Page 1 of Backslide
PrologueBOTHBACK IN THE DAY
Tonight, they are charmed.
Nellie feels it like a charge.
Tonight, instead of barking “Too many people!” and peeling out, the first cabdriver that pulls over on Seventy-Ninth and Broadway takes allfivegirls without hesitation, like it isn’t illegal. Like he can’t deny the magic.
And he doesn’t get annoyed. Not even when Nellie settles onto Cara’s lap to fit, her hand flat against the taxi’s ceiling to protect her head each time they hit a pothole or stop short at a red light. Even though Sabrina, Cara, Nellie, and Sabrina’s two other random friends have clearly already drank too much fizzy Zima and fruity Alizé. Even though, as the city blows past in trails and Cara starts to hiccup, they laugh and laugh and laugh.
Still kind of like children, though they imagine otherwise.
Tonight, the list girl hops off her stool, opens the velvet rope, and lets them through without an arched eyebrow or a wait. ComplimentsNellie on her skintight crop top, baggy jeans, and platform Docs. (Nellie’s decision to freeze her ass off without a coat wasobviouslysolid.)
The nine-foot-tall bouncer in a leather jacket that smells like cigarettes and cowboy almost smiles as his eyes barely graze their fake IDs and he pulls the absurdly huge door open.
They step through into inkier black.
Torch sconces line the walls, and Nellie is reminded of Gothic estates. She is readingJane Eyrein AP English. But school—her cheerful classroom with Shakespeare quotes tacked to the walls—is a world away, though it’s technically only thirty blocks uptown.
Here, she is a different person. Here, there are different rules.
The music grows louder and louder as they strut down the hall. It sizzles in their chests. Layers of Biggie. Mary J. “Murder She Wrote,” like a reggae anthem.
Like they’re strutting into a coliseum. Like it plays forthem.
And then Sabrina, shiny black hair dramatic against her pale skin, pushes the heavy crimson curtain aside—and they have arrived.
The two girls they barely know instantly disperse. And Cara glues herself to Nellie’s side as they stop to take it all in—while Sabrina, always fearless, runs up to the boys she knows. The ones from her school who invited them to the party. They’re standing with other boys who are decidedly not from any high school—older, grittier, with oversized hoodies and appraising eyes. Sabrina stands on tiptoe—in her new nose piercing, bandeau top, and Carhartt overalls—and kisses the boys each on the cheek beneath their Yankees and Stüssy caps. One by one by one.
Nellie waves casually to the two she has met with Sabrina before. One short and stocky with brown hair; one tall and stocky with blond. They nod, too cool to smile.
This is not the girls’ first time at one of these parties, thrownby promoters their own age and filled to capacity with posturing teenagers, drunk on freedom and, somehow despite being underage, flowing liquor.
Like the overstuffed cab,technicallyillegal.
But the grown-ups in their world are too busy with wars and political affairs and murderous former football stars to care.
The helicopter parents have not yet landed. It’s still latchkey all the way.
The dance floor is packed. Bodies in motion. Pressed together and teased apart. Bodies, bodies everywhere.
In baggy jeans. In bamboo earrings. In fades and slicked-back ponytails.
In platforms. In Princess Leia buns. With flannels around their waists and Ring Pops in their mouths.
The bass invades them all like a subway car thundering into a station. A pleasant rumble to the core that doesn’t apologize.
Possibility hums.
The ground is sticky. A smell of malt liquor and CK One permeates—just this side of rancid. The scent of bad behavior.
Nellie takes one more scan of the space. And just like that—the lights strobe, but time stands still. The music, the bodies, the sweat. It all disappears.
When she sees him, he is in a spotlight. At least, he is to her.
He is sitting a distance away on a raised platform that she will remember as a stage. He wears cargo pants and a thin white T-shirt, and he leans over his legs, his elbows resting on his thighs, as he nods to the music.
His baseball cap is slightly askew. Maybe on purpose. And maybe that’s a little douchey, she allows herself to admit. But it doesn’t matter. Because nothing can counteract his effect from moment one—his tan skin, his twinkling eyes, his toned armsstraining against the cotton, the killer smile he flashes when a friend nearby cracks a joke. He is beautiful, admittedly. But mostly it is justhim. Though she can’t explain it. The way, through her lens, he glows brighter than everyone else.
