“I just don’t understand what this has to do with me,” Tina said grumbled in her mother’s general direction. Both of them avoided eye contact.
“Your cousin texted me – you know how hard it is for him to reach out to people – and specifically asked if you would be there,” Tina’s mom replied, as if she was explaining this to her daughter for the first time.
Tina’s cousin Darryl hasn’t mentioned a friend to his parents, let alone spent time with one outside of school, since he started 6th grade. He and Tina went to the same junior high, but she was in 8th grade – which might as well have been college in the eyes of 11 year olds. Darryl enjoyed music with no lyrics, couldn’t stand sports or video games, and spent his Saturdays reading about obscure wars on Wikipedia. In other words, kids his age did not find him relatable.
He wanted to go watch the 8th grade Spring orchestra concert, but he didn’t want to sit alone. While he could get away with walking alone in class and only speaking when a teacher called on him, Darryl knew that attending an event alone would confirm everyone’s assumption that he had no friends.
“First, orchestra is lame. Two, I wanna go hang out with Maggie tonight,” Tina groaned through her rainbow braces. Her mother didn’t like picking unnecessary fights. Over the last year or so, Tina went from seeing her mother as her best friend to a mosquito that won’t stop buzzing in her ear. Not that her mother spoke much. But she often lingered, waiting for Tina to say something to her.
“Fine,” her mother said. “Maybe next time.”
Dutchess Zonia did not plan to stay at the Festival of Rings long. The official programming went until 3am and the unofficial programming likely lasted until after breakfast.
But Zonia knew if she stayed too late, she would be required to take an amnesia shot, and she needed to remember everything that would happen at the King’s Feast.
While it’s called the King’s Feast, the custom is for the King to arrive at the end of dinner for a quick toast. Political elites and the people who pay for their lifestyles fill out the King’s dining room, which was filled entirely with the Queen’s artwork.
“This newest piece is especially gauche, no?” Zonia overheard a dark matter energy tycoon whisper to the Governor of the Slion planet’s southern region. The golden statue showed a miner in motion, holding their digging laser above their head as if they were about to strike something hard.
“I’m not an art guy,” the Governor replied, glancing in Zonia’s direction. “But I do appreciate that the Queen takes working people seriously.”
“You’re joking, right? The Queen takes her reputation seriously. A close friend of mine owns an emerald mine here and she lets them do whatever the fuck they want.”
The Governor’s face began to tense and redden, which Zonia found fascinating. Why was a regional Governor from a different planet offended by an allegation of the Queen’s hypocrisy? Based on the Governor’s public persona, he seemed militantly anti-monarchy.
Zonia had a little over three hours to find out.
Not long ago, sunflowers bloomed here by the thousands every fall.
You can still occasionally find their seeds, usually between the teeth of tiny brown rodents with long tails. I forget their scientific name, so I just call them carls (they look a lot like my childhood hamster Carl).
Carl would not have been able to survive in these conditions, but the carls do just fine. Those freaks can survive for like five years without water. Maybe longer. And they can outrun the snakes and bobcats with leaps as long as a professional basketball player is tall. I’m not sure if they breathe in the dust at the same rate as me, but they definitely don’t cough as much.
Don’t lose your hat, because we could walk for half a day and not find shade. Once in awhile I’ll come across a boulder large enough to block the sun. You have to keep your eyes sharp, though, since poisonous scorpions love to nestle themselves under there. I’ve seen a few lizards learn that the hard way.
Christina’s pair of black high top Converse had been through three summers of walks and bike rides across town. Their most common destination: a house with high ceilings that always smelled like lemon Clorox, courtesy of the live-in maid Angelica.
Christina went to that house almost every day to pass time with her best friend Maisie. Last summer, the two of them painted their best attempt at the Phantom’s mask from Phantom at the Opera on Christina’s high tops. They first discovered the musical through a clip of a live performance of All I Ask of You online. Both girls daydreamed of a future when they yearned for something as desperately as the Raoul yearned for Christine.
“Say you need me with you, here beside you, anywhere you go, let me go too, Christine that’s all I ask of you”
They listened to the musical’s soundtrack on repeat all summer and watched any version of the production they could get their hands on (Both of them thought the movie adaption lacked focus). Maisie started referring to Christina as Christine but would not let her mother or little sister do the same.
In late August, about a week before the start of 7th grade, the high tops found themselves on the shoe rack in Maisie’s foyer, where they had been placed countless times before. But Maisie’s eyes were blood shot and skin stripped of its usual glowing olive hue. Her parents stood with her in the kitchen, which Christina found strange since it was 1pm and they both worked downtown until at least 5:30pm.
“What’s wrong?” Christina asked, not sure if she wanted to know the answer.
Maisie turned to her mom. “Honey,” Maisie’s mother began, “do you remember a few months ago when Maisie had to miss y’all’s end of the year awards ceremony for a doctor’s appointment?”
Christina vaguely recalled. Maisie never mentioned it again so she assumed it was just a check up. “Does Maisie have cancer?!” she shrieked.
“Thankfully no,” her mother continued, “but she started some medicine that as of a few weeks ago the state has banned.”
“So, she can’t get her medicine anymore?”
“Well, she can’t get her medicine here. But the good news is there are plenty of other states that still allow teens to take it.”
“Oh, I see.”
Maisie and her family were gone within a month. Christina started the school year wearing her high tops most days, but each time someone asked about the Phantom mask, she wanted to punch a wall, or God, or whoever “the state” was. Classmates spoke to her enough that she wasn’t considered an outcast. But Christina didn’t trust anyone else enough with the vulnerable and sacred ritual of experiencing new things together and letting them change you.
How stupid, she thought, that only a season ago yearning seemed like a rebirth. Christina understood now that it was a stab in the stomach with endless pools of invisible blood pouring onto her pair of Converse.
