Last Breath: A Novella. Karin Slaughter

      “Thank you,” Charlie managed. She pressed the cool towel to the back of her neck and closed her eyes again. Was this a stomach bug?

      “Ma’am, I can get you something to drink,” the girl offered.

      Charlie almost threw up again at the thought of Belinda’s cough-mediciney punch. If the girl was not going to leave, she might as well be put to use. “There’s some change in my wallet. Do you mind getting a ginger ale from the machine?”

      The girl knelt down on the floor. Charlie saw the familiar khaki-colored sash with badges sewn all over it. Customer Loyalty. Business Planning. Marketing. Financial Literacy. Top Seller. Apparently, she knew how to move some cookies.

      Charlie said, “The bills are in the side.”

      The girl opened her wallet. Charlie’s driver’s license was in the clear plastic part. “I thought your last name was Quinn?”

      “It is. At work. That’s my married name.”

      “How long have you been married?”

      “Four and a half years.”

      “My gran says it takes five years before you hate them.”

      Charlie could not imagine ever hating her husband. She also couldn’t imagine keeping up her end of this under-stall conversation. The urge to puke again was tickling at the back of her throat.

      “Your dad is Rusty Quinn,” the girl said, which meant that she had been in town for more than ten minutes. Charlie’s father had a reputation in Pikeville because of the clients he defended—convenience store robbers, drug dealers, murderers and assorted felons. How people in town viewed Rusty generally depended on whether or not they or a family member ever needed his services.

      The girl said, “I heard he helps people.”

      “He does.” Charlie did not like how the words echoed back to Dexter’s reminder that she had turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in the city so that she could work for people who really needed her. If there was one guiding ethos in Charlie’s life, it was that she was not going to be like her father.

      “I bet he’s expensive.” The girl asked, “Are you expensive? I mean, when you help people?”

      Charlie put her hand to her mouth again. How could she ask this teenager to please get her some ginger ale without screaming at her?

      “I enjoyed your speech,” the girl said. “My mom was killed in a car accident when I was little.”

      Charlie waited for context, but there was none. The girl slid a dollar bill out of Charlie’s wallet and finally, thankfully, left.

      There was nothing to do in the ensuing silence but see if she could stand. Charlie had fortuitously ended up in the handicapped stall. She gripped the metal rails and shakily pulled herself up to standing. She spat into the toilet a few times before flushing it again. When she opened the stall door, the mirror greeted her with a pale, sickly-looking woman in a $120 puke-spotted silk blouse. Her dark hair looked wild. Her lips had a bluish tint.

      Charlie lifted her hair, holding it in a ponytail. She turned on the sink and slurped water into her mouth. She caught her reflection again as she leaned down to spit.

      Her mother’s eyes looked back at her. Her mother’s arched eyebrow.

       What’s going on in that mind of yours, Charlie?

      Charlie had heard this question at least three or four times a week back when her mother was alive. She would be sitting in the kitchen doing her homework, or on the floor of her room trying to do some kind of craft project, and her mother would sit opposite her and ask the same question that she always asked.

       What is going on in your mind?

      It was not contrived to be a conversation starter. Her mother was a scientist and a scholar. She had never been one for idle chitchat. She was genuinely curious about what thoughts filled her thirteen-year-old daughter’s head.

      Until Charlie had met her husband, no one else had ever expressed such genuine interest.

      The door opened. The girl was back with a ginger ale. She was pretty, though not conventionally so. She did not seem to fit in with her perfectly coifed peers. Her dark hair was long and straight, pinned back with a silver clip on one side. She was young-looking, probably fifteen, but her face was absent make-up. Her crisp green Girl Scout T-shirt was tucked into her faded jeans, which Charlie felt was unfair because in her day they had been forced to wear scratchy white button-up shirts and khaki skirts with knee socks.

      Charlie did not know which felt worse, that she had thrown up or that she had just employed the phrase, “in her day.”

      “I’ll put the change in your wallet,” the girl offered.

      “Thank you.” Charlie drank some of the ginger ale while the girl neatly repacked the contents of her purse.

      The girl said, “Those stains on your blouse will come out with a mixture of a tablespoon of ammonia, a quart of warm water and a half a teaspoon of detergent. You soak it in a bowl.”

      “Thank you again.” Charlie wasn’t sure she wanted to soak anything she owned in ammonia, but judging by the badges on the sash, the girl knew what she was talking about. “How long have you been in Girl Scouts?”

      “I got my start as a Brownie. My mom signed me up. I thought it was lame, but you learn lots of things, like business skills.”

      “My mom signed me up, too.” Charlie had never thought it was lame. She had loved all the projects and the camping trips and especially eating the cookies she had made her parents buy. “What’s your name?”

      “Flora Faulkner,” she said. “My mom named me Florabama, because I was born on the state line, but I go by Flora.”

      Charlie smiled, but only because she knew that she was going to laugh about this later with her husband. “There are worse things that you could be called.”

      Flora looked down at her hands. “A lot of the girls are pretty good at thinking of mean things.”

      Clearly, this was some kind of opening, but Charlie was at a loss for words. She combed back through her knowledge of after-school specials. All she could remember was that movie of the week where Ted Danson is married to Glenn Close and she finds out that he’s molesting their teenage daughter but she’s been cold in bed so it’s probably her fault so they all go to therapy and learn to live with it.

      “Miss Quinn?” Flora put Charlie’s purse on the counter. “Do you want me to get you some crackers?”

      “No, I’m fine.” Remarkably, Charlie was fine. Whatever had made her stomach upset had passed. “Why don’t you give me a minute to clean myself up, then I’ll join you back in the rec room?”

      “Okay,” Flora said, but she didn’t leave.

      “Is there anything else?”

      “I was wondering—” She glanced at the mirror over the sink, then back down at the floor. There was something delicate about the girl that Charlie had not noticed before. When Flora looked up again, she was crying. “Can you help me? I mean, as a lawyer?”

      Charlie was surprised by the request. The girl looked nothing like her usual juvenile offenders who’d been caught selling weed behind the school. Her mind flashed up all the nice, white-girl problems: pregnant, STD, kleptomaniac, bad score on the SATs. Rather than guess, Charlie asked, “What’s going on?”

      “I don’t have a lot of money, at least not yet, but—”

      “Don’t worry about that part. Just tell me what you need.”

      “I want to be emancipated.”

      Charlie felt her mouth form into a circle of surprise.

      “I’m