“And if we don’t want to go in the end, will you make us?” I asked.
“We will only do what you want us to do.”
“But you can change what we want, can’t you?”
He looked away. “No—we can’t change you. Only influence you.”
The dim twilight made him beautiful in a blown-glass way that my seventeen-year-old self now knows could never rival Cole’s rugged charm. I leaned closer, glad he didn’t have a tag and I didn’t have a flexi-screen, that no record would show if I reached out and touched him. But he still seemed impossibly far away. I had seen the old video of Brixney and Michael—I knew I could as easy as not put my hand right through him. It wasn’t fair for him to be so beautiful and not beautiful at the same time.
I nudged the bread back toward him. “Is there anything solid in your world?”
“Much of it is solid. We just interact with things a little differently than you do.” And as he was talking, I saw in his mouth a single star, resting in the entry to his throat. But it was not a star. It was a tiny globe of light he had drawn in with his breath, and now he pushed it out so that it floated away like a bubble.
I touched his shoulder. “This isn’t who you really are.”
“A person can be many things.”
The Microsoft-Verizon rep found us after the competition, while Cole was still holed up in the sound booth because he hadn’t placed and wasn’t going to get any scholarship. I was camped outside the door, silently willing him to get over it—silent because there was nothing to say. The rep had another line for us, which Cole had to hear through the sound booth door: “Those levees can go to hell. How’d you like to live in a premier township?” It was followed by the click of the door unlocking.
She was going to make me and Cole high-concept. Our families and ten others in the floodplain would move into the best township in the country and wouldn’t pay a cent for anything. She talked about our energy, about this tension she sensed between us. But I knew it wasn’t really about energy or tension—it was about the coffee shop and how girls were drawn to Cole like moths to a flame.
Cole kept smirking at me on the drive home and asking, “What do you think she has in mind?” like he wasn’t sure yet he wanted to do it, even though his eyes gleamed with triumph. At first, I cared only that he was happy again, that he leaned close to talk to me, put his chin on my shoulder as though he did it every day. But then I thought about that new band that refused to leave Disneyworld and showed up at random places in the park to play impromptu concerts. It was dumb because everyone knew Disney had to be in on it or else the band would have gotten kicked out forever ago. I hoped Microsoft-Verizon had better ideas than that for our concept.
It turned out they did.
The rep stood in my kitchen the next day and told our parents she was going to take advantage of the fact that I’d hardly ever been on camera and would be relatively easy to scrub from the web. “Teen love is about wanting what you can’t have,” she said. “What you shouldn’t have.”
My dad adopted Grandpop’s rumbling drawl. “Just what are you proposing?”
“Cole’s a small-town charmer—any girl would want him,” the rep said, and Cole pressed himself into the kitchen wall so that I half expected he’d leave a dent. “But the only girl he wants is the one he can’t have. His cousin.”
“But I’m not his cousin,” I said stupidly.
She had a stage smile to match all those lines. Broad and disarming. “Which is why there’s no reason for you to object, Epony.”
It took a moment to sink in, and then the air went heavy as lead. I would pretend to be Cole’s cousin and he would pretend to be in love with me. It seemed more gross than sexy. But she was right about forbidden love—the girls I knew couldn’t get enough of it. That’s why they all had those Warehouse Burn pyromaniacs plastered on their arms and Tshirts.
My parents exchanged grimaces across the table. Cole’s parents started sputtering about small-town stereotypes while Cole himself looked like he’d just swallowed the world’s bitterest medicine.
In the next room, my sisters had the wall monitor set to CelebriFeed. The male lead in the latest Girl Queen movie—the tenth movie in the series—was taking a ribbing from the host, who kept insisting he must be from the Other Place. “How else can one boy be every girl’s dream? You’re some kind of illusion—you’re on another plane of existence.”
The star played at being bashful and laughed the question off. “No, no, I’m solid through and through.”