Page 14 of Backslide
“I wasn’t there.” Lydia drags on her cigarette and lowers her lashes, like she’s some screen siren and not a seventeen-year-old in a Champion sweatshirt with a small pimple on her forehead.
“Nice to meet you, Lydia.” Damien eyes her and laughs in an unreadable way again—is he mocking or flirting with her? “I’m D. We missed you… even though we don’t know you.”
“You have no idea what you missed,” she says.
His eyebrows quirk upward. “I bet that’s true.”
It takes everything in Nellie’s power not to visibly gag.
In the wake of that bizarre exchange, there’s a lull as the members of the group eye each other. A car rumbles by, blasting Snoop. “Ain’t No Fun.” It’s a strange kind of situation—no Sabrina to connect them, no alcoholic lubrication, no real knowledge of each other.
“So,” says Damien, the mouthpiece, doing his job of filling the dead air. “Where’s Sabrina at now? How come you’re not with her? Did you ditch her? You can tell us.”
Is he making fun of Sabrina or them or no one at all? Nellie can’t tell and it makes her uneasy.
“You guys saw her at your school more recently than we’ve seen her,” Nellie says, shrugging. “How comeyou’renot with her?”
Damien smirks. “She’s too cool for us.”
Nellie looks him up and down, purses her lips. “I can see that.”
And he scratches his head, like he can’t decide how this exchange is going.
“Sabrina has piano on Tuesdays!” Cara forces out at a near shout. It is abrupt. And she looks like she regrets her awkward attempt. Like she’d like to crawl back into her shell.
“Sabrina plays piano?” the short one says. “That’s cool.” He shrugs at his friends. “Who knew?”
“I think there’s probably a lot we don’t know about Sabrina,” Noah says, joining the conversation at long last.
Finally.His actual voice.
To Nellie’s relief, it is throaty and low. Matches his whole demeanor. And it feels like somehow she already knows the timbre. Plus, there’s something about his tone, the glint in his eye, the genuine warmth of his smile, that feels in deep contrast to Damien’s slip-and-slide vibe. Noah is, as she has suspected, the kind of person whose attention feels like a heat lamp shining only on you.
“That’s probably true.” Nellie smiles small at him. “Sab is kind of a mystery—even to us sometimes.”
His gaze lingers on her for a second, flits down to her mouth and back up. To avoid scaring him off, she pulls her own eyes away. She stares at a Dixie cup in the gutter, a discarded cigarette butt snagged in a sidewalk crack, focuses on anything else for fear of obviously gaping.
“So, where are you guys going?” the short one asks.What was his name again?
“Nowhere,” says Lydia. “Fast.”
Ugh. This girl.
All three boys widen their eyes and exchange glances.
“I have drawing class,” Nellie says, squinting at the black Swatch on her wrist. “And actually, I’m late.”
As much as she doesn’t want to leave Noah’s presence now that she has finally found him again, shereallymust go.
The drawing classes are not cheap. And her parents remind her of that every time she misses one.
“You draw?” Noah asks Nellie.
“I like to, yeah.”
“She’s being modest!” Cara manages to pipe up. “She’samazing.”
Nellie smiles at her friend, genuinely touched. Cara is her biggest cheerleader.
