Cover Reveal! Speed by BB Easton

SPEED EXCERPT When I woke up on my sixteenth birthday, I didn’t leap out of bed to go get my driver’s license. I wasn’t thinking about the appointment I had to buy my first car that afternoon—a car that I’d been saving for since the day I turned fifteen and was legally able to work. I didn’t give two shits about going to the mall, or opening presents, or eating a fucking piece of fucking cake. All I wanted for my birthday was to sleep through it, because whenever I was awake, so was my gnawing, soul-crushing pain. I could feel it chewing through the lining of my stomach, devouring my once bubbly personality, sucking the energy from my bones like marrow, swallowing my will to live. Being eaten alive hurt. Being awake hurt. Being asleep didn’t. I reluctantly opened my eyes and glanced over at the nightstand. The red numbers on the clock announced that I’d slept past noon again. The blueberry muffin sitting next to it with a candle shoved haphazardly in the top told me that my mom must have come in and tried to wake me up. My wide-open blinds—which were letting in an obscene amount of summer sun—let me know that she’d tried more than once. And that little white pill and glass of water on my nightstand? Well those only pissed me off. I sat up and squinted at the assorted bullshit on the table until I spotted my pack of Camel Lights. Swinging my spindly legs over the edge of the mattress, I reached past the food and water, opting for poison instead. I lit a cigarette and waited for that comforting, calming first inhalation to do its thing, but even smoking had become joyless. Just like everything else, I was going through the motions. Hand to mouth. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. I ashed my cigarette in an empty Altoids tin on the nightstand and stared at the pill my mother had left for me—the tiny white hope that had turned out to be just another disappointment. I picked it up and inspected it. If it hadn't had the word PROZAC stamped on the side of it I would have assumed they’d just been giving me Tic Tacs. That shit did nothing. Nothing but mute the vibrant colors of my world to a dirty, dull gray. Instead of my feelings being a violent riot of bitter, angry crimsons, churning, crashing ceruleans, and blinking, cautionary yellows, my inner world was now as gray as the cloud of smoke that hung four feet above the floor and three feet below the ceiling in my bedroom. As gray as my skin, where it draped between my ribs and puddled in the hollows of my cheeks and eye sockets. As gray as the fading knight tattoo on the inside of my wedding ring finger. I threw the glorified breath mint across the room and listened to the plink, plink, plink sound it made as it bounced off the wall, onto my “desk”—which was just two filing cabinets and an old door that my mom had scrounged up at Goodwill and spray painted black—and landed in a heap of shiny army-green nylon on the floor. My chest felt as if someone had come up behind me and yanked the laces on an invisible corset. Tears stabbed at the corners of my eyes as images began flashing, unbidden, behind them. Images of a skinhead standing behind me at my locker, sliding an army-green flight jacket up my arms and over my shoulders to warm my perma-chilled skin. Images of his smile when he turned me around to admire the fit. I’d never seen him smile before. Not like that. Making him do it again soon became my reason for getting out of bed every morning. Now what reason did I have? Knight was gone. All I had left was his stupid fucking jacket.