my future in unpleasant ways. “What conditions?”

“Sometimes you do things like call me forty times a day and leave obscene voicemails and that’s why I don’t pick up.”

“Ridiculous. That doesn’t sound like me. I would never call an even number of times.”

“Also, sometimes you call only because you’re bored and not because you have anything to say, and I don’t want to be some sort of living Internet that you summon to entertain yourself.”

That did sound like me.

“So go home and write your album and then call me in the morning and tell me where we’re going this weekend.”

“I’ll be all alone.”

“We’re all alone, Cole.”

“That’s my little optimist,” I said.

After I hung up, I walked back to the house.

I thought about kissing Isabel in the shower.

I thought about how I had the evening alone in this strange New Age paradise.

I thought about working on the songs for the album.

I thought about calling Sam.

I thought about getting high in the bathroom.

I crossed the yard to the stucco house where Leyla was staying.

The sliding door to the yard stood open.

Inside, it was mostly just a white sofa and a lot of bamboo.

The evening light through the front windows made it look like an elegant eco-car showroom, minus a car. Leyla sat in the middle of the floor performing yoga or meditation. I couldn’t remember if they were actually different things. I thought meditation was the one that didn’t require special pants.

I knocked on the doorjamb.

“Lily. Leyla. Can I talk to you a second about tomorrow?

When we make the world a better place?”

Leyla blanketed me with a heavy-lidded, pacific gaze.

“Oh, you.”

“Yes, me. Funny story: That is also the first thing my mother said to me.”

Leyla didn’t laugh.

“I just thought I ought to let you know,” she said, “because I believe in honesty: I don’t respect your work or anything about your personal sense of life.”

“God. Well. That’s out there now.”

Leyla extended an arm and stretched. “It feels good, doesn’t it?”

I wondered if it was some kind of milestone, to be dissed by a hippie. “I wasn’t really reaching for the word good, but okay.

Do you want to play any variations on that note, or was once enough for you?”

She switched arms. Her speed ranged between excruciating and sloth-like. “People are totally expendable to you. They’re just, like, objects.”

“Okay, and?”

“And you are in it for the celebrity, not the music.”

“That is where you’re wrong, my friend,” I told her. “I am in it for the both of those things. Fifty-fifty, at least. Maybe even forty-sixty.”

“Have you even written the album we’re supposed to record in six weeks?”

“Now you’re harshing my buzz.”