Scorpio

Chapter II

"Grandma, I'm going to school!"

I zipped up a jacket over my long sleeve. It was a shade of blush pink that matched my eyeshadow—not because I was vain, but because I liked matching my makeup with candy-colored tops. It was one of the limited ways the school let us express ourselves, as we had a dress code that had outlawed many things, including skinny jeans—for whatever odd reason—although we didn't have uniforms.

I took some ibuprofen for my incurable headache and downed a cup of water. Can never sleep enough. Then, I slung my pop-art backpack over my shoulders.

I wasn't sure if she heard me. A shower of muted applause rained from the T.V. in the living room as the show host took his or her place center stage. If I had to randomly guess which show it was, I'd have a 25% chance of getting it right. Grandma's |Ω|, that is, the cardinality of her big Omega outcome space, or—in other words—the suite of T.V. shows that she regularly cycles through, wasn't very large.

I pulled on my shoes, scuffed brown leather Mary Janes that I'd had for the past three years, and closed the front door behind me. Outside, it was mildly chilly. Not cold enough to make your breath fog up, but enough to make me jam my hands into my pockets as I trudged through the wan, pasty-gray neighborhood smote under a sickly sky.

It was quiet as I walked to the bus stop, taking the same route that I had traversed all last semester, automatically avoiding the chinks and other assorted tripping hazards breaking up the grimy sidewalk. The other houses lining the streets were quiet. They stared at me with forlorn eyes through the cataracts of their clouded windowpanes and gaped at my passage as I shuffled past their neglected and peeling doors. Urban decay—much more appealing as a cosmetics brand than in reality.

My life had always been an irony. The daughter of a cross-country truck driver walks to school. Dad was somewhere in the forty-eight contiguous states, trundling along asphalt interstates on eighteen wheels, burning rubber and foul-smelling diesel. He had a mission to deliver a couple thousand cubic feet of unnecessary but indispensable goodies to bright-eyed consumerism junkies all over the nation.

Based on the number of trips he made and all the miles he'd logged over the years, the odds were favorable that Mom had ended up with one of the manufactured knick-knacks that had, at some point, passed through his truck. But it'd be impossible to test this hypothesis because no one knew where she was. Not for many years. Funny how two points look really close on a map, and the miles that separate them don't really register until you start plodding along the route that Google Maps has highlighted in blue, and you realize how huge the world is. Then, you start wondering if you'll ever get there. If you'll ever see that person again.

I kept alert and tried not to yawn in my sleep-deprived state. A lot of people, including the vast majority of the kids at school, would be über freaked out to stroll through this part of town. As for me, I was inured to the desolation, having lived here for most of my life, but it was still wise to keep your wits about you.

And some spare change. In case you ever ran into trouble.

I passed by a For Sale house and arrived at the bus stop. Claren was already there, his backpack hanging over one shoulder and his standard-issue duffel bag emblazoned with our school's mascot, a golden stag, hiked over the other shoulder. Claren Gale wasn't particularly tall; neither was he particularly short. He was toned from all his wrestling training, but not in that head-turning, heart-swooning, hot-bod way that magnetizes fangirls like iron filings. He stood firmly, prepared, shoulders back and jaws set, but sometimes, you could see wavers of disquietude flicker in his eyes. Especially if you knew what to look for, as I did—because we had grown up together and survived the "other school" before the "good school" took us in.