Page 6 of Secondhand Smoke
She looked like some evil twin version of the Janelle he’d avoided like the plague in high school. His type and her type didnotmingle.
But he hadn’t seen her since he graduated two years ago, when she was a sophomore, and everyone knew what happened three months ago. It didn’t take a genius to know this drastic change had everything to do with what she’d done to her friends.
Or what peoplesaidshe had done to her friends.
Whatever happened, three girls were dead and one alive. Though, Janelle looked like a corpse too with that dirty dark hair sticking to her pale skin.
She gaped at him, frozen like she was waiting for something horrible to happen.
Barrett chuckled at the expression. “You forgetting something?”
He held out the beginner’s manual, now as soaked as the two of them.
She looked down at it, then up at him. He shook it toward her. But all she did was stare at him, her eyes wide.
Had the rain frozen her?
He noticed her shaking hands gripping the handlebars. Watered-down streams of blood dripped from her knees. His brow furrowed.
“Whoa, are you—”
The bike between them fell to its side and clattered on the ground. He jumped back, shocked by the harsh crash. When he looked up, she was already twenty feet away, sprinting up the road without glancing back.
Barrett’s mouth hung open as she ran around a building and away from him.
He stared at the wall she disappeared behind, waiting for her to reappear, but after a minute with no sign, he realized she was serious.
“Okay then.” He knew what people thought of him, but was he really that scary? He laughed and pushed his stringy bangs away from his eyes.
Despite appearances, the pastor’s daughter must still have that God-fearing beat in her that scared her away from him. Maybe for a good reason, but he was just getting curious.
He glanced down at the bike she’d abandoned. The back tire spun slowly, and he contemplated leaving it there for her to come back for later. He nudged it with his foot.
Leaving it out in the rain would rust the spokes, and though it already looked old to begin with, it was still a perfectly good bike. No use letting it go to waste.
Barrett sighed and bent over to pick it up and, with guitar lessons in hand, pushed it back to the store.
Toni stood in the window, gesturing to the scene in front of him. Barrett shrugged.
Instead of leaving the bike against the brick wall outside, he maneuvered it through the shop door, ignoring the looks he gotas he pushed it back behind the counter and into the storage area, and hid it behind some unopened boxes.
“Did you just chase a girl into the rain and steal her bike?” Toni appeared behind him.
“It’s not stealing if she abandoned it.” Barrett grinned, drying his wet hands on his pants.
“Who was that?”
“Janelle Duncan.”
Toni’s eyes widened, and his mouth dropped open. “No fucking way.” He chuckled like he couldn’t tell if Barrett was joking or not. “The one—”
“The very one.” He cut him off.
“She looks . . .” Toni paused, trying to find the words that Barrett hadn’t yet been able to come up with. “Different.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“Still hot, though.”
