Page 4 of Puck Love

I’m lost.I have nodamn clue where I am. I fiddle with the gadgets and knobs on the dash and attempt to turn up the heat. Next time I run away from a stadium full of people and steal a car in cold-as-fuck Canada, I’ll remember to bring a damn jacket. Snow dusts the windshield. I turn a lever by the steering wheel, and water sprays the glass.Shoot. A fine layer of frost forms instead, and I tremble as I take another sip of the whiskey Istole.

Headlights approach. I slow, trying to find my hazard lights so the car will pull over and the occupants can help me get my bearings, but they zoom on by and I give them the finger as I glance back in the rear-view mirror, even though they’re already longgone.

There are no streetlights out here. I turned off the highway after seeing a sign that read Fairmont Banff Springs. It won’t be the escape I long for, but it will be a place to spend the night while I drown myself in Wiser’s Special Blend. Hopefully, in the morning, this will all have been a baddream.

Something tells me that’s not the case though.No. Not something—my mamma’s voice. I can still see her standing over me at the age of seventeen on the precipice of all my dreams coming true while I broke down in my dressing room with my very first panicattack.

“You made your bed, kiddo. Now, pick yourself up, fix your damn lipstick, and show everyone in the audience why you’re StellaHart.”

Every night I take the stage, I hear her saying those same words. Sometimes, I even whisper them to myself like a mantra. But my mamma’s been dead now for almost as long as I’ve been in showbiz, and sometimes I think her daughter was buried right alongside her because when I look in the mirror, I have no idea who the girl is staring back at me. Certainly not the illegitimate daughter of a business tycoon and a cocktail waitress. That girl is long gone. In her place is Stella Hart, country’s sweetheart, a lonely, sad echo of a woman whose job it is to entertain millions, and who takes the stage without a trace of the desperate panicked girl I’d been in the dressing room just five minutes earlier.Well,usually.

“Turn around where possible,” the robotic voice of the GPS tells me again. She’s been doing that for the last hour, but there is nowhere to turn around. The road I’m on is winding and steep, and narrow to boot. I’d likely fall right off the edge and roll into aditch.

“I can’t turn around!” I scream at the disembodied voice. “I can’t do shit,lady!”

I hit the wipers again and tap the screen for the GPS to get a better look at where I’m going, but it goes blank and flashes a terrifying shade of short-circuit blue before it lets out an almighty squeal. The screen is pitchblack.

I bang my hand against it. “No, no, no, no,no!”

The snow is falling so hard that I can barely see past the hood of my car. I consider pulling over, but there isn’t room on the narrow road. I could freeze out here by myself, and who knows how much worse this snow storm will get? Panicked and parched, I unscrew the cap on the bottle of whiskey and take a swig. My trembling fingers drop thelid.

“Shit.” I glance down, trying to find where the hell it went, and when I lift my gaze to the road, I’m headed right for a moose. The thing bounds off. I swerve into the bank. Cold liquid splashes across my lap and down my legs as the bottle goes flying through the cab of the SUV. My head smacks off the steering wheel. The airbag explodes, shoving me back against the headrest. Propellant fills theair.

Pain. It’s everywhere. My head swims, my vision blurs. I need to get out. I reach for my door but it’s stuck. I can’t get the window down. I can’t breathe. The airbag burns my barearms.

“Help,” I murmur, but there’s no one around to hear me. It’s fitting, really, that I should wish to be alone and suddenly, I’m exactly that. Alone. Completely, and utterlyalone.

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