Page 20 of Secondhand Smoke
Janelle looked back at him then and giggled. He relaxed a bit.
“Good luck convincing her. Sam, Minnie, and I were the only people she ever sang for.” For the first time, there was a hint of sadness in her voice.
She didn’t say it, but Barrett sometimes had a sixth sense for these things. Only sometimes, though. Most of the time, he was completely oblivious to people’s inner turmoils.
For the moment, he was perfectly in tune with Janelle, like he could read her thoughts, sad that her friend never got the chance to share her voice with the world.
“I still have the song she was working on. She left it in my room, and I wanted to learn to play the guitar so I can hear it again whenever I want.”
Barrett’s smile faltered.
It made a whole lot of sense now: the guitar, the beginner’s manual. She was like those connect-the-dots puzzles he liked to do as a child, and line by line, the picture was coming together.
She was lost in her head, lost in her admissions, and Barrett sat next to her, lost in her too.
“You should hear her lyrics. I’ve never heard anything like them. They have this way of making even the simplest things into these beautiful stories that stick in your head and change your world.” She took in a deep breath, and Barrett held his, waiting for the next piece in this saga. “I think it’s why I fell in love with her.”
There was a beat. Then another. Then another.
For the first time in his life, Barrett was totally lost for words.
Fade to Blackby Metallica faded out on the player, and they were left in the silence of the turning scratch and no sound.
He swallowed a lump in his throat. “I didn’t know you were …”
“Oh, no. I’m not. Well, notentirely. If my dad knew, he’d say I’m half ‘normal’. I like both.” She said it with such certainty, but Barrett still felt like he was taking advantage of the situation. He was sober, and she was high out of her mind, spewing secrets and memories and things that she would not tell him if she hadn’t been smoking his dope. “It took me a while to realize that.”
His tongue itched to say something, to fill the empty air she left full of confessions. Something he needed to offer to settle theuneasiness of having his full mind while she didn’t. There was a space there.
In his mind, Janelle Duncan had been what every girl wanted to be. She’d been as pristine as a statue and as perfect as an angel.
But this confession, it was something deeper. It dug past what she’d always shown others, and revealed the real dirt beneath that she’d hidden away.
Janelle wasn’t an angel; she was human. Just like him.
And that little revelation made him lean in. He wondered what else she hid in there. “I guess I owe you a secret of my own now.”
“It better be a good one.” Her laugh was a twinkle, and it forced Barrett to smile.
He pointed to the second joint, smoking between her fingers, that was nearly gone. “Other than the weed, I’ve never done drugs in my life.”
She blanched backward, her mouth twisted in shock, and then after a few seconds, her expression cleared into cautious amusement. “Yeah, right.”
She didn’t believe him. He could tell by the joking tone in her voice. He couldn’t blame her. No one would believe that the drug dealer hadn’t done drugs.
“I’m serious. A little dope, sure, but nothing harder than that.”
The shock sprouted back onto her face, and her mouth fell open. “How?” she asked, shaking her head.
Barrett bit his lip as elation of getting such a reaction from her bubbled in his chest.
“I mean, why wouldn’t you?”
Now that was the question of the century. He’d told his bandmates since they’d been friends, and Ron knew by default, but no one else knew other than that, much less his reasons.
But this was a debt he was repaying. A secret for a secret. He could think of these two skeletons as equivalent.
“My parents were junkies since before I was born. Mainly crack and stuff, way before it was cool.” He watched her face for a reaction, but despite her earlier shock, she was surprisingly calm, leaning forward intently with dilated, wide red eyes. “My uncle, Ron—my mom’s brother—said my mom tried to stop for my sake, and it worked for a while, but after I was born, she couldn’t resist anymore and went back into it. Worse than before. They both did. Eventually, by the time I was eight, I was sent here to live with my uncle, and I’ve been here ever since.”
