“Well,” Isabel said, thin and mean and condemning, “I’m going to leave you two here. I have things to be doing, like drilling a hole through my own temple. So long.”
Tom broke off his death stare toward his wife to look at his daughter. “I drove two hours to see you.”
Isabel’s back was to us, so I saw her arms crossed behind her back instead of her face, and I could see how she so savagely pinched the skin of her right arm with her left hand that the skin flushed red. But her voice was still glacial. “And now you’ve seen me.”
She clicked out of the room.
Tom licked his teeth. Then he said, “I see your parenting has done wonders, Teresa.”
There was no universe in which Tom Culpeper and I would be friends. Sofia ducked over her phone, texting rapidly. I saw nothing but Isabel’s name at the top of her screen.
A moment later, Isabel appeared around the side of the deck and squeezed into the playhouse — I had to crush right against Sofia to make room. Isabel looked carved from ice. Her eyes were pointed at the place where I’d signed the playhouse, but she wasn’t really looking at anything at all.
“Here,” I said.
I offered her the marker, but she didn’t take it. She said, “I want to forget I was ever here.”
Sofia volunteered, “I can go in and get some cookies if you want them.”
Isabel snapped, “I don’t want you to go get me any goddamn food, Sofia!”
Her cousin somehow managed to shrink without actually occupying any less space. Isabel closed her eyes, her mouth thinning.
I was sandwiched between two miserable girls and I had no car of my own to go anywhere else, and even if I did, it was a Saturn. And once Sofia had said cookie, I really did want one, because our dinner had been reneged by suspicious sushi chefs.
But now Teresa and Tom Culpeper were having a proper scream fest in the kitchen and really, nobody could go inside without risking civilian casualties.
“I would take a cookie,” I said to Sofia, “but I’m watching my weight. Camera adds twenty pounds, you know, and there’s really no point to life if I can’t be handsome on camera.”
Isabel snorted. Sofia snuffled and murmured something.
“What?” I asked.
“Lens distortion,” Sofia sniffed. “That’s why it adds twenty pounds. Every — sniff — lens is technically a fish-eye so it makes the middle of everything bigger, like your nose and stomach and stuff. And all of the lighting and flash and slave flash and — sniff — whatnot gets rid of shadows and edges, so you look even fatter.”
“Well,” I said. “The more you know.”
The fight in the kitchen escalated. (Teresa had just shouted gloriously: Isn’t lawyer just another term for whore? And Tom had replied, If we’re talking about women who work all night long, I think the term is doctor.) I retrieved my phone. “Want to see the episode we did today?”
Sofia said, “What’s it about?”
“That’s a surprise. I could tell you, but then I’d have to edit you out of the world’s fabric.”
Isabel opened her eyes. I thumbed through screens on my phone and navigated to the website. Both girls leaned a little closer to the illuminated screen in the darkness.
The episode began with my fight with Leyla and proceeded apace to the fight with Chad over Jeremy.
“What a jerk,” Sofia said.
“Doesn’t he know Jeremy was married to you first?” Isabel added hollowly. I knew she was saying it for Sofia, to sound like she was into the video-watching and to be forgiven for being mean earlier. It worked, too, because Sofia badly wanted to forgive her.
After I secured Jeremy, the three of us headed to the address Isabel had given me. It was the wedding of a super-fan in Echo Park. Well, according to Isabel it was a super-fan. A lot was resting on Isabel’s ability to both play me on the Internet and also know how to do her research. Because if this turned out to be just a normal person’s wedding or a casual fan’s wedding, we were heading to disaster. Timing was tight, and the Saturn mysteriously ran out of gas on the way. We were forced to walk for gas to a station where the attendant just happened to recognize me.
I paused the video. “So this is the part where I got to find out if Isabel really did know everything.”
Sofia said, “Why?”
“She’s the one who found the wedding.”
Sofia’s giant eyes turned to Isabel.
Isabel said, “Good thing for me I know everything.”
And she did. We eventually made it to Echo Park, where both the bride and the groom turned out to be super-fans, and the bride fainted wonderfully and mostly on camera when she saw me and Jeremy climb out of the car. Much to the horror of all of the parents involved, we jammed and played the couple down the aisle. Leyla wasn’t even terrible on the drums. It really was a fine bit of television.
Sofia sighed happily. “It’s so romantic. Was it that romantic in real life?”
“Sure,” I said.
Isabel was scrolling through the video comments on my Virtual Me phone. There were a lot. Too many to read all of them, even if you wanted to. Isabel squinted at the most recent one. It was a paragraph long, full of love for NARKOTIKA and weddings and asking if I would ever write another song like “Villain.”
As we were both looking, another comment came in.
Comment number 1,362, and just one line:
cole st clair facedown is how I remember him Isabel pursed her lips. She didn’t look at me. I felt trapped between that comment and the confrontations in the sushi restaurant and with Chad. It felt like my past was getting closer and closer instead of the other way around.
Sofia was still in rapture from the glib ending of our episode.
“Do you think you’d have a rock band at your wedding, Isabel?”
“I’m not getting married,” Isabel said, clicking off the work phone and putting it away. She still wasn’t looking at me or at the house or at anything. “I don’t believe in happy endings.”
Later, in the empty apartment, that was all I could remember clearly. The aborted dinner with Baby was a blur of humiliation and anger. The conversation with Chad a smear of doubt. The smiles of the wedding guests: forgotten.
I just remembered the one person I wanted to be with saying she didn’t believe in happy endings.
When I got into the Saturn late that night or early that morning, the radio was playing “Villain.” My voice snarled at me as I backed it out into the alley: