Free Spoils by Tammar Stein Page B

We won seventy million dollars. How was I supposed to know each one of those dollars was a curse? How could I have known that then? I was only seventeen.”
    We’re both breathing heavily and my heart knocks in my chest at the sudden adrenaline rush, but there’s nothing to fight and nowhere to hide.
    “There
was
something a little scary about him,” she finally admits. “I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the first thing I did when I saw him was take a step back.” I sit up to see her face better, but she stays on her side, her back to me, a pale mound under the washed-out covers. “I keep thinking about that,” she says to the wall. “That small step away from him.” Her voice is suddenly thick with tears. “He frowned when he saw it. Then he smiled this crooked little smile and started talking. I keep thinking about how some part of me knew I should leave, but I ignored it.”
    I slide back under the covers, suddenly cold. In the dark we lie back to back, two parentheses facing the wrong direction.
    “Natasha…” My anger is gone and only a weary sadness is left in its wake.
    “All I could think about was that Emmett was leaving. He was enlisting in the army and he was leaving St. Pete and he wasn’t coming back. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t let him leave me like that. I was completely obsessed.”
    I don’t remember that time very well—I was only ten. But I remember how worried my parents were about her. How they felt she was crossing some line, passing from youthful intensity into something not-normal, into crazy. Maybe that’s what caught his attention in the first place. Maybe she secreted some pheromone, something that said she’d cross any lines, pay any price, and it’s what attracted him to her. To take her up on what she was so clearly eager to give away.
    “The first few times I saw him, he never asked anything about me,” she says, settling into the story. “When he saw me light up the first time, he offered to share some of his smokes. He said they were smoother than anything I’d ever had. What a pickup line, right?”
    “A lame one.”
    She falls silent and I kick myself for interrupting her flow.
    “I took one,” she says after a pause. “He flicked a gold lighter and as soon as I tasted it, I knew he was telling the truth, it was amazing. He finished before me and he crushed the butt under his heel and said, ‘See you later.’ And that was it. I watched him walk away as I kept smoking; he never looked back. A couple of days later I saw him outside a coffee shop where I was with some friends. But he only waved and kept going. He was wearing that wonderful leather jacket and looking like he could be a movie star. All my friends were dying to know who he was, asking me how I knew him. So I said we met at a concert, that he was a musician. When I saw him again the next week, I had some crazy thought of going out with him, making Emmett jealous.” She laughs hollowly. “God, can you believe that? Seventeen-year-olds are pathetic, aren’t they?”
    “I guess it depends on the seventeen-year-old.”
    “Sorry, Leni, I forget how young you are sometimes. You’re definitely smarter than I was at your age.” That’s supposed to make me feel better, but it’s not much of a compliment.
    “So what happened next? After you tried to date the evil hacker?”
    She winces at the bite in my tone.
    “I asked him where he got his cigarettes because I wanted to buy some. He reached in his pocket and took out a nearly full pack and handed it to me. He told me they were blended especially for him, and I could keep the pack, he’d get more later. It didn’t have a name on it, just a red carton with a gold flame embossed in the center. They had to be really expensive. When I shared them with my friends, everyone went crazy over them. They made us feel so good, mellow but focused, you know?”
    I don’t nod, I don’t move, we’re getting to the heart of the story.
    “I saw him