Welcome to Year of the Firefly: The Free Serialization. Here’s Chapter 5. 📖 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 there 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+. 📝 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

👉Looking for Chapter 1? Begin 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 5

Writer brain. Hers switched on at the strangest times: while Leah Oglethorpe from English Lit was sobbing to her about her girlfriend ditching her for a grad assistant on the swim team, when faking an orgasm with Nick because she was high on K-4s and couldn’t get off, when Brady Vaughn overdosed in the admissions parking lot on the first day of school. It was during those tense situa­tions—no matter how humiliating, how crushing, how nerve wracking­—that the aspiring novelist in her would switch on a lamp in some dusty office in the right hemi­sphere of her brain and begin mining for literary gold.

Imagine if there was this girl maybe she had a minor opiate problem definitely not a criminal though but her boyfriend sells drugs and one day they go to buy pills and he leaves a pistol and dope in her car and this really mean police officer shows up . . .

She leaned against the back bumper of her car, fore­arms flat on the trunk, staring through the rear window as he dug beneath the seats, lifted the floor mats, checked the door panels, the console, the glove compart­ment, the visors, all while whistling some arrogant little tune. Whis­tling. As her life was circling the drain.

“Found your key,” he called from the floorboard.

She considered running. But to where? And how far would she get? Even her writerly imagination could not concoct a scenario where she fled on foot and disappeared into the Pensacola underworld. She didn’t even know where the Pensacola underworld was located. And anyway, her money and credit cards were in her purse.

He stood and clapped the dust from his hands. “Every­thing appears to be in order . . . less you got a body in the trunk.”

A glimmer of hope. “I can open it for you!” Anything to get him out of her car.

“Hang on darlin’.” He raised his palm. “I think I know how to pop a trunk.” He glanced back inside the car and shook his head. “I hate going through a woman’s purse. Anything in there I should know about? Knives, needles, pipes?”

She swallowed and forced a smile. “Just tampons and makeup and, um, my hairbrush.”

He stared at it for a moment, chewing his lip, as if on the fence about such an invasion of her privacy. Then he ducked back inside the door, grabbed it from the console and dumped its contents onto the driver seat. Although she couldn’t see, she could hear it. A waterfall of fri­vol­ities and trinkets culminating in a distinct successive th‑thunk.

Then silence followed by a low whistle.

She closed her eyes and clung to the stable steel of the Avalon as if her trembling legs were dangling from the side of a cliff.

While she had yet to begin her first novel, she did take copious notes in Professor Duncan’s creative writing class. Enough to grasp the mechanics of storytelling at a fundamental level. And enough to recognize that in the three-act structure of her life, she had just arrived at what the professor referred to as the first doorway of no return. The moment where everything changes.

Her hands were pulled behind her back with humili­ating gentleness. Steel teeth nibbled at her wrists. When he spoke, his voice was solemn. His words floated over her shoulder in a gust of breath mints and aftershave.

“You have the right to remain silent . . .”