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Barrett couldn’t believe his eyes.

She’d completely transformed, blossomed from her cocoon into her true form like she’d been there the whole time, hiding behind that patchy dark hair and pale skin.

He recognized her now: that smile, those kind blue-violet eyes, the bubbly personality that had been sitting there the whole time.

Who knew it would take only a blunt to bring her out.

He greeted her like an old friend, though they’d never actually been friends, and a simple grin his way sent his blood into a teenage rush.

The best part was she never once acted disgusted or annoyed or weirded out as he prattled on about his music. Even though she vocalized her interest—or lack of—in the music, she still listened and gave it all the benefit of the doubt.

He’d always known she was kind. Feeling it firsthand was another experience altogether.

He loved her silly questions, her twinkling laugh.

He wouldn’t even hold the entire bag of Doritos she’d eaten against her.

She listened with full, active attention to his tales of playing in a band with his lovable, idiot friends.

She seemed to care, and almost no one cared.

This entire experience was a one-of-a-kind rarity.

“How long have you played guitar?” She interrupted his pointless story to ask the question, and he didn’t mind one bit.

“Since I was eight.” He didn’t need to think about it, because the day he started was one of the most fortuitous and best days of his life.

Shortly after he’d come to live with Ron, he’d been so depressed, but his poor uncle had pooled together what little funds he could to get him a guitar so Barrett had something to keep him busy and happy.

It’d done more than that, though. It’d given him meaning, and to this day, he lived every day because of that guitar.

Janelle nodded and popped a Skittle into her mouth. “You must be pretty good at it then.”

He could pretend to be modest, but there was a sense of dishonesty in that, so he just told it as it was. “Only the best in the state. Possibly the entire region.”

“So modest.” She chuckled. “I bet KC is better than you.”

“Who?”

“KC,” she repeated, like saying it twice would flick on the light bulb above his head.

He didn’t answer and wracked through his mind for that name. It was familiar, sure, but it wasn’t ringing any bells, which made him agonize over trying to remember the person who was on the tip of his tongue. She stared at him, waiting, then suddenly it clicked. Somehow, he connected the dots.

KC. Most people had known her as Kelly Anne Carter, but he remembered now hearing Janelle and her friends call her KC. But the nickname wasn’t what tripped him up the most; it was the tense Nell had used.

“I bet KC is better than you.”

Not was. Is. Like she was still alive.

He didn’t have the heart to correct Nell, so he just carried on like he wasn’t totally caught off guard by the mention of one of the three girls who had been killed. He could picture her though: dark brown skin and tight natural ringlets.

“She played guitar?”

“Guitar and piano,” Janelle corrected him without any condescension. “And she writes her own songs.”

Guitar, piano, and a songwriter? Barrett hadn’t touched a piano in his life, but he’d taken a dig at songwriting before. Needless to say, he’d stick to his covers until inspiration struck.

“Was she as good at that as she was at guitar?” he joked, hoping she wasn’t offended by his past tense.

“Better.” She didn’t blink an eye but looked at a blank spot on the wall with a dreamy sigh.

Barrett raised a brow.

“She’s got the most beautiful voice. Like, she wanted to be the next Tina Turner or Whitney Houston, but I think she could have been even bigger.”

Barrett watched her carefully. It was her first time mentioning Kelly Anne in terms of what could have been rather than what was.

He half expected Janelle to start crying, which wasn’t uncommon in this phase of a high, but despite her red eyes and blown pupils, she seemed steady. Despite what her words suggested, she didn’t look to be wavering on the line of acceptance and denial.

“Why didn’t I know this? I could have asked her to be in my band.” Barrett put his hand on his chest, scandalized and putting on a show.

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 Black by 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, not entirely . 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 the uneasiness 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. ”

She stared. “And you never once wanted to try it?”

“Hell no.” He shook his head, sending his hair shuffling from side to side. “Stuff like that makes people choose between things they shouldn’t have to. Leave the things they love behind and make bad choices. I’m not trying to become a person like that.”

One corner of her mouth lifted in a loopy grin. “That sounds exactly like something my dad would say.”

He cringed, baring his teeth in a grimace at being compared to the pastor. “Then I guess that is the only thing your father and I will ever agree on.”

She laughed, throwing her head back, and fell into the cushions of the sofa. He would forgive that offensive comparison.

“But I still don’t get it,” she said.

“What?”

“If you hate it so much, why do you sell it to others?”

His smile fell. “It’s money.”

She nodded slowly, like she understood, but he couldn’t help and wonder if she really did. Everyone knew that even though her dad held the title of pastor, their name held more dollar signs than was appropriate for a “humble” leader to have in his pockets.

As sweet as Janelle was, she couldn’t know the first thing about what it meant to do what you needed for money.

But she must know a bit about desperation. She wouldn’t be here sitting high on the floor next to him otherwise.

“Does this stuff normally make you tired?”

“Oh yeah. It’ll knock you out eventually.” As he said it, the realization hit him that she would actually be knocked out eventually, and she was high out of her mind. And she’d ridden her bicycle. “Do you need me to take you home?”

“My parents think I’m in my bedroom. I snuck out the window. They won’t know I’m gone.” She lifted her hands over her head and stared at them with an amazed expression.

Meanwhile, Barrett’s breath caught in his throat, and his blood stilled before rushing back faster than before.

God, what had his life become in the past couple of days? Was this really happening?

Janelle Duncan was about to spend the night in his house.

He was lucky she wasn’t paying attention to him because he needed a moment to take a deep breath and make sure his face wasn’t too hot to the touch.

“I’m sleepy,” she said.

He cleared his throat. “Just close your eyes. It’s better if you let it happen.”

There was a big sigh, and Barrett glanced over to see she had done as told. Her eyes were closed, her lashes resting gently against her under eyes.

He could stare more openly when she wasn’t looking.

After that point, their conversation tapered off into quiet. The record continued to spin with no music coming out.

“Thank you, Barrett.”

After sitting in the still room, her voice startled him.

“I haven’t felt this good in forever.”

Barrett huffed a small laugh. “Anytime, Duncan.”

God, wasn’t he glad he would remember this in the morning.