“I don’t think so.”

We drink some more tequila and do another couple of lines each. I forgot this about us; we never knew when to stop when we were together, and the time between racking up lines would diminish until we started moving like a time-lapse film, cutting out all unnecessary pauses as we dipped our heads.

“What did you come back for? Dylan?”

I shake my head. Another line, this one thicker than I like. I wish we weren’t in the sticks of Malibu and that there was somewhere nearby I could buy a pack of cigarettes.

“Me?” She puts her hand across her heart like she’s flattered, and I shake my head, then point at her, acutely, perfectly.

“Definitely not you. You’re the worst,” I say, and Laurel is pissed for a moment before we both collapse into ridiculous, charged laughter, but I’m only really feeling 10 percent of it. I do another line of coke.

“I came back because I realized I was trying to be someone who doesn’t exist anymore,” I say, my throat stinging.

“But then when I’m here, I just feel like I’m letting everyone down all the time too. I’m never going to be what anyone wants me to be, you know? Even that little shit in Best Buy or my own fucking sister—they think I’m going to be . . . I don’t know—” I search for the right word to perfectly, irrevocably encapsulate how I feel, the coke charging through my bloodstream now and coating every word I say with a thick, urgent intensity. “Cool. They think I’m going to be cool. I’m not cool. I’m not impressive.”

Laurel bursts out laughing again, and some powder falls out of her nose. She claps her hand across her nose and mouth, and you can’t even tell that she’s laughing anymore, other than the snorts escaping.

“I fucking missed you. You’re worried that people don’t think you’re cool?”

“No, I’m worried they do think I’m cool.”

“You’re an idiot, Grace.”

We sit on the floor with our backs against the sofa, and everything seems brighter in the room, the lights glowing around us.

“You left me too. You know that, right?” Laurel says. “And I don’t think it’s better when you’re not here.”

“I’m paying you, you don’t count,” I say.

“You think you’re paying me?” Laurel looks at me as if I’m insane, and it all suddenly seems so funny that I start to laugh. She doesn’t laugh this time, and I can see instead that she’s warming up to the idea of having a meaningful coked-out chat, but the tequila and coke both hit me behind the eyes at the same time.

“I thought I was supposed to like myself by now,” I say, and now my eyes are stinging with tears because it’s finally the truth and it makes me think about how nice it would be to tell her, to get the thing off my chest and set it free into the world, to let it feed off somebody else’s oxygen, somebody else’s bones, but instead I start to gag as the bitter coke drips down the back of my throat. It’s too much and I run to the toilet to throw up, hot messy tears running down my cheeks while Laurel strokes my hair.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I wake up facedown on the sofa, my mouth tasting like petrol. Every inch of my flesh is covered in an icy sweat as my brain pulses in my skull, knocking against the back of my eyes. I know that sleep isn’t an option from this point on, so I stumble through to the bathroom, avoiding looking directly at the mess from the night before. I turn the shower on and make sure it’s scalding hot before I step into it, then I crouch on the floor like an animal, my head in my hands as the water floods over me.

I have just wrapped a towel around me when someone knocks at my front door. I stagger across the living room, assuming it’s Laurel with provisions, like it always used to be. She would turn up with a bottle of 5-HTP to top up our serotonin levels, a packet of Emergen-C to replace the nutrients we lost, a weed pen and sometimes a Xanax, depending on how much coke we’d done the night before, because we weren’t actually trying to kill ourselves at that point.

I open the door, and Dylan is standing there with his hands in his pockets.

“Oh fuck,” I say, stepping forward in an attempt to shield him from the scene in my living room. Two empty bottles of tequila, my clothes strewn across the sofa, traces of white powder on the coffee table and the unmistakable stench of tequila-laced vomit.

Dylan looks over my shoulder and then back at me.

“Dylan . . .” I start, but there’s nothing I can say.

“It’s okay, I should have called,” he says, backing away. “I just wanted to check how you were doing, but it looks like you’re all settled in.”

I reach out to stop him from leaving, but he sidesteps my touch and then tries to smile at me to show just how okay the whole thing is. I feel sick as he walks down the steps, and I know that, after everything, he’s still only trying to act normal so I don’t freak out, which makes everything worse. Surely there must be some limit to how many times you’re allowed to hurt another human.

I watch him get back into his car and drive up the dirt track. When his car disappears at the top, something inside me breaks and I slide down the wall of the house, sobbing like I haven’t since my first night back in Anaheim. As tears fall down my cheeks, I look up at the peach house, shimmering on the hill above me.

* * *

? ? ?

When the beetles take a break from scuttling over my brain, I force myself out of the house to get something to eat. Laurel isn’t answering my calls and I don’t trust myself to drive, so I walk up the hill to the highway instead, instantly regretting it when I realize that Los Angeles isn’t playing fair today. It is fiercely, unfathomably hot, and the ash from forest fires one hundred miles north is coating my lungs. Sweat patches have already formed on my T-shirt, and I can’t remember ever having been this thirsty. If this were Venice, I’d already be in possession of a forty-dollar green elixir smoothie promising me beauty and vitality and the cleanest liver in town, but it’s Malibu, so all I can do is walk into the first place I come to—a gas station on PCH. I buy some dill-flavored potato chips, a pack of Babybel cheese and a huge bottle of water. As I’m paying, I notice the hot counter next to the till, and I point to a slice of stale pizza, which the attendant drops stiffly into a brown paper bag, all the while staring at me as if I’ve made some terrible life choices to get here. I grip the bag with sweaty hands and am stumbling out of the store when someone says my name.

“Grace.”

I turn around. It’s a man around my dad’s age, slight, with acne scarring and dark eyes. At this point, it seems like as good a time as any to mention that everyone I meet feels at least slightly familiar to me, so the fact that I think I recognize him means nothing. An example—I meet my driver for the night and become convinced that he also worked behind the cash register in the bookstore I visited the day before. I’m aware that it says a lot about my self-absorption that I think strangers are on some sort of rotating wheel, orbiting my life like something out of The Truman Show, but does being aware of that make it better or worse? It’s hard to say.

The man in the gas station reaches into his cross-body bag, and now I notice how heavy it is, how much he’s trying to blend in with his backward gray baseball cap and white T-shirt. He pulls out a long-lens camera and grins at me.

“This is my lucky day. Welcome home, Ms. Turner. Do you mind?”

“Can I say no?”

He shakes his head, still smiling.

“You know how it works.”