"Pick me up tonight and you can find out," she purred, making her friend giggle.

"Don't think so. Busy."

"Ahhh, boo." She pouted and let her fingers of her other hand hook a finger into my waistband. "Well here's something to keep you company tonight."

And then she pulled me down by my collar and kissed me. I tried not to cringe away, but her lip gloss was sticky and sweet. When she tried to open my mouth with her tongue I pushed her away gently with my hands wrapped around her bony arms.

"Let's keep this PG, honey. Settle down."

She giggled. I knew she would.

It was the last week of school. It was my last week to pretend that I was still in high school. The next time I made a move to evade Biloxi, I'd enroll in college because I was getting too old to be a high schooler. I didn't know where I was going. I would have graduated from high school years ago, but at the rate I was going, I didn't know if I would have actually graduated or not. School was not a place of learning for me, it was a cover, a place to blend in and be normal until Biloxi found me and then I'd be gone to the next place.

This was my life. No time or want for girls, no parties, no movies, no parents.

This was my life, but it wasn't a life at all.

Two.

Six months and one lonely birthday later...

College sucked.

The big one.

I had only been going to cla.s.s for a couple of days and was already dreading the long cla.s.ses. It was part of my cover. I practically chanted those words in my mind as I trudged everywhere I went. But one thing remained the same. Desperate girls ran rampant and I still wasn't interested. Every once in a while, they were good for a distraction if need be, but mostly...not interested. There was this one chick, Kate, who would not take not for a answer. She'd 'found' me over the summer when I was apartment hunting and hadn't 'lost' me yet, no matter how hard I tried. To get her to go away one time, I'd even given her my phone number. I was going to ditch it in a couple weeks anyway when I undoubtedly had to move again, so it didn't matter, right?

Wrong.

The girl was as annoying as a Chihuahua all hopped up 'cause there's a knock at the door. The texting and come-hithers in text code were nonstop.

And now, as I stared out into the rain to see a POS car sideways in the road, I knew the world hated me, had to, because someone had just smashed her car into my truck.

I got out and braced myself. It wasn't easy to pay cash for new cars every time I needed to skip town. It was hard living when you couldn't be who you really were. Finding people to pay you under the table was almost impossible these days.

I groaned and glared at the beauty standing at the end of my truck. "Look at that!"

"I'm so sorry," she began. I could tell she really was, but I was beyond p.i.s.sed. "I call my insurance company right now."

That stopped me. "No!" I shouted and she jolted at the verbal a.s.sault. "No insurance."

"Well," she pondered, "what do you mean? I have good insurance."

"But I don't."

She turned her head a bit in thought and then her mouth fell open as she realized what I was saying. "You don't have any insurance, do you?"

"No," I answered. "Look. Whatever, we'll just call this even-steven."

"Even-steven my b.u.t.t!" she yelled and scurried to jump in front of me, blocking my way.

"And what a cute b.u.t.t it is."

Even through the noise of water hitting metal, I heard her intake of breath. The rain pelted us in the dark. I hoped no one came around the corner. It would be hard for them to see us here in the middle of the road. She might get hurt. Then I wondered why I cared. I "Look, buddy," she replied and crossed her arms. It drew my eyes to her shirt. My eyes bulged 'cause that shirt...well, she was see-through now. She caught on and jerked her crossed arms higher. "How dare you! You're on a roll in the jerkface department, you know that!"

"My specialty," I said and saluted as I climbed in my truck. "Get your pretty b.u.t.t in your car and let's pretend this never happened, shall we?"

Because if cops and insurance were brought into this, I'd be on the run sooner than I thought.

She huffed. "Excuse me-"

"Darling. Car. Now." She glared. "Like right now."

She threw her hands up in the air and yelled, "I knew chivalry was dead!" before climbing in her car and driving away. She didn't know it but I was being as chivalrous as they come. I made sure she got out of the rain and back into her car, even though she didn't like the way I did it, and I got her as far away from me as I could.

In my book, I deserved a freaking medal for being so chivalrous. Because people that stuck with me didn't live long.

Just ask my mom.

Oh, wait, you can't. She died long, long years ago saving my life. I refused to bring anyone onto this sinking ship with me. If it finally did go down, I was going down alone.

Now, an excerpt from Airicka Phoenix' Touching Smoke

Chapter 1.

"What's the matter?" Mom honed in on my mood before I even realized I was chewing anxiously on my thumbnail.

"Nothing." I quickly wiped the spit off on my jeans and stuffed my hands into my lap. My torn and b.l.o.o.d.y thumbnail glared up at me, a sick mockery of my lie.

"Fallon..." The warning tone was in effect.

"Nothing."

It was a risk telling Mom when something was wrong. Her tendency to overreact was legendary. I spent a great deal of time and effort practicing to lie convincingly.

"Don't lie to me." But even practice didn't help sometimes.

I gave my head a shake, fixing my attention out the pa.s.senger side window in clear avoidance. Pale sunlight splashed over blooming treetops. The golden rays spilled through the knotted branches in splinters that lay broken across the forest floor. Birds flittered from tree to tree; I could hear their elated chirping over the Rust-Bucket's roaring engine.

"Fallon!" My mom seemed to think that the more she said my name in that I'm-your-mother-and-you'll-answer-when-I-ask-you-something tone, I'd cave.

Usually, it worked. I may have been sixteen, but I feared my mother's wrath like nothing else. She was downright s.a.d.i.s.tic when she wanted to be.

"It's nothing!" I insisted, already knowing even before the words were out that she wouldn't believe me.

"Okay." Her sigh resounded of feigned remorse, as if she really didn't want to have to do it and it hurt her more than it would hurt me - as if I believed that. Her hand wandered off the steering wheel and inched towards the radio.

I caved faster than a house of poorly placed cards in the wind. There was nothing worse than country music, and not just any country music, the old western kind that only played when you're in the middle of nowhere and only two stations worked on the radio: ancient western and some guy ranting about the end of the world and demons.

Give me the crazy guy any day. Unfortunately, he only came out at nights, when he knew he could give you nightmares.

"Okay! Fine!" I grabbed her wrist before she could touch the k.n.o.b. "I'll talk!" I would have made a lousy spy. If I were ever captured, all the bad guy would have to do is threaten me with country music and I'd sing like a canary.

She didn't actually smirk - my mother didn't do that - but there was a satisfied tilt to her lips as she sat back and waited patiently for me to begin.

I faltered in my explanation. Every thread I grabbed proved to be the wrong way to start. My jumbled emotions kept knotting up inside me like yarn, tying up my tongue, making every attempt to speak impossible. Mom never interrupted me. Maybe because she knew how hard it was for me to talk about things I didn't understand myself. I knew she would sit there, for hours if she had to, waiting, never breaking my concentration, until I was ready to speak. Just so long as I told her, she would wait.

"I had another dream," I finally said, staring down at my lap as if the rest of my courage was somehow sitting there, waiting to be plucked up. But the only thing there was my hands, clenched together between my jean-clad thighs. Sweat squished between my palms. I wiped them on my jeans.

"What was it about?" she asked, casual with a tense undertone she was failing miserably to conceal.

Her knuckles blistered white around the steering wheel and there were slight pinch lines on either side of her lips. She stared with such fierce determination out the windshield that I half expected there to be scorch marks on the gla.s.s.

Mom was very pretty, much like those old black and white movie starlets they showed every so often on basic TV. She had beautiful cinnamon-colored hair that was naturally wavy when she didn't cut it pixie-style and it always carried the lingering scent of citrus from her shampoo. She also had beautiful hooded, viridian-green eyes that seemed to always be shimmering like sunlight over a lake. Her complexion wasn't as pale as mine, but porcelain, and she was willowy, not gangly like me, but... graceful, like a dancer. No one ever believed Erin Braeden was my mother. We were as different as night and day physically. My hair was thicker, curler and the highlighted with streaks of blue and it hung to my waist. It also had a life of its own, constantly creeping into my eyes when it was down, catching on things, and when the wind blew through it, the whole thing was one giant bird's nest. I tried cutting it more than once, but it had a maddening way of growing back, longer and thicker than before. I eventually gave up and kept it in a tight braid down my back.

"Fallon?"

I averted my gaze. "I don't remember."

Liar, liar, pants on fire! But it was either lie or tell her about Amalie. Lying was safer.

The dreams had begun six months before and I could never remember more than a few seconds of it. It was always dark with flashes of light, like someone spinning around and around with a camera in a room full of candles. Every so often I would see a flicker of a hand holding a pen over a faded journal, but the image would always dance away too quickly for me to read what was written. There were only two instances where I actually caught a glimpse of something tangible and both times it was a name: Amalie Nicolette Dennison I didn't know who she was or why she kept popping into my dreams every night, or why I would wake up in the morning, dizzy with the salty scent of sea breeze hanging thick in the room, but I wished she would stop. I wasn't sure my brain could take any more sleepless nights.

"Where are we going?" I asked, needing a change of topic.

Thinking about Amalie always creeped me out and I didn't like it. I refused to believe that I was some pod for spiritual communication as I'd heard it once called on a TV show somewhere in Alberta a few months back. The whole show had been ridiculous. Spirits from the beyond had better things to do than wander into the minds and dreams of the living. Besides, Amalie hadn't left me any subliminal messages or announced the name of her killer - a.s.suming she was murdered. She just kept trying to make me nauseous with the spinning and the lights, or she was trying to drive me crazy from lack of sleep.

Honestly though, I blamed the whole thing on my mom. Would it have killed her to spend one night somewhere that didn't look haunted? It was no wonder I was getting crazy dreams. My subconscious was begging for a hint of normalcy. But Mom wouldn't see it that way.

"I was thinking we could just drive west for a while," she answered, rhythmically tapping her unpainted fingernails on the worn leather of the steering wheel in a way that meant she was in deep thought but was answering because she believed children should always receive an answer when they ask a question. "What do you think?"

I thought I would like to head back to Nova Scotia, rent an apartment and stay there. But that answer would only earn me a deep sigh and a long speech about firsthand experiences and how every teenager in the world would have loved to be in my shoes and how I should enjoy it and blah, blah, blah. I'd heard it all before.

So, instead, I replied dryly, "West - fun. Nothing there we haven't seen a million times before."

She either didn't pick up on my sarcasm, which was unlikely, or she chose to ignore it, which I was sure of, because nothing ever pa.s.sed over her head.

"Actually, there's a school I called the other day-"

Reflexively, I groaned. "Not another one..." I was ignored again.

"-they teach Latin and French."

"Wow! Latin! That should come in handy, oh... never!"

She spared me a glower from the corner of her eyes. "You will like this one and it's only for a little while!"

Every time our funds began to decrease, Mom would stuff me in the most heavily guarded private school she could possibly find, while she worked herself silly earning more travel money. She claimed it was a good opportunity for me to make new friends and learn something new. It also gave her a chance to do what she needed to get done without having to worry about leaving me alone in a motel. But what I never confessed to was that I stopped trying to make new friends after leaving the fourth grade for the sixth time in one year. I learned everything I needed to know from the mountain of textbooks, worksheets and notes I carted around with me from all the schools I had left behind over the years, and there were tons of those. The number was mindboggling so I never kept count. But she always insisted.

"Can't we just use the money dad left me?"

I knew it was useless to ask, even before she speared me with a dark scowl. Mom never touched that money, except to pay for all the high priced schools she thought I needed. I think it was her way of making it up to me for missing out on so much of my childhood to the open highway. Not that being stuck behind towering walls and iron gates was any better and I was sure dad would have told her so as well, had he not died when I was four.

"That money is for you to start your own life one day."

One day. I knew my dad would have wanted Mom to use the money instead of working herself to death, but Mom refused to touch a penny of it in any way that didn't involve my education.

"How long are we staying there?" I sighed heavily.

Mom shrugged. "I don't know yet." In other words: until she had enough cash to keep us afloat for a few months. That could be anywhere from three to six months.

Well, maybe it would be different this time. Maybe Amalie would behave for once. Maybe she'd go away. I believed that nearly as much as I believed the sleek, black motorcycle racing to catch our fender was on its way to rescue me.

The sun gleamed off the rider's black helmet, and as I watched, he raised a hand and gave me a two-fingered salute.

My lips twitched and I raised a hand and waved back through the side mirror. Deep down, I stifled the mindboggling pulse of familiarity that warmed in my chest. I didn't know him, yet the pull was unmistakable, As was the distinct sense of deja vu at seeing that exact bike a few days ago at a gas stop in Nova Scotia and then again periodically for as long as I could recall, but always from a distance and always gone when I tried to get a closer look.

I must have been waving for too long, because my mother's voice broke through my train of thought. "Fallon? What are you doing?"

I quickly stuffed my hand back between my thighs. "Nothing."

But Mom wasn't fooled. She took one glance into the rearview mirror and lost all coloring in her face. She cursed under her breath and floored the gas pedal.

Somewhere on highway 1 heading west, four sets of jagged burn marks mar the asphalt where the Impala had all but ripped through the concrete. Black smoke billowed, choking the clear sky with the stench of burned rubber. The motorcycle screeched, swerving under the attack. But where most would have shaken a fist and thrown a few curse words, the rider righted himself, leaned over his handlebars and sped up.

We were doing a hundred kilometers, and climbing. The needle quivered as we accelerated to speeds the Rust-Bucket was not accustomed to; the Impala groaned and shuddered, but kept pace.

"What's going on?" I shrieked, partly out of soul chilling terror, partly to be heard over the clashing roar of two engines battling, one ours, the other the speeder behind us.