He turned the key, though he knew it was useless; the engine only sputtered. Leopold sighed and banged his head against the steering wheel, a familiar sensation of failure enveloping him. When he raised his head again, the first thing he saw was his father’s giant face looming against the sky, radiating disappointment. And then he read the line below the new book’s title about how the last one had been an “instant bestseller,” and he pictured the corner of their garage that was filled almost to the ceiling with unopened boxes of the book his father had bought himself, and something inside Leopold turned to hot metal.

  He yanked the hood release, threw open his door, and got out of the car without waiting for a break in traffic. Ignoring the honks from passing motorists, he circled the Volvo, opened the hood, and tugged apart a bundle of wires beside the inlet manifold. The oxygen sensor cable had rattled loose from its harness again. He reseated the wire and wrapped it with fresh electrical tape from the roll he kept on hand for such occasions. A new sensor was expensive, one of several chronic maintenance issues that would’ve cost more to fix than the Volvo was worth; this summer he’d already poured most of what he’d earned slinging lattes at his coffee shop job into keeping her running. His dad was certainly not interested in throwing money at a car that left oil stains on his pristine driveway. Richter had even tried to bribe him with a less elderly and mechanically superior BMW if Leopold would only let the Volvo go, but Leopold had refused, and Richter, assuming the cost and trouble of fixing the Volvo would eventually break his son’s will, had let the matter drop. Instead, Leopold had learned how to deal with all but the most complex of the car’s issues himself, and in the past year had become an expert in the seemingly endless mechanical quirks of 1991 Volvo 240 station wagons.

  This was surprising to Richter only because he didn’t pay much attention to his son. Leopold had always been stubborn and proud, and he liked doing fussy, technical work with his hands. It had started with learning to repair the janky old VCR, back when he was watching Sunderworld ten hours a day. Lately he’d been coaxing the coffee shop’s temperamental fifty-year-old espresso machine back to life whenever it broke. Leopold found the close attention such tasks demanded of him centering; they distracted him from the mental quicksand of anxiety and self-doubt. At the moment, reseating the detached oxygen sensor cable was distracting him from the question of whether he might be losing his mind. As vehicles whipped dangerously around him on both sides, he wondered if he’d crossed the line from stubbornness to stupidity. He was now risking his life for an old car. Maybe it really was time to let her go.

  He’d just finished wrapping the new connection when a great boom sounded, rattling the ground and startling Leopold so badly he cracked his head on the underside of the hood. He emerged, rubbing the back of his skull, to find that the sky—which a minute ago had been its usual smog-stained tan—was now crowded with thunderclouds.

  All at once, it began pouring rain. He closed the hood and dove back into the car, though not quickly enough to avoid getting soaked. He sat for a moment, gazing at his still-throbbing hands, then out at the rain.

  A small, quiet voice in the back of his mind whispered, Did I do that?

  He chased away the thought, then turned the key in the ignition. The Volvo started.

  Rain transformed the windshield into a weeping smear of refracted neon. He turned on the wipers, but only the one on the passenger’s side worked. The other had been wrenched off by a vandal back in March—the last time it had rained in LA—and he hadn’t yet bothered to replace it. He leaned his body all the way across the center console so that he could see through the windshield’s unsmeared half and drove with one stretched leg and one pointed toe working the pedals.

  He joined the halting flow of early evening traffic. After a few blocks it occurred to him that he had no intention of going home. He didn’t want to face his father, couldn’t stomach another lecture, and wasn’t about to deliver Bessie back to a place where a tow truck might be waiting to haul her away. If anyone was getting rid of the Volvo, it would be Leopold himself, on his own terms and in his own time. So for a few minutes he just drove, the touristy glitz of Sunset giving way to the gritty strip malls of Hollywood, and he tried to make sense of what had happened to him.

  It all seemed obvious enough, in retrospect.

  The flaming raccoon, the winged woman, the red streetcar: episodes, all in his head. And the red sparks? Could his mind really have manufactured such an intensely real-seeming thing, just inches from his eyes?

  He folded the fingers of his right hand inward to trace the scarred ridge along his palm. It was a self-inflicted wound from years ago, when he used to clench his fists so hard the fingernails bit indelible half-moons into his flesh. The itching and heat could be some new phase of the healing process, he supposed. He’d read that certain scars could take a decade to mend.

  But the rain: He hadn’t imagined that.

  The city was in the grip of a monthslong drought, so dire that wildfires had been erupting in the foothills. No rain had been forecast; even a drizzle would’ve been news. Suddenly, he couldn’t seem to get enough air into his lungs.

  Of course you didn’t make it rain.

  Just entertaining the idea made him feel like he was losing his grip on reality. It had been a coincidence, obviously, and making anything more of it was dangerous. If he let himself believe he could control the weather, who knew what he’d let himself believe tomorrow—and then he’d be off the deep end completely, back to the days he’d spent waiting for talking coyotes to deliver magical keys. No, no, it was all in his mind—old, undigested traumas being regurgitated. He just prayed the episodes would stop. It was one thing for a fragile twelve-year-old who’d lost a parent to have psychotic breaks—call it what it was—and quite another for an almost-eighteen-year-old who was supposed to be applying to top-tier colleges to endure them.

  The rain worsened, grinding traffic to a crawl. It was hard to see even through the wipered section of windshield. Bessie inched along a block of sagging courtyard motels, their signs boasting amenities like “Electric Heat.” At a standstill he collected the fast-food wrappers and parking receipts that had cascaded forward during the near-crash, tossing them into a Ralphs bag. He was nearly finished when, beneath it all, he uncovered something that gave him pause.

  A flimsy book, one that had been wedged tight under the passenger seat. It was his mother’s old Thomas Guide, a spiral-bound street atlas of Los Angeles with a bleached photo of downtown’s stubby skyline on its cover. Though Leopold hadn’t looked at it in years, he’d never forgotten it was there.

  The Guide was long, long out of date. It had been ancient even 7,261 miles ago, but his mother had refused to drive anywhere without it. Just in case, she always said, although she’d never said in case of what. One day, after he’d finally gotten his license, he’d cracked it open and found a note inside the front cover, inscribed to him, in his mother’s handwriting.

  To Leopold. Just in case.

  He’d shoved it back under the seat like it was radioactive, and there it had stayed.

  Now he shoved it back again. A truck horn blared and Leopold’s head snapped up as if he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have. He stomped the pedal and Bessie lurched forward, his heart racing inexplicably—and then, spotting a rain-bleared figure through the passenger window, Leopold’s mind produced a word he hadn’t thought of in years.

  Shiggoth.

  Leopold relaxed. A shiggoth was a lizard-like monster from Sunderworld; this was just a woman shielding herself from the rain with a fold of sopping cardboard, her stringy hair like a wet mop. She ran toward one of the glarey neon motels, taking shelter under a ragged awning. The Fade Inn was the grungiest on the block, with barred windows and a faulty sign that blinked irregularly.

  The woman seemed to be staring at Leopold, her head turning as the Volvo passed at a walking pace. Then she opened her mouth and a long, narrow tongue shot out, snatched something from the air, and reeled back again.

  Leopold thought: Nope.

  That would be his mantra.

  Nope. Not today.

  The woman took a moment to savor whatever it was she’d caught before tossing away her cardboard umbrella and scurrying inside the motel.

  Nope, nope, nope, not happening, Leopold repeated to himself, and then traffic unclenched its grip, and he began to move forward.

  Now his heart was pounding. He was starting to get scared. Not of the visions, but of his own unraveling. He swore and swore, a long, angry litany of foulness directed at himself and his traitorous brain.

  He knew he should’ve parked the car and called an Uber, but he was too stubborn to pay twenty bucks to get somewhere he could’ve driven blindfolded. In fact, his hands had already made the right turn onto Las Palmas, because they seemed to have figured out what he needed even before his brain had.

  He needed to talk to Emmet.

  Emmet Worthington, Leopold’s best friend since the fourth grade, was the only person in the world with whom Leopold could imagine having a conversation about whether he might be losing his sanity. Just as this occurred to him, his phone started vibrating. With some effort he wedged it out of his pants pocket.

  Mind meld. It was Emmet.

  “Are you almost here?” Emmet said, half shouting over noise in the background. “I don’t see you.”

  “Almost where?” Leopold asked, but then he remembered, and his stomach sank.

  “The Stench. Mika’s show.” He was annoyed. “Her band plays in half an hour.”

  Mika was Emmet’s girlfriend, and Emmet was nothing if not a dutiful partner. In all the craziness of the past few hours, Leopold had completely forgotten that he’d promised to be there. Which meant it was going to be very hard to talk to Emmet alone.

  “Shit, I totally spaced. I’m sorry. It’s been…a day.”

  “But you’re coming?”

  “Yeah. Yes. And hey, at some point tonight, I need to talk to you.”

  “What happened? Your dad’s head finally explode?”

  “Something like that.”

  There was a slight pause. “You okay, Mister Berry?”

  They’d addressed each other with a formal mister since age nine. A joke that stuck.

  “I’m fine, Mister Worthington. See you in twenty.”

  “Take Fountain. Traffic’s shit.”

  “Always,” replied Leopold.

  Seven

  Leopold sat parked across from The Stench, the rain slackening to mist, his heart slowing as Bessie’s hot engine ticked. A painterly twilight had settled over the city, magical and portentous, lending this soot-stained slice of downtown an otherworldly splendor. The dead-eyed windows of old warehouses lining the street had come briefly alive, reflecting the bruised violet of the sky, and the razor wire that snaked everywhere across their roofs glinted like tinsel. Even the grim little dive bar at the end of the block looked halfway inviting now, draped in the kind light of dusk.

  There had been no more episodes since the woman outside the motel. Leopold’s mind was beginning to settle, his chest to unclench. Still, he needed to calm down a bit more before he could face The Stench and its regulars.

  A few teenagers smoked outside an iron-barred door. The Stench had no proper sign, just a graffiti wall where the name was sometimes painted and sometimes not. It was an old punk club that had gone belly-up in the early 2000s and been reclaimed by straight-edge vegans, who’d turned it into an art and music space that only served juice and funky mushroom-tasting coffee, so people as young as fifteen could get in. It had been adopted as the hangout spot of choice by seemingly half the weird art kids in the city—who’d all started unlistenable noise bands that performed here—and by a smaller population of nerds, who dominated the upstairs loft space with tabletop role-playing games. The two groups tolerated each other but rarely mixed, though detachments of nerds would occasionally wander downstairs, eyes glazed from long dragon battles, to watch a noise band with bemused curiosity. Leopold didn’t care much for noise bands or role-playing games or mushroomy coffee, but he did care for Emmet, who loved it all, so he ended up spending a lot of time at The Stench.

  Regarding himself in the rearview mirror, Leopold found the sight so comically discouraging he almost laughed. His suit jacket was soggy, his neck ringed with red marks from his tight collar. He unbuttoned it and tossed his tie into the footwell. Wet, rust-brown hair hung limply over his hazel eyes. He raked the strands aside with his fingers, inadvertently drawing a third eyebrow of engine grease across his pale forehead. As a boy his mom had often held his face in her hands, promising him he’d grow up to be a handsome young man—but she hadn’t lived long enough to judge the results. At the moment, in Leopold’s humble opinion, he resembled a traveling salesman who’d slept in a bus station.

  With a resigned sigh, he reached behind his seat and dragged out The Club, a heavy steel bar with a U-hook at each end. Not that anyone would want to steal Bessie. Still, he couldn’t bear the thought of her being joyridden or dismembered for parts, so he wedged The Club’s hooks through his steering wheel and locked it, then got out and ran across the street. Maybe if he hurried, he could still catch Emmet before Mika’s set began.

  The smoking kids ignored him. So did the bouncer, engrossed in his phone. Leopold hurried down a dim hallway papered in peeling posters, following an amplified whine that might’ve been Mika’s band tuning their instruments—or might’ve been a song.

  He emerged into the main room to discover Mika posing with her bandmates under the spotlights of the little stage. A few dozen art kids congregated in cliquey knots. A respectable turnout. If the audience outnumbered the band on a random weeknight, the gig could be considered a success.

  Leopold threaded the crowd and found Emmet at the front. They’d met on the first day of fourth grade, when Emmet, one of the few Black kids in his class, had shown up wearing an Evil Dead T-shirt three sizes too big for him. Recognizing a kindred spirit, Leopold had walked right up to him and shaken his hand like a bona-fide adult, and Emmet had been calling him Mister Berry ever since.

  “You okay?” Emmet said by way of hello, shouting over the noise.

  “Yeah,” Leopold shouted back, which at the moment was honest enough.

  Just being in his friend’s presence was making him feel better than he had all day. Emmet nodded—good—held up a finger—talk in a minute—then turned his attention back to the Broken Typewriters, who were, as it happened, in the middle of a song.

  Leopold did his best to feign interest.

  All four members wore white painters’ jumpsuits. A girl in giant lensless grandma glasses was playing a saw with a violin bow, bending it to produce a noise that sounded uncannily like weeping. A hollow-cheeked goth boy tore pages from a phone book while kicking a drawer full of silverware in 4/4 rhythm. Mika herself, who Leopold supposed was the singer, held a microphone up to an old tape deck that played a warbly recording of Mika’s eight-year-old sister singing “Earth Died Screaming” by Tom Waits. The band was originally conceived as a Waits cover act but had diverged at some point during the first rehearsal. Talent-wise, the Typewriters were on par with most bands that played at The Stench, all of which were locked in a self-defeating war to out-weird one another. Legend had it a crowd once gathered to watch a janitor vacuum the stage and applauded when he’d finished, to which the janitor had reacted with confusion, then disgust.

  Mika’s band abruptly stopped.

  After an uncertain quiet there came a smattering of applause from the crowd, then wild cheering from Emmet and an older Japanese couple. Mika announced they were taking a break. She jumped down from the stage, gave Emmet a deep kiss, said hi to Leopold, and slouched off to talk to her parents. Mr. and Mrs. Yamamoto, also in the front row, were Broken Typewriters superfans.

  Emmet turned to face him. “So?”

  There were people everywhere.

  “Roof,” Leopold said, and they headed to the stairs.

  Nerds crowded the second-floor landing, a gangly, blue-haired one buttonholing Emmet as they tried to pass. “Em, you playing tonight? Jeremiah’s got a killer campaign plotted out.” Through an open doorway Leopold counted ten or twelve people in cosplay regalia pulling chairs up to a long table covered with papers and figurines.

  Emmet demurred. “Rain check.”

  Emmet was the rare social chameleon who was popular with the athletes, the art kids, and the nerds—and who paid no social price for his association with any of them. Leopold, who seemed to fit nowhere in particular, had always floated at the margins.

  “Larry? What about you?”

  Blue-hair was throwing him a bone. Leopold tossed it back. “Not tonight.”

  “Your loss.”

  Leopold followed Emmet up another set of stairs, through a metal fire door, onto the hallowed rectangle of open space that was the roof: tar-paper shingles underfoot, a loose confederacy of wet lawn chairs, sagging Christmas lights strung along a chest-high barrier.

  For the moment they had it to themselves.

  They stepped around a puddle of drowned band flyers, leaned against the barrier, and looked out at the skyline, such as it was: pockets of dark interspersed with neon, downtown’s distant high-rises shrouded in mist, the whirling lights of an ambulance tracking through the maze at right angles like Pac-Man pursued by ghosts. Emmet had worn a white painter’s jumpsuit in solidarity with the band, and standing there surveying the city he looked like a superhero awaiting his call to action. His height and athletic build helped the effect. Emmet Worthington was many things Leopold was not: levelheaded, socially adept, well-liked. He was a shoo-in for either Stanford or Caltech, where his parents were professors. He was also loyal, and even as he’d graduated from outcast-adjacent to something like cool in the ninth grade, he’d never made Leopold feel extraneous. Emmet wasn’t Leopold’s only friend, but he was, in many ways, the only one who mattered.