80. 90. 100. 110. 120.
Quinn eyed the speedometer as the needle quickly passed each small number illuminated behind the steering wheel. Her petite hands gripped the wheel, chipped black nail polish glistening in the glow of the dashboard lights. So much had changed since high school.
It started when she was working at that strip club the summer after graduation. Rebelling against her parents, her religion, and her past life Quinn had taken up a job in one of Lima's many strip clubs, The Gold Star. Selling your body like that changes a person, she became disconnected and emotionless.
One night while giving one of the drunk regulars a lap dance, a man entered the club, masked and armed. Shots were fired. Two went into a padded velvet booth, one went into the side of Quinn's head. She was fine, the doctors had to shave her head in order to remove the bullet.
Ever since then Quinn had kept her hair short, and the bullet on a small gold chain around her neck. She ran her fingers through the 5 or 6 inches of silky blonde hair on her head and felt the scar on the right side of her head.
She sighed and looked down at the speedometer again. 134? Not fast enough. The black Challenger easily shot up to 160. It was 2:30 AM, driving down Highway 1. Nobody was going to be around to slow her down.
Or so she thought, until she saw the flashing lights in her rearview mirror. Shit, she thought. Her foot flew to the floor and the car sped up to 170 as she reached into the passenger seat and grabbed the package and threw it into the backseat. She flipped the steering wheel around and started heading the other way faster than the cop behind her could comprehend.
Come on Fabray, she thought, you've done this a thousand times before. You can't screw this up now. Not with $4,000 worth of cocaine in the backseat. She glanced back at the package she had just tossed and took a deep breath. The blue and red lights falling further and further behind her made Quinn feel invincible. She saw her escape, a dirt trail off the side of the road.
She sped off into the dark off the road and slowed her speed. Well, 80 was slower for her.
Quinn hit the breaks and killed the engine about a mile into the dark cover of the trees. She took a deep breath, glanced one more time at the package on the backseat, then grabbed her pack of Marlboro 100's and stepped out of the car.
The only light in the dark of the virtual forest was the ashes of the girls cigarette, which she flicked off after one long drag.
Cigarettes were her vice. Even as a drug-runner of 8 years now, she had never touched a single drug in her life. Well besides nicotine and alcohol of course. She knew what drugs did to your body after all those health seminars in high school.
She still held one important trait of her high school self- self image. Quinn still obsessed over her image. Less about her clothes and hair and make-up, and more about her body itself. She compulsively did sit ups, and the most expensive thing she owned (besides the car) was a set of barbels which she spent almost all of her free time with. The cigarettes kept her skinny, the workouts kept her toned and strong, her love of fast food kept her curvy.
The 5-foot-5 teenage dream had turned into a bad-boy fantasy, looking like a character straight out of some video game. Her black t-shirt, stained and cropped right above her belly button ring, hung off her right shoulder. Sitting on the edge of the Challenger her skinny jeans clung to her skin like they were painted on, too tight to cover the g-string peaking out below the Ryan Seacrest tattoo she got her senior year of high school.
She took another drag of the cigarette and blew it out in smoke rings, laying back on the hood of the car. A hole in the treetops allowed her to see the stars. The stars only reminded her of one thing, so she shook the thought away, far far away, and put the cigarette out on her wrist, wincing but not feeling any pain.
"I've gotta piss." she said aloud to herself stepping down from the hood of the car. She walked into the bushes looking for a proper place to relieve herself, when she felt something cold and hard hit her square in the back and someone grab her arm.
"Thought you'd get away, dirtbag?" the raspy overly-confident voice said.
"Fuck." Quinn said, glancing back to see the little light from the stars reflecting off a badge on the mans chest.