Welcome to Year of the Firefly: The Free Serialization. Here’s Chapter 2. 📖 New chapters are released every Monday and Thursday. Whether you’re a long-time reader or discovering my work for the first time, you can read the entire novel on Substack for free. Visit the page anytime to catch up on chapters you may have missed. 📚 Prefer holding a real book in your hands? Skip the weekly wait and grab the complete paperback edition right now on Amazon or other online retailers. Ebook is available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. 📝 New to my writing? Explore all eight of my published books on my website, malcolmivey.com. 🙂 Thank you for reading, and as always, reviews and are highly appreciated! Wishing you momentum. —IV

👉Missed Chapter 1? Read it here: Part One: Eight Weeks | Chapter 1

👉Read about the genesis of Miranda McGuire here: To My Incarcerated Sisters

👉Get an introduction to Year of the Firefly here: Introduction to Book One of the Miranda Rights series

CHAPTER 2

For a car manufactured at the turn of the century and on the wrong side of 200,000 miles, the Avalon was in pris­tine condition. “Can’t beat these Japanese cars and their timing chains,” said her dad when he handed over the keys for her sixteenth birthday. “Damn things run forever.” And he was right. He usually was when it came to cars. Almost three years later the old Toyota was still gliding along.

She hit unlock on the key fob and settled behind the wheel, pouting as Nick swaggered around to the passen­ger side. “What’s up, bae?” He folded his long body into the leather bucket seat and slammed the door. “You feeling some type of way?”

For all of her gushing about his street slang, a few of the more nonsensical phrases grated on her; feeling some type of way, for example. Typical vague noncommittal male statement. What type of way?

She started the car and backed slowly down the steep driveway. “If by some type of way you mean livid, then, yes. I am. I’m feeling some type of way about your com­plete lack of chivalry.”

Impossibly long lashes blinked in her periphery. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you not objecting when Captain Hook in there insulted me.”

“Gucci?” He frowned. “How did he insult you?”

“Um, he called me your bitch for starters.”

Perplexity. “Wait . . . you’re not?”

She shot him a withering look. “I’m nobody’s bitch. That’s an offensive, derogatory, misogynistic word.”

“I don’t think he meant it like that, bae.”

“No?” she smirked, “And what about when he called me a troll? Was that intended to be a compliment? I’ve never been so humiliated in my life.”

A stray dog loped across her rearview. She braked to let it pass before pulling out onto Sixth Avenue. When she shifted from reverse to drive, she noticed that Nick was grinning. “It’s not funny asshole.”

Laughter spilled through his smile. “You’re trippin’ bae. Not troll as in some ugly monster. Troll as in patrol . . . as in police. Feel me?”

The dog looked up from the sidewalk as they passed. Defeated bloodshot eyes touched hers. She stopped the car.

“Miranda? What the . . .? We’re ridin’ dirty. You can’t just stop in the middle of the street.”

She fumbled through her purse and found a trail mix bar, her go-to snack between classes. “This will just take a sec.”

The musclebound money counter stepped out on Gucci’s front porch and glared a question at them. What the fuck? Nick responded by raising his index finger. One moment please.

Miranda unwrapped the breakfast bar, broke it into pieces and opened the door. The dog bounded over to her outstretched hand and devoured the food, licking her palm clean as she scratched its dirty head. “That’s a good boy.”

“Bae? Can we flex already? This neighborhood is crawlin’ with troll and I’ve got a zip of Boi and my fire on me.”

“Okay, okay.” The dog clearly wanted to come home with her. She gently pushed it away and pulled the door shut. For a moment it trotted along next to the car, but by the time she reached the light at Cervantes it was barely a speck in her mirror.

She reached for the stereo. NPR’s Acoustic Interlude came jangling through the speakers. Gillian Welch was singing “The Way It Goes” over Appalachian strings. She adjusted the volume.

He grabbed her hand. “Look at me.” Deep, soulful, almond-shaped eyes narrowed with intensity. “I wouldn’t let nobody disrespect you. If anything, I’d go to war about you.”

His grip morphed into a caress. She melted beneath his touch. The light turned green. “Which way?”

He released her hand and flipped down the sun visor, removing a rolled blunt. “To your crib? You know the way. Bust a left.”

She hesitated before tapping the blinker. “I thought you said you were getting some pills.” Her voice was weak with need. She hated the sound of it.

After an anti-Trump rally turned violent outside the Civic Center, she tripped over a rain-slicked curb on Gregory Street while running to her car, skinning her knees and injuring her back. Dr. Metzer prescribed Percocet for the pain. By the time her prescription ran out, the pain had subsided, but a new ache bloomed within her. She had fallen in love with the muted warmth of opiates. After a second script was quickly gobbled up, she was on her own, forced to overpay and scrounge and trade her Adderall for Lortab. Until Cassy Myers, her lab partner in Anatomy and Physiology, introduced her to Nick at a frat party a month earlier.

He pushed in the cigarette lighter and shook his head. “It don’t make sense to pay a dollar a milligram for pills when I’ve got some of the most fire dope in the city right here in my pocket. You heard Gucci say how pure it is.”

“Actually, he said it was purr.”

“This shit’ll make you purr.” He reached across the console and squeezed her thigh. “Just like a little kitten. Want me to fix you up a bump?”

She shook her head. It wasn’t that she was snobby and only wanted pharmaceutical grade opiates. She just didn’t want to cross that line. It was bad enough that she had graduated from popping pills to snorting them. But heroin was a Pandora’s box with an escalator inside lead­ing straight down to the bathroom floor with a needle in her arm. No way. She had a GPA to maintain, novels to write, dreams to chase.

He puffed the blunt to life. The familiar aroma of Girl Scout cookies filled her car. Such a strange name for de­signer weed, she thought, Girl Scout cookies. She was a Brownie and a Scout all through elementary school, had probably moved more crates of cookies than Gucci had dope, but she had never run across any that smelled like Nick’s stash.

There was a certain sensuality in the way he smoked, a level of intimacy and attention to detail that reminded her of his lovemaking. He took a deep pull followed by small sips, frequently turning the blunt sideways to inspect it, licking his finger and dabbing out runs as se­duc­tive tendrils of smoke drifted from his mouth up into his nose, inhaling and exhaling almost simultaneously.

He extended it toward her with one hand while reaching for his phone with the other.

She was never a big fan of weed. It made her too self-conscious. Her inner narrator was chatty enough as it was. No need to pump up the volume. But lately she found herself doing all kinds of things she didn’t normally do.

She accepted the blunt and took a tentative drag. It was moist from his lips. She wasn’t sure about any Girl Scout cookies, but she could definitely taste him. On the radio, Gillian Welch faded into a digital hiss of dead air. For a moment, the only sounds were the road noise and Nick tapping away on his phone. Then a swarm of ban­joes burst forth through the speakers, jolting her upright. A yodeler began to yodel.

Nick stopped texting and looked up. “What the fuck are we listening to?” He jabbed an insistent finger at each radio preset until he found the rap station. An autotuned emcee was crooning about kidnapping someone’s bitch if they played with his money. He began to bob his head hypnotically and settled back into his seat. She passed him the blunt.

The familiar businesses and street signs that lined Cervantes flew by in a fluorescent blur. She was stoned by Twelfth Avenue. As they neared Seventeenth, she eased into the turning lane. Maybe she would try a little bump of heroin when they got home. Just a taste.

“Don’t turn on your street,” said Nick. “Keep straight.”

She glanced over at him. He was texting again.

“I’ma get you some pills, bae.”

Her heart rate accelerated with the Avalon. The thrill of hope alone was intoxicating. She cut off a pickup as she swerved back into the middle lane. Brakes shrieked. She winced and sucked air through her teeth. “Sorry,” she mouthed into the rearview, but the truck was already surging along the right side of her car.

Through the passenger door mirror, she could see a rebel flag license plate bolted to the chrome front bumper. Muddy axles and Super Swamper tires quickly pulled even. Snarling faces, purple with rage, shook fists and shot middle fingers. She could hear them through the glass despite the rap music pumping through her speakers. “Pull over you stupid bitch!”

Still bobbing his head, Nick looked up from his phone, took another hit from the blunt and passed it to her. “Hold this.” Then he reached down the front of his jeans and produced a pistol. He didn’t wave it or even aim it at them. He just set it in his lap and clicked off the safety. With a barely perceptible raise of his dimpled chin, he asked a question, simple yet deadly. What’s up?

The truck roared off, belching exhaust as its taillights vanished over the Bayou Texar bridge. Nick stared after it, his jaw tensing and relaxing. The gun lay heavy in his lap. Though her eyes were locked on the road ahead, she could still sense it, a dark and ominous shape, seething on the perimeter of her vision. She ventured a quick glance. There it was. She absently raised the blunt to her lips for another hit.

Nick lowered the volume on the radio. “Everything good, bae?”

“Better than good.” She exhaled a torrent of smoke, her voice an octave higher than normal. “Everything’s Gucci.”

He smiled and retrieved the blunt from her trembling fingers. “There’s some apartments coming up on the right. Village on the Bluffs. Take the second entrance.”

Cervantes bent into Scenic Highway. Glimpses of Escambia Bay flickered through the oaks and pines. The sun was still high enough to sprinkle diamonds over the water. It occurred to her that Florida was shaped like an inverted pistol.

Her phone chirped. Dad was texting. She glanced at the message as she pulled into the apartment complex. Biloxi? She rolled her eyes. Her last trip to the casinos with her father cost her every dime in her purse and almost a thousand in student loans. No thanks. A speed bump rose from the asphalt unannounced. Tired shocks creaked and groaned in the immediate aftermath. The gun bounced from Nick’s lap and tumbled to the floorboard.

“What the heck?” She objected, increasingly more stoned as her adrenaline ebbed. “I thought they had to paint those yellow. It’s like a law or something.”

He reached between his Jordans for the pistol. “Pull up on that curb by the dumpster.”

She scrunched her nose and surveyed the parking lot. There was an open space between a Yukon and an Alero. “How about over there?”

He was tapping on his phone again. “Yeah. Good. Whatever.”

She pulled in, shut off the car and began checking her makeup in the mirror.

“You can’t go in with me this time, bae.”

“Oh,” she frowned. “Okay.”

He stuck the phone in his pocket. “Misty’s got a script for Roxy 30s. But she won’t even open the door if I’ve got somebody with me. Her son weighs 500 pounds. Rarely ever gets out of bed. Her apartment’s a mess . . .”

“Say no more,” said Miranda. You had me at Roxy 30s.

“There’s a cop that lives across from her. Fucks with me every time he sees me. Frisks me, threatens me with jail. Petty shit.” He thumbed the gun back on safety and held it out, handle first. “Hold this down for me. Just in case he’s snooping round.”

She hesitated. “But . . . what if he follows you back here? What if he searches my car?”

“He won’t. He’s probably on duty anyway. I just can’t get caught slippin’. With my record, I’d never see daylight again.”

The internal floodwaters of anxiety were already up to her throat. She regretted smoking the weed. Her inner narrator wasn’t helping. A gun!?! Don’t you dare Miranda. What kind of a hypocrite are you? I cannot believe you are even considering it. How many anti-gun rallies have you attended? Didn’t you just post a Gabby Giffords quote on Facebook last month? What would she think about this? What would Nancy Pelosi think about this? WHAT WOULD MICHELLE OBAMA THINK ABOUT THIS?

Why did her inner narrator sound so much like her mother? She wished she had a Xanax.

“I’m just doing this shit for you, bae. You know how I feel about pills. Want me to hit her up right now and let her know I ain’t coming? She won’t stress it. Hard as it is to get pills these days, they’ll be gone in an hour.”

“No!” She grabbed the gun and looked for a place to put it, finally settling on her purse. “Just . . . just please hurry up.”

“You sure?” he said. “I’m supposed to be getting some lean soon. Maybe tonight. If you can hold out.”

Lean. Sizurp. Codeine promethazine. Medicated cough syrup. Favored beverage of rap stars and drug dealers. Nick mixed his with Sprite. She had guzzled her share over the last month. It definitely took the edge off. But compared to snorting Roxys, it was baby aspirin.

She shook her head. “It’s fine. Really. I was just having a moment. You know I get weird when I smoke.”

“Just chill bae. You with me now. I got you.” He reached for the door handle, paused and pulled the Ziploc of heroin from his jeans. “Damn. Slippin’. Almost forgot this.”

He dropped it in her purse himself.