Something about the bright pink sky had always bothered Ima, but she couldn’t put her unease into words. It wasn’t like the sky had changed in her seventeen years on earth; it had changed during her mother’s marrying years, from a blue the color of forget-me-nots, to that awful, bright pink.
She plucked one of the forget-me-nots from next to the bush she was hiding behind and held it to the sky for comparison. Her mother remembered the change starting around 2036, when the ozone layer damage hit an all-time high and the air became too polluted for breathing. Populations migrated to domed cities like Chicago, where the government could control the atmosphere and food supply without overextending the earth’s dwindling resources.
Domed cities provided answers for the people who had survived The Scorched Years. And most accepted the safety the domes could provide without question. But the pink blush that streamed through the clear protective barrier only left Ima with more questions. Questions about The Dead Zone. Questions of what lay beyond it.
A shadow fell across Ima’s forearm and she ducked farther behind the forget-me-nots.
“E,” a familiar voice whispered. “It’s just me.”
“Do you have the concert tickets?” Ima scooted sideways and Dash crammed himself behind the bush, crushing half of the flowerbed that separated their apartment complex from the one next door. He squatted comically, like he’d just eaten cake in wonderland.
His arm brushed her lightly when he whipped out his avatar and connected it to hers with a few screen touches. “I’ll transfer yours now.”
Dash was short for Dashiell, but it could have been short for dashing—he was handsome in a prince-charming way, with midnight blue eyes and blonde hair that fell across his forehead in a simple swoop. Dash had rare coloring—only about 1 in 10,000 had it still—that contrasted Ima’s own dark skin, almond-shaped eyes, and black hair. And even though Ima saw her best friend’s face often, sometimes the paleness of his skin and the perfect symmetry of his cheekbones still struck her like a hard slap on the face. Ima read somewhere that love felt a lot like that. She didn’t know that she loved Dash, only that he frequently left her dumbfounded, slurring through her words, digging through a cloud of fogginess to find her brain and figure out how to use it. Supposedly, love felt a lot like that too.
Dash clicked his avatar off as the transfer completed. “I brought the stuff you asked for,” he said, freeing Ima of her thoughts. “We need to hurry, though. The train leaves in seventeen minutes.”
Ima eyed the scarlet lace bra poking out of Dash’s shopping bag and felt her cheeks flush to about the same color. She snatched it from him and ran her fingers across the clasp. 32B, her exact size.
A black cat snuck across the lawn, giving Ima a distraction from the clothes. In the old days, black cats meant bad luck. But in the domes, most people didn’t own pets, couldn’t afford them. The woman in apartment 1222 left scraps out about once a week. Most of the cats died anyway, despite her generosity; but every once in awhile a survivor would come through. And for some reason, the survivors were always black.
When Dash first pointed that out to Ima, he told her that he considered her a black cat—scrappy, sly, and with a never-ending will to live. But Ima couldn’t see it in herself.
She unclasped the bra Dash had bought for her. “Close your eyes,” she mumbled, barely able to breathe. Dash gave her a funny look, then shrugged and turned away, training his eyes on the black cat’s movements.
Ima knew what Dash’s shrug meant; he wanted to say, “Not like I haven’t seen you before.” He had. Six times. And Ima could barely look at him whenever he reminded her.
YOU ARE READING
Socialpunk (Socialpunk #1)
Teen Fiction"This book would be good for those that enjoyed the Hunger Games!” ~ Cover 2 Cover Blog "When I read the first page, I did not anticipate that I would be finishing the book that night, but I did. I had to. I didn’t care that I was up until 3:00AM."...
