Free The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith Page B

before, and just as I found a path to where he was pouring, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
    A soft hand. It stopped me, turned me back.
    “I didn’t think you were going to come. I’d almost given up waiting for you.”
    I felt myself going white, like all the blood had just drained from my body, and my eyes met squarely with hers.
    “It’s Nickie, with an I-E,” she had said, and spelled it out slowly. And now I remembered how I’d entered it into my cell phone, earlier, before it went dead. She was the one who took my picture after we met on the boat. I remembered it now, how she’d brushed my hand lightly while I was taking a picture and asked if I’d like her to take one of me, since I was alone, for my friends back home. Nickie.
    Maybe.
    What the hell is happening to me?
    I exhaled, smiled. “I…I’m sorry. I don’t know where the time went. Jet lag, I guess. I’ll get over it.”
    She smiled back at me.
    “Well, I’m pleased you’re here now,” she said, and added, “Jack.”
    Then she squeezed my hand.
    I heard myself gulp. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever talked to in my life, I think.
    She wore those jeans that were so tight around her ankles and a pink sweater that clung to her waist with a wide, open neckline that showed her collarbone, the perfect smoothness of her skin. And she looked at me with the softest blue eyes—the slightest trace of a smile on her lips, and shining black hair that spilled down to her shoulders—like she was waiting for me to say something.
    Nickie.
    “Do you want to get something to drink? Something to eat?” I stuttered.
    “It’s very crowded in here, Jack,” she said. “Can we go for a walk outside?”
    I looked back at the bartender. He was watching us.
    Everyone’s watching you, Jack.
    I took her hand. “Let’s go.”
    When we were out on the street, Nickie slipped her arm in mine and I said, “Where to?”
    Nickie smiled and said, “Come on. I’ll show you.”
    And while we walked toward the Tube, I thought I’d better shut up and let her talk, because I didn’t have any idea how a guy like me could get a girl like Nickie to wait for him anywhere.
    Hey, Nickie, did I tell you about how I got kidnapped by this sick guy named Freddie Horvath? And how he shot me up with drugs and shocked me, and I thought I was going to die? And, oh yeah, how he tried to rape me, too?
    But I got away from him.
    Y OU DIDN’T GET AWAY FROM ANYTHING , J ACK .
    Freddie Horvath did something to my brain.
    And then me and my best friend, Conner, killed him. It was an accident, but we fucking killed him, just the same. Did I tell you that, Nickie? Or, did I tell you about how I can’t even remember anything about meeting you today because I hallucinated some crazy shit about people getting hacked into pieces and eaten by bugs? Or how I got shot through my side with an arrow?
    Did I tell you about that, Nickie?
    Because I do remember that.
    I reached around and felt those goddamned glasses there, still in my back pocket.
    She took me to Hampstead, the part of the city where her family lived, and we ate Thai food at a café there and then rode on the Underground to Piccadilly.
    She caught me staring at her on the subway. I wasn’t really staring, though, I was looking past her at the alternating blur and reflections in the window. I looked at myself, and sometimes I looked scared.
    And Nickie said, “There’s something about you, isn’t there, Jack?”
    That snapped me out of it.
    I said, “I don’t know. What do you think?”
    “I think it’s okay,” she said.
    She said it like she knew, like she could heal me. Maybe I was only hoping that was true, because I really didn’t know what to believe anymore.
    I said, “Thanks for having dinner with me, Nickie. I’m beginning to feel, well, not so alone.”
    It was warm, muggy, and we sat on the steps beneath the statue of Eros, looking out at the lights, the traffic. I felt so comfortable with her, but at the