Robert Crais Quote

Traci Louise Fishman picked at the steering wheel some more, then gave me the Special Secret look again. Like there was something else I’d never heard before, and something Traci had never been able to tell, and now she wanted to. You want me to tell you something really weird? I looked at her. Last year, we were up in my room, smoking. My room is on the second floor and in the back, so I can open the window and no one knows. Uh-huh. We were smoking and talking and Mimi said, ‘Watch this,’ and she pulled up her shirt and put the hot part of the cigarette on her stomach and held it there. I sat in the Rabbit, listening to sixteen-year-old Traci Louise Fishman, and my back went cold. It was so weird I couldn’t even say anything. I just watched, and it seemed like she held it there forever, and I yelled, ‘That’s crazy, Mimi, you’ll have a scar,’ and she said she didn’t care, and then she pushed down her pants and there were these two dark marks just above her hair down there and she said, ‘Pain gives us meaning, Traci,’ and then she took a real deep drag on the cigarette and got the tip glowing bright red and then she did it again. Traci Louise Fishman’s eyes were round and bulging. She was scared, as if telling me these things she had been keeping secret for so long was in some way giving them reality for the first time, and the reality was a shameful, frightful thing. I ran my tongue across the backs of my teeth and thought about Mimi Warren and couldn’t shake the cold feeling. Did she do things like that often?