Page 60 of Secondhand Smoke
“Oh yeah, sorry. I forgot you have averyspecific type,” Dennis said, a teasing lilt in his tone.
Nell heard it, but she was already lost again.
Her heart beat too fast, her unfocused brain struggling to decipher the meaning.
She’d like to be a type. She’d like to beBarrett’stype, she realized. Lamely. Stupidly.
But what type would she even be? She was a shell, blank and gray, and lost like an aged pencil drawing that had beensmudged into nonrecognition through the years—or months, in her case.
Silly to think she could compare with the type of women they met while performing. She could imagine they were beautiful, with similar tastes in music, and full of life that Nell had lost long ago.
Her high was still there, but somewhere along the way it’d lost the fuzzy, lighthearted buzz she loved so much. An inky fear seeped into her and stole its place.
Her breaths shallowed. She stared at the stars, hoping they would comfort and hide her, calm her.
Barrett’s gaze scraped on her face, and she wished she could disappear. Become erased—finally.
“Nell.” Barrett’s voice was soft, a whisper. Nell’s breath caught because he’d never called her that before. “You okay?”
The trees around them leaned in, curling over the corners of her vision, mocking. The stars twinkled, laughing. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, afraid.
“I’m—” She tried, but the word came out too disjointed to connect another one to it, like she was choking on it. It burned coming up, and the other words stung where they stuck.
Barrett sat up. “Nell.”
But there wasn’t time for that. Not when a pair of bright headlights hit the group, followed by the red and blue flashing of police lights.
22 - Nell
One second, Nell was frozen in terror at the flashing lights. The next, her hand was enveloped in a warm clasp, and she was being tugged away from their spot.
In her nose, the burn of rubber and smoke stung, and she thought she felt the cold clip of a raindrop on her skin even though the sky was clear.
In her hazed mind of drugs and fear and confusion, she saw the butt of the joint flying off the quarry’s edge out of Toni’s hand, and he split into the forest, in a different direction from her.
Her and Barrett, she realized. His hand was the one pulling her.
She had no idea where Dennis or Paulie went, but she hoped they were long gone.
She couldn’t breathe, and if Barrett weren’t pulling her, she wouldn’t be on her feet. She would have already been caught by one of the swinging flashlights and destined to spend the night in a holding cell before her parents found her and locked her up forever in her padded cage.
But Barrett had her, and he was diverting into the tree line and warning her in a faded voice when to watch for a rock or root that was trying to send her down.
She thought she saw the flash of broken glass scattered on the ground, but she moved too fast to tell if it was real.
She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t form her lips into anything other than open-mouthed gasps for panicked air that her body rejected.
She was going to die and be swallowed whole by the forest.
But Barrett had her, and even when her body threatened to collapse, she was still moving.
Barrett had her.
Barrett had her.
One of the searchlights, that marked the exact position of a police officer, had broken off in another direction, but the other was on them. She didn’t have the capacity to gauge how far, but it felt close.
A minute later? Two? An hour? She wasn’t sure, but she was pulled to the side and found herself enveloped by something warm and hard, the scent of weed and weak cologne covering her. Her panicked thoughts slowed at the steady rhythm of a rapidly bumping sound.
