Slow Twitch - Реинхардт Лиз (бесплатные серии книг .txt) 📗

  “Brenna?” Evan’s voice called out, smoky and quiet.

  “I’m…I’m, uh, sorry. I have no idea what’s up with me. I just…you know, I think I’m just tired, I guess.” I peeked through the crack in the stall door, not ready to face anyone just yet.

  She slid up on a sink and fished in her rosebud purse until she found a silver case. She flicked it open and took out a short, dark cigarette that she pursed between her lips and lit up with a tiny vintage gold lighter. The smell it gave off wasn’t the acrid burn of a regular cigarette. It was a smoky/sweet mix that made me think of Halloween and pumpkin spice coffee that my mother always got in October.

  “I was being a monster, sweetie.” She closed her eyes and let her head fall back on the mirror. “Devon gave me a few hints about Saxon, so I understand a little bit, I think. You’re not gonna mess it up with Jake here.”

  “I know.” The words flopped out too fast. “I mean, I don’t think that’s going to happen or anything.”

  “Of course you do.” She flicked the dull gray ash into the pristine white sink. I wondered if it was okay to smoke here. I doubted it, but it was clear that Evan operated above the rules. “I know you think I was joking back there about being psychic, but I have this teeny-tiny sixth sense. My daddy used to take me to the track because I could always pick the winning horse. Every single time, I’m telling you. He stopped after this one time when I was twelve and he forced me to go with him instead of letting me hang out with my new boyfriend at the mall. I picked all the wrong ones just to piss him off.” When she chuckled, rings of bluish smoke coiled out of her mouth. “I knew you were a winner the minute I saw you. I really do have a harder time with guys. It’s girls and horses with me, I swear to God. Guys? I just don’t see them clearly. Hence…well, Rabin most recently.”

  “What did you see when you saw me?” I had my fingers on the deadbolt, almost ready to slide it open and sit next to her on the sink, maybe take a drag of her sweet cigarette.

  She took a long, slow drag and opened her eyes, but just stared at the ceiling for a few seconds before she answered, “I saw what I wanted.” She gestured with her cigarette like a kid writing a flash of a message with a sparkler. “I wanted to know you. To be your friend. And I wanted to have what you have. Not your stuff, though I do love those fucking gorgeous shoes. I saw this, I can’t really explain…like this love in you. And I saw the guilt, too, so I knew you weren’t just this bambino in the woods. I knew it was real.”

  I knocked my forehead against the bathroom door. “Oh, it’s real. It’s so real, it’s scary. I feel so much about them both, but it’s so incredibly different, and I just have to shut up about it, you know?”

  “You don’t.”

  I’d never heard a person say things and make them sound like a question and a non-negotiable fact at the same time, but Evan managed that.

  I slid the bolt with shaky fingers and flew to the sink. Evan was already holding the cigarette out to me. I took a quick drag and was disappointed to find that it was still acrid and burning, just like a regular cigarette.

  “What do you mean?”

  She petted my hair back from my face and tucked it with smooth, quick fingers behind my ears. “I just mean that you shouldn’t shut up about anything that’s important to you. If it matters, say it. And if you really love Jake and are worried, don’t hide things from him. Try to explain, and maybe some of this nervousness will go away, you know?”

  I watched the cigarette smolder. “If I say it, I’ll just hurt people. It never comes out right. No matter how hard I try, it’s just all wrong, and I sound like a jerk. That sounds lame, but I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  She plucked the cigarette from my fingers and stubbed it out in the sink. “People always want girls to be nice. Fuck nice, Brenna. Be honest. Say what you need to say, and don’t shut up. You’re a good person, and you love him, so it will work out.” She slid the pins out of her hair and it swooped, piece by piece, down around her shoulders.

  “It’s not that easy.” I ran the tap so the black, smeared ashes funneled down the drain and tossed the butt into the garbage.

  “Nothing that’s really important ever is, sweetie.” Evan kissed my cheek and took my hand. “It’s never easy, and it’s never neat. Ever. You don’t have to listen to me, but I’m saying it because I like you so much, and I know what happens when you try to lock secrets away and cover them with lies, no matter how good your intentions might be.” Her eyes went dark, like lake water, crystal clear until its murky bottom gets agitated.

  All the hair on my arms stood on end at her words, and a cold chill twisted up, then back down my spine.

  I thought about what she said as we headed back to Devon. Evan gulped down one more drink, and Devon did wind up carrying her more than half-way back to the dorms, just like she predicted. We managed to get her tucked in, and I took a minute to pull the covers up to her chin, the way I liked them.

  “She’s a little crazy,” Devon whispered, rubbing the kinks out of the shoulder he carried her over during the long walk home.

  I looked down at her long hair spilled over the pillow, her mascara-coated lashes flecking bits of black under her eyes, and her puffy red lips, half-parted in sleep. “Crazy beautiful.”

  Devon shook his head as he left the room. “Geez, you fall in love fast, Bren.”

  “Yup,” I said as I pulled the door shut. “I’m full of it.”

  Chapter Two

  Saxon

I was always fairly hard to shock. In fact, I was good at being the shocking one, and I liked that. It kept everyone guessing, and that was always the best way with me. Once in a while, I’d get soft and let my heart leak out on my sleeve, but I’ve always regretted it. Every single time, it’s bit me in the ass. Once in a while, once in a really rare while, I managed to shock myself.

That’s where I was just after the end of my unimpressive junior year at Frankford High. I had missed almost as much school as I had attended. I’d hit on my brother’s foxy girlfriend and practically convinced her not to completely hate me, then fucked it all up and lost my one chance to be with a girl whose brain interested me more than her tits. I boozed a little more than I should have and blacked out one too many Saturday nights. And Wednesday afternoons. And Monday mid-mornings.

Then I needed some money, so I started dealing. I’m not remotely interested in sad-sack stories about innocent fucking school kids buying bags of crack and hurling themselves off of tall buildings. I was a dealer; I knew exactly who bought. It was other assholes like me. Losers who needed to forget just how shitty life was.

‘Cause mine was. I lived in a big piece-of-shit house that had been featured in twelve different architectural magazines but still managed to creep my ass out and made me feel like I lived in a really shitty modern art museum. I’d slept with every delicious piece of ass in a hundred-mile radius, but the only chick I really dug was with my brother, Jake, and they were so in love it even made my icy heart thaw a little. I had a hot car, a bitching Charger, but it was pretty hard to drive it when it was locked in my piece-of-shit father’s garage. I was captain of the soccer team, an honors student, a badass, and a little bit of a rebel. So how the fuck did I end up in the back of my Aunt Jackie’s shitty Mazda, zipping down the highway towards a tiny piece of urban Jersey hell? Why was my life so shitty?

Did I do drugs because my life was such a steaming pile of shit, or was my life such a steaming pile of shit because I did drugs?

My theory was that it was a nice bundle of both theories. I just chose the wrong drug. Coke made me see things more clearly, have more energy. For what? I had no one to do anything with, considering I’d screwed the love interest of every guy friend I’d ever had, and I never hang out with girls unless they have the only thing I’m interested in on their minds. I already had a genius IQ, like it or not. And, despite smoking a pack a day, I was a star athlete without the drugs. So the coke just made everything more clearly, draggingly miserable. That’s why I wasn’t good at hiding it. That’s why my mom found it.