I decided it was time to get back to playing my own game.
They paid the new girl to go in and out of grocery stores while Cole pined for her near the cart return. The two of them were supposed to be fighting. Over me, I suppose. Sometimes when she walked out, he looked at her like he was missing something and she had it in her shopping bag. I didn’t think he was in love with her. In fact, I happened to know that he hated that pouty city look, the fake needle marks, the black-smudged under-eyes. But there were a lot of things missing in Cole’s life and it was probably easier for him if he could put them all in one bag.
I ambushed Cole while they had an actual cameraman camped in view of the fluorescent storefront of the grocery store.
Cole was stunned to see me, in a five-million-volt stun gun kind of way. “Are you—what’re you—?” he sputtered. “Are you okay?”
I waved away his We shouldn’t be meeting like this but I’m so glad to see you attempt. “I have to talk to you. I’m going back.”
“Back?”
“Home.”
He shook his head, genuinely confused. Home was underwater, along with busted-up levees. But I wasn’t talking about home home. I was playing for the cameras. I was giving us a way out.
“I’m going to the Other Place,” I said.
Cole shrank back, surprised. I almost reached for him. Even now, hurt as I was, I felt he was a magnet and I was metal.
“I want you to come with me,” I said, and almost grimaced at how my voice cracked.
“How—how can I? What’re you—”
“I’m leaving tomorrow morning.” Leaving L.A., even if you don’t come with me. Quitting this act.
He pulled me aside, as if the cameraman couldn’t change angles. “What are you talking about?”
“I won’t do this anymore.” I lowered my voice to a tone I hoped his mic wouldn’t pick up. “I know you hate it too. Come with me.” I touched his arm, slid my hand down to twine my fingertips in his.
I knew he wanted to say it: Come with you where, exactly? He didn’t believe, of course, that we could go to the Other Place. But he couldn’t break the act while he was wearing a microphone and the cameraman was behind my shoulder. He wouldn’t go that far off-script.
And I hardly knew myself how serious I was. I wanted to leave L.A. and leave the act. Something inside me stirred when I thought about trying to cross into the Other Place. But was it adrenaline, or my vorpal, long dormant and finally coming to life?
I tried to find it, tried to reach out with it and make Cole listen to me. I slipped Grandpop’s old map into Cole’s hand. “There’s a train. Tomorrow morning.”
Cole glanced at the map and thrust it into his pocket before the camera could get a good view of it. “What the hell is this all about?”
I glanced through the window at rows and rows of boxed food—rice and pasta and powdered salty cheese mix. Cole’s other girl was there, oblivious to what was happening out on the sidewalk. She was scrutinizing a package of instant rice. I remembered Grandpop’s comment about knowing a people by learning about their food. I imagined the girl as a student of the L.A. species and almost laughed. Funny how a person’s jokes can outlast him.
Cole was waiting for me to say something.
I touched his hand again. “Just come with me.”
“You know I can’t.” Was he saying it for the cameras, because he couldn’t cross into the Other Place? Or was he saying it for me, because he wouldn’t leave the act?
Nothing in his gaze would tell me. I pulled my elbow out of his grip and strode away.
The Microsoft-Verizon rep was waiting in my hotel room when I got back. Her smile had widened into a shark’s grin.
“You’ve decided to go off-script,” she said.
The wall monitor was tuned to Cole’s feed, as always. He was alone in his kitchen with a stack of canned black beans and his guitar. I spent a few moments listening to the low tone of his song, letting his voice fill up the dim space of my hotel room: “If the world is a creek bend, you’re my city. It’s pretty to pretend. Then it ends.”
I turned to the rep, my insides full of daggers. “Remember? I wrote the script in the first place.”
“And Microsoft-Verizon financed it. Your whole act.” She smiled at the pleasantly poignant sight of Cole singing to his empty kitchen. “I wonder where your parents are going to live after you and Cole have run away together.”
I imagined my sisters sighing over Cole’s feed, urging him to come back to me. Would they be surprised if I disappeared? They might believe I had been an alien all along, and then someday a month or a year from now they’d look up from the screen and say, Wait? Wasn’t she just our sister?