“I’m going to be cremated. What good will this body do when I’ll already be on my way to the next?”

“Of course,” Cole said. “I’m going to have you stuffed, anyway.

Isabel? How about you? A machine gun perhaps, or a tiara?”

I could not smile because the current game required me not to smile. But I liked his version of me. I replied, “Both.”

“Leon?” Cole asked.

Leon was too kind for this, I could tell. He was the sort of earnest and pleasant man who would never let you know if you offended him, which only made me feel somehow pressured to not offend him. But he wanted to please Cole, because everyone wanted to either please Cole or kill him, so he answered, “I saw a grave once with an angel on it, and even though her head was like this” — he tucked his chin — “she was smiling. Just a little.

It was nice. I’d like that.”

“I could hook that up,” Cole said.

Sofia realized a second before she was asked that she was the next in line for this question. Distress welled in her eyes.

“That’s morbid,” she interjected in a sweet voice only audible to attentive dogs. Luckily for her, Cole was an attentive dog.

“Death’s not morbid,” he said. “Everything else is.”

“I don’t think it’s nice to talk about,” Sofia said bravely.

“There are so many beautiful things to talk about.”

“Indeed,” Cole agreed, to my relief. He grasped Leon’s arm and pointed. “There. Leon. Yonder. That is the photo op of the day.” Leon obediently plucked his phone from his slacks and framed the place Cole indicated: the palm trees, all slanted to the right, silhouetted on the glory-pink sky behind a white mausoleum.

“I took a photo with my mind,” Jeremy said.

My mind’s memory card was full. I had to delete an old mind-photo of a simpler San Diego sunset in order to take this one.

As a group of older women passed by us, laughing and gripping wine bottles, I asked, “What’s your plan here, Cole?”

“Actually,” Cole replied, “it’s Leon’s plan.”

At this, Leon looked modest. “I read about it in the weekend insert.”

Cole agreed, “The place where news happens. Apparently, they are going to project a motion picture on the side of that mausoleum over there” — he gestured to the photo op — “and we will sit like so” — he crossed his fingers on both hands — “and watch it.”

The white mausoleum he indicated was massive and featureless, ideal for film projection. “Which film?”

Cole leaned forward, looking knowing. Desire stabbed me.

“Beauty and the Beast.”

He smirked. It was not actually Beauty and the Beast.

I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t like it when you call me a beast.”

Cole’s grin was so wonderful that it hurt.

Leon broke in, “Folks, maybe we should find a seat?”

As Cole leaped ahead with Jeremy, Sofia hung at my elbow.

She whispered, “Oh, Isabel, he’s so beautiful.”

Only she said it like she would say terrible.

Up ahead, the boys had found a place without too many tall people in front of it. Sofia spread the blanket and served everyone sandwiches, much to my annoyance — but the others didn’t know to tell her not to. I watched her eat hers very quietly and precisely, tearing off small pieces so she wouldn’t do it wrong with her mouth open. It just made me want to punch something. Couldn’t she see that the others didn’t care about how she chewed? How they were all prepared to like her before she handed them sandwiches?

I expected (feared?) there to be alcohol of some kind, but it turned out that Jeremy was some kind of straight-edge Buddhist, and Leon had given up drinking five years before, and Cole was also abstaining, and Sofia and I were us.

Cole, sitting beside me, put his hand on my back, under my jacket. His fingers wanted me and nothing else. I was absolutely dying.

“Would you like my jacket?” Leon asked Sofia.

“Oh, no, I’m fine,” Sofia said, though she was clearly freezing and Leon had said it in a strictly fatherly way. Probably she didn’t remember what fatherly looked like.

“Sofia,” I said, lowering my sandwich from my mouth.

The edge of the bread had a red mark on it from my lipstick. “If you don’t take that man’s jacket, I’m going to set something on fire.”

Cole immediately came to life.

Jeremy shook his head slowly. “No, man. Not here.”

He said it with such lazy, muted humor that it suddenly seemed obvious that they’d been in a band together. That he, anyway, knew Cole in a way that those fangirls did not.

I expected to feel jealous, but I felt more like I’d found another member of a survivors’ club.

Sofia took the jacket.

The movie began. It turned out to be Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which we had all seen.

At one point I glanced over to Cole, and he was just — looking at me. His eyes were narrowed like he was trying to learn something from my face. He was silhouetted by the very last of the pink sky and the tall, leaning palms. It was impossible to think that California hadn’t made him, because he looked like he had emerged from the ground here along with the palms and the peacocks and the memorial of Johnny Ramone playing his guitar.

He didn’t look away.

God, I wanted to kiss him so badly.

I wished we were alone.

But there was Sofia, who needed me, and Leon, who seemed to be Cole’s driver and date, and Jeremy, who — well, I didn’t know what Jeremy was. He seemed like he could handle himself.

Partway into the movie, Sofia excused herself for the toilets.

She was gone for too long, so I pushed myself to my feet with a sigh. I whispered, “I’m just going to go check on her.”

I found her in one of the mausoleums. The wide aisle led me under a high, domed glass ceiling. On either side of me, the skyscraping walls were divided into squares that looked like post office boxes. There were small urns attached to the front of them, because these were actually boxes of dead people.

Sofia was crying noiselessly next to an urn, Leon’s jacket still over her shoulders. My heels clicked on the floor as I marched up to her.

“This is not what grown-ups do,” I told her.