Blue Smoke

on a family. I didn’t put them first, and that’s my fault. So we got a divorce. Nearly ten years ago now.”
    “Sorry.”
    “Funny thing is, after, we got along better. We got closer. Maybe the divorce burned away the bad stuff, made room for some good. So.” He tipped back his bottle. “I’m free if your wife’s got an older sister available.”
    “Just brothers, but her cousins are legion.”
    They were silent for a moment, companionably. “This is a good spot.” John sipped and smoked and studied the neighborhood. “A good spot, Gib. You need another pair of hands putting your place back together, you can have mine.”
    “I’d appreciate it.”
    Upstairs, Reena lay on her bed and listened to their voices carry up to her open window as the sky went soft with summer twilight.
    I t was full dark when the screams woke her. She tumbled out of bed with thoughts of fire chasing her. He’d come back. He’d come back to burn their house.
    It wasn’t fire, and it was Fran who’d screamed. Fran who stood on the sidewalk now with her face buried against the shoulder of the boy who’d taken her to the movies.
    The television was on in the living room, with the sound turned down low. Both of her parents were at the doorway already. When shepushed between them, she saw why Fran had screamed, why her mother and father stood so stiffly in the open doorway.
    The dog was burning, its fur smoldering, smoking as was the pool of blood that had come from its throat. But she recognized the hard-barking mutt Joey Pastorelli called Fabio.
    S he watched the police take Joey Pastorelli away, much as they had his father. But he didn’t keep his head lowered, and his eyes had a vicious glee in them.
    It was one of the last things she remembered with absolute clarity during those long, hot weeks of August when summer was ending and her childhood was over.
    She remembered the glee in Joey’s eyes, the strut in his walk as they took him to the police car. And she remembered the smears of blood, his own dog’s blood, staining his hands.

4
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, 1992
    The glossy pink goo of Mariah Carey’s overorchestrated Emotions oozed through the wall of the adjoining room. It was a never-ending stream, like frothy lava. Inescapable and increasingly terrifying.
    Reena didn’t mind music when she studied. She didn’t mind partying, small petty wars or the thunder of God’s judgment. After all, she grew up in a house with a big, loud family.
    But if her dorm mate spun that track just one more time, she was going in and jabbing a pencil through her eye. When that was done, she was going to make her eat that damned CD, jewel case and all.
    She was in the middle of finals, for God’s sake. And the load she was taking this semester was a killer.
    Worth it though, she reminded herself. It was going to be worth it.
    She pushed back from her computer, rubbed her eyes. Maybe she needed a short break. Or earplugs.
    She got up, ignored the flotsam of two college students sharing one small room and opened the little refrigerator for a Diet Pepsi. She found an open pint of low-fat milk, four Slim-Fasts, a Diet Sprite and a bag of carrot sticks.

    This was just wrong. Why did everyone steal her stuff? Of course, who the hell was going to pilfer Gina’s I’m-on-an-endless-diet food, but still.
    She sat on the floor, Mariah’s voice swimming in her overtaxed brain like evil mermaids, and stared at the piles of books and notes on her desk.
    Why did she think she could do this? Why did she think she wanted to do this? She could have followed Fran’s lead, into the family business.
    She could be home right now. Or out on a date like a normal person. Once, becoming a teenager had been her life’s ambition. Now she was nearly out the other side of the era, and she was sitting in a crowded dorm room, with no Diet Pepsi, buried under a course load for the insane masochist.
    She was eighteen years old and hadn’t had sex yet. She barely had what passed for a boyfriend.
    Bella was getting married next month, Fran was practically beating guys off with a stick, and Xander plowed happily through what their mother called his bevy of beauties.
    And she was alone on a Saturday night because she was as obsessed with finals as her dorm mate was with Mariah Carey.
    Oh no, now it was Celine Dion, she realized.
    Just kill me now.
    It was her own fault. She was the one who’d studied her brains out in high school, and worked more weekends than