Vivian Divine Is Dead by Lauren Sabel

like a dead squirrel by the tail. I’m so grossed out I can barely speak.
    “Did I mention I’m never eating again?” I ask, staring at the squirrel’s furry body as Nick skins it with his small pocketknife. I have to look away as he cuts it open and impales it on a stick, and then hangs it over the fire, inches from the flames. “Seriously, never again,” I repeat.
    Despite my protests, within minutes the squirrel is roasting over the fire with bits of its flesh crackling. A few butterflies are swirling in the smoke over the flames, but the rest have settled into the forest, still as ghosts.
    “Just try it,” Nick says, blowing on a piece of the steaming cooked squirrel hanging from a stick. “One piece won’t kill you.”
    I seriously doubt that. You don’t just eat a squirrel and live! “No way.”
    “Scared?” Nick taunts.
    “Okay, gimme that.” Aware that I’m going to spend the rest of the night waiting for food poisoning to kill me, I grab the stick from him and bite off a piece of meat. It practically melts in my mouth. “It tastes like chicken,” I say through another mouthful.
    Nick grins at me, and his smile is almost worth eating rodent intestines. Almost.
    After we’ve eaten, we settle back into the darkness of the forest, our shoulders lightly touching in the dark. I’m surprised at how safe I feel, now that I’m really hidden from the world for the first time in my life. Besides Nick, no one knows I’m here. No paparazzi, no police, no magazines looking for their next story. Not even that horrible man could find me here. The thought of him sends beads of sweat down my back.
    “You look nervous,” Nick says. In the firelight, his eyes flicker from dark green to light green, and I feel like I’m being hypnotized, his irises a swinging watch at the end of a long chain. His eyelashes are longer than mine (not fair!), curling up a bit at the ends, and his eyes seem to breathe me in, all of me, not just little useful pieces like Pierre’s used to do. But maybe I’m just imagining it.
    “It’s just . . . I’m glad you’re here,” I say, praying he won’t laugh at me. “I mean, there must be lots of girls wishing they were in my position.”
    Hiding from a killer with an armed stranger in Mexico? Am I crazy?
    Nick looks at me in surprise. “Not really. I pretty much stay to myself,” he says. “I like being alone.”
    Here’s a major difference between us: I can’t imagine what’s possibly fun about being alone. In fact, I can’t think of a time when I was. My life is scheduled out for me, every hour penciled in with journalists, photo shoots, interviews.
    “This is the first time I’ve ever been alone,” I say quietly.
    Nick pretends to pout. “Am I that bad of company?”
    “No, it’s actually the opposite,” I say, a blush spreading up my cheeks. “I feel like I can tell you anything. I haven’t felt this way since—”
    “Since when?”
    “Since my mom died.”
    Nick turns and gazes into the fire, as if he’s searching in the flames for something to say. “You were really close?” he finally asks.
    “She was the only person who ever really knew me,” I say softly, remembering the way Mom and I would blurt out the same thing at the same time. Then she’d laugh and say, You’re thinking that? Like I was the only one thinking it. “It’s like . . . she knew what I was going to say before I said it.”
    I expect Nick to look confused, like Pierre did when I told him, but he’s nodding like he understands.
    “Without her, I feel so, I don’t know, hollow,” I say. Okay, so that was embarrassing. Stop talking! But I can’t, because something beyond my control is pushing the words out of my mouth. “I guess I’m just . . .” I bite my lower lip to stop talking, but the words come rolling out, stinging and raw in the air between us. “I’m just afraid I’ll never feel happy again.”
    Nick is silent for a moment. I’m expecting all the usual things: