“Have you ever heard of it raining like this in August?” Emmet said. “I bet there’s actual water in the LA River right now, not just dead bodies and old shopping carts.”

  “So weird,” Leopold agreed, his anxiety rising at the mention of rain. Which he’d had nothing to do with.

  Emmet took out a vape pen and held it to his lips. It glowed brightly; a moment later he blew a cloud of apricot-flavored smoke toward the high-rises.

  Leopold shot him a look. “Seriously? I thought you quit.”

  “I did. Then I un-quit.”

  “Well, re-quit. That’s disgusting.”

  Emmet sighed. “Tomorrow. Don’t tell Mika, okay?”

  “I won’t tell Mika. I’ll tell your mom.”

  “Wow.” Emmet raised an eyebrow, then took another drag. “I think it’s been too long since the last time I kicked your ass.”

  Leopold cracked a smile. “I’m serious. It’s not cool to smoke anymore. It’s celery juice or die.”

  Emmet poked him in the chest. “Beep. Next track.”

  “I’m concerned. You can’t just next track me—”

  “I’m the one who should be concerned. You sounded freaked out on the phone. And that suit—” Emmet winced as he appraised Leopold.

  “It was Richter’s idea. For the interview.”

  “Right, that was today,” said Emmet, nodding. “I’m guessing it didn’t go well?”

  It couldn’t have gone worse if Leopold had ripped down his pants and evacuated his bowels onto the floor, but there was no need to belabor the point, so he just said no.

  “Did you finally pick a career from Herr Richter’s Wheel of Futures?”

  “Not yet,” said Leopold. “I may have mentioned film school.”

  “Jesus take the wheel.” Emmet exhaled another curl of vapor. “So Richter finally lost it. What happened?”

  Leopold only shook his head.

  “What? He kick you out? Slash Bessie’s tires?” Emmet raised his eyebrows. “Threaten you with community college?”

  When Leopold didn’t laugh, Emmet looked genuinely concerned. “All right, talk. You’re starting to scare me.”

  For an hour he’d been dying to tell Emmet about the episodes, but now he found himself hesitating. What did he want from his friend? Reassurance he wasn’t going crazy? He didn’t know if Emmet could give him that. He only knew he needed to tell someone he trusted what had happened. Feeling like he was about to dive into a pool of icy water, Leopold said quietly, “I started seeing things again.”

  Emmet took a beat, his expression carefully neutral. “Like what?”

  “Sunder things.”

  Emmet turned his head and blew out another jet of smoke. “Haven’t heard that word in a while. When did it start?”

  “A few weeks ago. Just a little at first. Then, today, a lot.”

  “What’s a lot?”

  “Three or four times?”

  Emmet swore softly.

  Leopold hazarded a glance at him, but in his friend’s narrowed eyes he saw only concern. So Leopold laid out the whole strange story, beginning weeks ago with the fruit vendor chased by a rain cloud and ending with the lizard-tongued woman outside the motel. He found himself downplaying the terror of some moments, like when he thought they were about to collide with a streetcar, because he didn’t want to worry Emmet more than necessary. But he left nothing out.

  “And then you drove straight here?”

  “Yeah,” Leopold said.

  The whine of a musical saw echoed faintly through the propped fire door. Mika’s band had started again, but Emmet made no move to go inside.

  “Why’d you wait so long to tell me?”

  “I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

  Emmet’s eyes flashed. “Your first episode in years and you didn’t think it was a big deal? Come on, Larry.”

  “I figured it was a one-time thing.”

  “You mean you hoped it was.”

  “And I guess I was embarrassed.”

  That was only half the truth. The other half was that he’d been afraid it would push Emmet away, as it had when they were younger. When Leopold’s episodes had persisted even after his first major no-key, no-coyote disappointment, he’d finally confessed to Emmet that he was seeing rust fiends in alleys and so on—and Emmet had gone along, assuming it was all part of some elaborate game. Eventually, Emmet made the mistake of mentioning Sunder in front of his parents, and something in the way he’d talked about it, with nearly as much conviction as Leopold, spooked them so much they told Emmet he couldn’t hang out with Leopold for a while, and to make certain of it, they’d packed Emmet off to summer camp.

  When Emmet finally returned, Leopold pretended he’d never believed Sunder was real in the first place, and slowly their friendship revived. It wasn’t until they were sixteen, long after Leopold really had stopped believing Sunder was real, that he was brave enough to admit how long the episodes had persisted.

  “You should be embarrassed,” Emmet said dryly. “We both know a shiggoth will shrivel up if it’s out of water for more than twenty minutes, so unless she was living in that motel’s pool, those were some really low-rent hallucinations. If you’re going to bug out, can you at least do it in a way that respects canon?”

  “It was raining,” Leopold said, flipping him off.

  “All right, listen.” Emmet’s grin vanished. “You’ve been going through some shit with your dad and it’s been triggering you. Seeing Sunder is one of the ways your brain deals with that. Right?”

  “Right.” Leopold pushed a hand through his damp hair. “I hate my brain.”

  “No. We’re not doing that.” Emmet pointed at him with the vape pen. “I know your brain, and it’s a perfectly good one. But when things like this happen, you have to talk about it or they only get worse. So next time, tell me. Right away. Middle of the night, whatever. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Leopold said, exhaling. He felt a sudden rush of gratitude for Emmet and resisted the urge to give him a giant, back-slapping hug. He was trying to affect the air of someone who wasn’t on the verge of a breakdown, and it was hard work keeping up the show. “Thanks, man.”

  “Anytime.” Emmet watched him carefully. “You good?”

  “I’m good.” For the first time in too long, the words felt almost true.

  There was a beat of companionable quiet between them. The band’s wheezing music drifted up the stairs. “You should come out with us after the show,” Emmet said. “I know you don’t love Mika’s friends, but—”

  “What’s not to love?” Leopold cut him off. “The last time we hung out, Jessica told me I had the potential to be hot but no hope of being memorable.”

  “Damn.” Emmet’s eyes dimmed, then brightened. “She said you had potential, though?”

  Leopold was smiling as he said, “Dickhead.”

  “Potential in a three-piece suit!” Emmet nodded at Leopold’s still-damp clothes. “You’re looking dapper as a rich murder victim, Mister Berry.”

  Leopold laughed despite himself. “All right, whatever, I’ll come. I’m not ready to go home and deal with Richter yet, anyway.”

  “Yes.” Emmet fist-pumped as they headed for the exit. “It’ll be the best night of your life, I promise.”

  “We’re going to eat shitty diner food and talk about noise bands, aren’t we?”

  Emmet briefly looked back. “Like I said.”

  Eight

  The Typewriters cranked out some more noise, then finished with a funereal rendition of Britney Spears’s “Toxic,” the lyrics sung in Latin. It wasn’t quite nine o’clock. Leopold’s phone had been buzzing with angry messages from his father—Get your ass home, and so on—until finally he’d just silenced it.

  As the small crowd cleared out, Leopold and Emmet clustered by the juice bar to pick a restaurant. Joining them were Mika and two of her bandmates, Clark and the aforementioned Jessica—the phone book ripper and musical saw player, respectively. Leopold had lifted his hand in limp hellos, and though Clark acknowledged him with an uncertain look, Jessica had tucked her platinum-blond hair behind her ears and said, without cruelty, “Have we met before?”

  The Typewriters had shed their white jumpsuits and were now dressed like standard art kids in band shirts and shapeless light-wash mom jeans, except for Mika, who’d paired her band shirt (WEIRDO RIPPERS) with tan canvas pants and ugly-on-purpose Teva sandals from the nineties. The pants, Mika never tired of explaining, were from a store in Panorama City called Pants Town, which sold unironic workwear in bulk and had been experiencing a recent and baffling influx of teenagers. Leopold thought she looked good despite her clothes, but because he tried not to dwell on Mika’s attractiveness—she being Emmet’s girlfriend and everything—he pretended to study the juice bar menu and turned his thoughts to food. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast and was suddenly ravenous.

  “Clifton’s,” Emmet suggested, now dressed in the white tee and black jeans he’d been wearing under his jumpsuit.

  “The Perch,” Clark countered.

  Jessica wrinkled her nose. “Too expensive.”

  “You have a trust fund,” Clark pointed out.

  “Not until I’m twenty-five.”

  “So, Clifton’s,” Emmet insisted.

  Clark looked defeated. “It’s so old.”

  Leopold just watched, amused. He knew where this was heading.

  “Z Café,” Mika suggested, then waved her hand and said “Never mind” before anyone could respond. “Too avocado toast.”

  “I thought you liked avocado toast,” Clark said.

  “Do you know how water intensive avocado farming is?”

  “Do you hear me giving you shit about all those almonds you eat?”

  “I don’t know why we go through this when we always end up at either The Pantry or Clifton’s,” Jessica whined.

  “No Pantry,” said Mika, crossing her arms. “There’s meat in everything and I’m vegan this month.”

  “Clifton’s it is!” Emmet crowed.

  Nine

  Clifton’s was twenty blocks from The Stench, at the foot of Bunker Hill below the high-rises, wedged between a liquidator of secondhand mannequins and an old theater that hadn’t shown a movie since Charlie Chaplin was starring in them. Clifton’s was nearly as ancient, which for Emmet was half the attraction. He was an aficionado of LA history and, by extension, a connoisseur of quirky old LA diners. His favorites looked like somewhere a 1930s hobo would cough up his last dime for a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee. Clifton’s food was barely a notch above school cafeteria fare and the menu hadn’t changed in half a century, but neither, it seemed, had its prices. For that reason alone, it usually won out.

  Leopold found parking down the block, Clubbed his wheel, noted the new number on Bessie’s odometer (7,274 miles), then met Emmet and the Typewriters in front of the restaurant. They were doing a postmortem on the show, which Leopold tuned out as he pushed open the heavy log-cabin door and held it for the others.

  Stepping inside Clifton’s was like entering a magical forest—albeit one that had been neglected for years. There were fake shrubs everywhere, fake streams that flowed with heavily chlorinated water, fake woodland creatures that peeped out from the branches of fake trees. The place was nearly empty but for a few tipsy thirtysomethings and a man in a heavy coat who appeared to be asleep at his table. Clifton’s was the rare survivor from an era when every third restaurant in LA was like a miniature Disneyland without the rides. Its theme was “enchanted redwoods,” and though at one time it might really have felt magical, it was now faded and sort of depressing. Leopold figured it would fold in a year or two and give way to some avocado toast place. It was the way of things.

  A yawning hostess escorted them to their usual table, a curved brown booth built into the hollow of a giant plaster tree. Its trunk rose halfway up the wall before melding into a painted mural of a redwood grove. A waiter with a graying comb-over brought menus and took drink orders. Leopold asked for black coffee.

  For a while Mika and Co. talked about noise bands, which allowed Leopold to zone out and sip his coffee, but then the conversation turned to college applications. It seemed like everyone already had it figured out, their whole unimaginable life in all its snaking turns—or the next few bends of it, anyway. Jessica would be premed at one of the better UCs. Clark was a legacy at some private liberal arts school in the Midwest, and Mika was taking a gap year to backpack around Europe, having convinced her parents that she needed to “study her soul” before deciding what to study in college. Emmet was almost certainly going to either Stanford or Caltech, and it was easy to imagine him becoming a rocket scientist like his parents.

  Leopold, meanwhile, was trying to figure out what to say about his own murky future when the waiter came back to take their food orders and he was granted a stay of execution.

  “I think I’ll have the salmon,” Jessica said after a cursory look at the giant, laminated menu. “Is it wild or farmed?”

  The waiter scowled. “Microwaved.”

  Emmet nudged Leopold. “You know what you want?”

  “Not yet,” he said quietly.

  Sometimes, when his eyes popped open and his heart set to racing at three in the morning, Leopold knew exactly what he wanted: for his mother to come back to life. It was a notion so impossible, even his disordered middle-of-the-night mind knew it to be absurd—and yet it sometimes occurred to him, in clearer moments, that his troubling visions of Sunder had been birthed in retaliation to this fact; that if he couldn’t live in a world where his mother was alive, perhaps he could live in another world altogether. It was childish and stupid and embarrassing, the fantasy of Sunder every bit as fake as the tree whose plaster trunk they were sitting inside, but he couldn’t figure out how to let it go.

  He lowered his head, turning a page in the menu. Mika, too, was taking forever to decide. Everyone was giving her advice.

  “The chicken-fried steak is excellent,” Emmet said, then reversed himself after Mika made a face. “Right, you’re vegan.”

  “Greek salad?” Jessica suggested.

  “That’s on page six.” Clark looked horrified. “Geriatric diner rule number one: Never order anything after page four. Past that, you’re taking your life into your own hands.”

  Inexplicably, a strange sensation had begun to steal over Leopold. A leadenness in his limbs and a lightness in his head. He blinked at his dinner options, trying to affect outward calm, and noticed that someone had defaced his menu. In blue ballpoint, above the list of appetizers, was a doodle of a man with a big nose peering over the top of a wall.

  Kilroy.

  Leopold’s face felt warm. Suddenly, he was nine years old again. Ten. Eleven. The big-nosed man had been a wink shared between him and his mother. Only later had Leopold learned its origins, as a bit of inside joke graffiti left behind by Allied soldiers during World War II, often accompanied by the words Kilroy was here. For Leopold and his mother, it had begun when she created a word search for him on the back of a restaurant menu with Kilroy drawn at the top. He’d solved it quickly and requested another, and they’d sat there at Shakey’s Pizza for two hours after their meal was done, passing paper menus back and forth, the little man at the top of each one. Word searches evolved into cipher puzzles and eventually weekend-long scavenger hunts that led him all over their neighborhood.

  Often she wouldn’t even tell him there was a puzzle to solve—that became part of the game—but Kilroy, chalked on some unmissable square of sidewalk outside their house or drawn on a Post-it tucked inside a book she knew he’d open at school, was always her signal that something was afoot. It meant, essentially, pay attention. Leopold had never considered himself some kind of puzzle genius—or any kind of genius—but when his mother asked him to pay attention, he did.

  A sudden movement drew his gaze upward.

  Above Clifton’s main floor was a second-floor atrium, roped off and rarely used. It was crowded with more tables and faux greenery, and Leopold thought he’d seen a trembling in the bushes there.

  The bush moved a second time. His head tingled as his eyes fixed on it.

  A furry, ring-eyed face popped out from behind a limb and peered down at him.

  No. Nope.

  The goddamn raccoon again. It pressed its little hands against the glass fall barrier, eyes pleading. Leopold clenched his jaw and willed it to disappear.

  “Fuck off,” Leopold hissed under his breath. “You’re not real.”

  “Excuse me?” Clark said, turning to face him.

  Leopold quickly lowered his head. “The crab cakes,” he said, pretending to study the menu. “They’ve got to be fake, right?”

  “Uh, I guess.” Clark gave him a strange look, then returned to the conversation he’d been having with Jessica.

  When Leopold glanced up again, the raccoon was gone.

  He remembered, with a rush of relief, Emmet once telling him that most of the fake woodland creatures in Clifton’s were animatronic; at some point in the restaurant’s history they’d all been functional, so that as you walked around, you might see a tin gopher poke its head out of a hole or a wooden woodpecker tap on a tree. That would account for the raccoon; maybe a few of them still worked.

  “And for you?”

  It was his turn to order. Leopold scanned his open menu for anything that didn’t sound overtly poisonous. His gaze snagged on an item in red, sandwiched between the liver and onions and the shepherd’s pie: