High Life :: Hiatus

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[prologue]

What had started out as a perfectly bland day had turned into anything but.

The plan had been for Imani to walk just down the street to Reneé Kidman's sprawling three-story house, pick her up, and then catch a taxi downtown to the Gardens, where Madison Albany lived with her mother in a too-shabby condo. They would pile into the taxi, giggling and trading stories, and ride to their favorite tea shop for Imani to quickly grab a passionfruit green tea with pearls. The taxi would drop them off at Santana Row, and Reneé would insist on paying because she was the only one out of the three of them to have money to blow. Shopping would be done, gossip would be traded, and Madison would spend more money than their monthly rent.

Instead, Imani stood facing the mint green walls she had insisted on painting as a toddler, sweating so copiously that rivulets snaked down her face and pinned the tendrils of her hair flat to her face. She rifled through her closet, trying not to get any of the sticky, grimy mess that was her hands onto the delicate fabric. Mid July easily marked one of Imani's lowest points throughout the year, with the oppressive heat and the languid mire of midsummer. She was determined not to let that get to her this year.

She pulled out a crisp red skirt and cropped striped shirt and laid them carefully on her bed before carefully stepping to the bathroom she shared with her twin siblings Abia and Aina. The plan had been for her to go out with Reneé and Madison, but her parents had insisted on eating at their favorite comfort café. For what reason, her parents had declined to explain. All Imani knew was that she would have to make sure Abia and Aina were ready, which would be ridiculously difficult in itself, them being flighty preteens.

As Imani wrapped a towel around her hair and draped herself in her favorite bathrobe, a blur of black and blue shot past her and locked the door of the bathroom. Aina, probably, because Abia was the responsible one and probably had already showered.

By the time Imani had dressed stood in front of the mirror and fidgeted, resisting the urge to change yet again, her mother rapped sharply on the door and called in a patronizing fashion for her oldest daughter to "grace her mother with her presence."

As they trailed into the quaint restaurant, Abia walked up to the reservation desk, giving their family name, Rudh, to an astonished waitress, who promptly led them to a booth and vanished. Imani immediately ordered an iced grapefruit tea, the only drink that could sufficiently calm her down enough to carry on a coherent conversation during the summer months.

At the diner, over grilled cheese sandwiches and hot tomato bisque, her mother had announced the new job. Imani had not quite understood what it was, but it had to be important, from the beam on her father's face. They would not be moving (she had made that explicitly clear) but Imani, Abia, and Aina would be, traveling across the country to attend Milton Lange Preparatory Academy in Manhattan. Imani had slowly slurped up her tea with the straw, unable to process what her mother had just callously announced.

Eventually, by the next week, Imani was forced to process that information as she was thrust into a whirlwind of applications, standardized examinations, essays, and teacher recommendations. She had frantically sent an email to her sophomore pre-calculus teacher, who all of her classmates had complained had loved Imani. Mrs. Lexington had replied promptly, stating that she had provided a glowing recommendation and that she wished Imani the best of luck on her educational endeavour.

This is real, then, Imani thought. This is actually happening.

Up until this point, the fervent application process had seemed like some sort of ethereal nightmare; something happening on the periphery that Imani had no part in. Sure, she had written and rewritten her essays, panicking in the dead of night, had studied until her eyes simply could not handle anymore, had thought a thousand times about how to phrase her recommendation request, the folds of her anxiety-ridden brain pestering her constantly.