Fate (Choices #2) (23 page)

I used the ride home to calm down and ready my side of the inevitable argument with my mother. She was going to be pissed about my suspension from school. I walked up to the front door and stood there for a moment staring at the crackled, flaking paint. I didn’t want to go in. I felt emotionally unstable and I knew Mom would flip out the second I walked through that door. We didn’t see eye to eye on anything anymore and I didn’t feel prepared to handle her reaction.
With my back resting against the adjacent wall, I tipped my head back and closed my eyes. I wanted to stand there forever, but no amount of stalling was going to make this any easier so I took a few deep breaths and reluctantly opened the door.

“Hey Ma,” I called as I walked in.

“Jojo? What’s going on? Why are you home so early?” Her tone was anxious. It was time to face the music.

I threw my purse and book bag on our ratty old couch and walked the few steps into her room. It smelled. Her room always smelled like roses and medicine. Roses, because she loved perfume and she sprayed it on ten times a day. Medicine, because she was sick. They said it was some kind of auto-immune disease. Her body’s own immune system had turned on itself. The doctors couldn’t be bothered to explain anything to me so I didn’t know much about it, but there’s no mistaking the effect it had on her body. She was weak as a kitten. Barely able to close a button on her blouse or run a brush through her hair. She took a dozen pills a day, yet she was in constant pain.

It was a common belief that pigmented people received poor health care. I didn’t want to believe it, but everyone said it was true. I wasn’t sure if the biggest problem was our inability to pay or just a blatant disdain for the pigment in our skin. Whatever the reason, my mother suffered because of it. She went from walking to sitting in a wheelchair to spending every day in bed in less than three years and all I could do was stand helplessly by her side.

As soon as I walked into Mom’s bedroom, her tired, caramel brown eyes were on me. I pulled Sterling’s note from my pocket and handed it to her. She quickly perused the page before turning to glare at me.

“Joanne! Seriously?”

“Let me explain…” I began, but she interrupted.

“I don’t want your explanation. You promised you’d stop this kind of behavior. You can’t keep doing this. You need to learn your place,” she said.

“How can you say that? Dad would’ve never said something like that to me. How many times did he lecture me about standing up for myself?
He
would be proud. Can’t you see that?” I argued. I knew she couldn’t deny it. She had been privy to the same lectures. I watched her anger fade to grief. Bringing up Dad was a low blow.

“Hand me that pen,” she whispered, all the fight knocked out of her. She was so frail she could barely grip it. As she scrawled her name on the slip, regret washed through me.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

“No you’re not,” she said weakly. I went to my room.

I felt like crying as I closed the door behind me, but I never cry anymore. Maybe I’d just grown too obstinate for tears; whenever the urge came I would try to let them out, but it never happened. I hadn’t cried in a very long time, not since my dad died seven years ago. I cried so much after he died I think I used up my lifetime supply. For days and days, I sat in this very room sobbing. I was inconsolable; my mother was unable to reach me.

I was ten years old at the time and my dad had been everything to me. He died at work when a huge piece of metal dropped from a crane and crushed him. My mother didn’t receive one dime from the company because they said Dad wasn’t wearing a hard hat. As if that would have made a bit of difference. In the seven years since then, I had not shed a single tear, not even when my mom got sick. I willed the tears to my eyes, but they wouldn’t come.

“How can it be wrong to stand up for myself?” I muttered out loud and flopped broodingly onto my bed.

Chapter 2

Three days later I was back in school, sitting in the lunchroom, trying to figure out what I had missed while I was suspended. Apparently I had missed something major, because there was a buzz of excitement in the air. I felt it the moment I walked through the door that morning, but I hadn’t cared enough to ask anyone about it.

I scanned the cafeteria. Most of the noise was coming from students at one table. They were obnoxiously loud and laughing like hyenas. I wondered what it would be like to sit with them, the social elite. Not because I wanted their company, far from it. What I really wondered about was how they could sit there day after day trying to impress one another, making plans for the future based on whatever happened to be trendy at the moment. It was embarrassing to witness. I rolled my eyes, but I knew I shouldn’t judge. My future’s already decided for me too. It’s just decided by society rather than the unimaginative whims of a bunch of arrogant teenagers.

I had to sigh.

“What’s on your mind today, Joey?” my best friend asked shrewdly. That’s why I loved her: she knew me so well. I’m lucky to have such a wonderful friend so aptly named, Kind.

I continued to stare into space, too lost in a tangle of unsettled thoughts to answer. The last several days had been difficult. I didn’t mind missing a few days of school. That part was fine. The difficult part had been dealing with my mother when she was angry with me and the nightmares I’d had thanks to Officer Bain and his nightstick. The dreams had been much scarier than the actual event that triggered them. Absentmindedly, I rubbed at the purplish bruise still on my chest and shivered.

“Joanne Brennan!” Kind pressed. I swung my head back to meet her incisive wide blue eyes.

“Just wondering about today’s hot topic. Something’s got them all worked up over there.” I threw my head in the direction of the
hyena
table. As if to validate my speculations, a flurry of giggles exploded from its inhabitants.

“Wow, Joey, you are slow today.” Kind straightened her glasses and put her nose in the air. “We have the great honor of having a new student with us today, class,” I hear Mr. Michaels’ overdone bravado as she teased. “Grey Redcrest, son of Mayor Eli Redcrest has finally graced us with his presence. Blah, blah, blah.” I had to laugh as even the ‘blah, blah’s’ came out with panache.

“I must say for a Fluff, he is awfully adorable,” Kind continued, sing-songing the last two words, while tousling her auburn curls. “Fluff” had been the slang term for an albino for as long as I could remember. I think it’s because their hair and skin are so very white like a fluffy cotton ball or a fluffy white cloud. I don’t really know the origin. Maybe no one does, but that doesn’t stop most pigmented people from using it.

“And I must say,” I paused to make the statement more meaningful, “you say the same thing about half the guys who go to this hell hole, hussy,” I added with a wink. Kind rolled her eyes.

“Please.” She leaned over the table, closer to me. “He’s got a sexy strut, Jojo. You gotta see his butt in a pair of jeans. Better yet, out of them...”

“Kind!” I admonished with phony astonishment. She giggled.

“What? Aren’t you the least bit curious?” she questioned and leaned to peer past me.

“I really don’t care about his butt or his jeans,” I retorted as Kind blew out an exasperated breath.

“Humor me,” she insisted and I sighed.

I glanced at the table behind me, but I couldn’t see past all the heads. Dimly, I remembered Grey, but he had left town so long ago I couldn’t recall his face.

“It doesn’t matter how
adorable
he is, Kind. Admit it. He’s not only a Fluff, but he’s rich and the mayor’s son.”

As if any boy could be more unobtainable
, I thought. “And anyway,” I continued. “What about Chase? Just another fling under the bleachers?”

With a blush, Kind waved off my musing and pointed at the boy in question. Chase sat just a table away scarfing down food with reckless abandon and laughing with his friends like he was giving the hyena table a run for its money.

“How could
that
ever be a fling?” she asked. As if on cue a blob of ketchup plopped onto Chase’s shirt. We both laughed. We finished our lunch quickly as the hour was almost up. I wasn’t looking forward to my next class, but I didn’t want to be late either.

The day passed slowly, but finally I was free from school, only to move on to my next torture—work. I worked at a coffee shop.
The
coffee shop, to be exact. I hated it in some ways, but I was glad to have the job. Any half-way decent work was hard to find in my pigmented condition, and I needed the money. The tiny check my mother received from my father’s pension every month wasn’t enough to pay the bills. Things were okay before Mom got sick because she was able to work. She worked two jobs for several years, but that’s all over. Before I started working, my mom and I would often go to bed hungry because we couldn’t afford to buy her medications
and
food. I never complained. Her health took precedence over my hollow stomach. The day I turned fifteen, the legal age of employment, I got my job at the Lotus. We still struggled, but it wasn’t as bad as before.

I’d always thought it was my pale green eyes that had given me any chance in this world. I considered my looks as they reflected back at me from the sheen in the espresso machine. Unexceptional by today’s standards of beauty, but I’d never felt unattractive. Light brown hair grew long and wavy to the middle of my back, a handful of freckles graced my dimpled cheeks and the bridge of my nose, and soft lips drooped into a frown and of course, green eyes.

“Almost light enough to be decent,” a teacher had said to me once after looking me up and down with a sneer. She was most definitely decent. Pale white hair tied back with a dainty clip. Eyes so light just a hint of blue was evident in the right sunlight. Her skin was alabaster and lacked even a freckle on her nose. Of course something like that could easily be removed and often was shortly after birth or as soon as it was discovered. She wasn’t perfect herself, but she was acceptable. Only a completely albino citizen with pink eyes was given a one hundred percent degree of purity and all the perks such a lack of pigment could provide. They were guaranteed a top education, high-paying jobs, the finest homes, and the respect of all.

Albinos were the clear majority and well, majority rules. How many years had it been since a Pig was elected president? Long before my birth, but it did happen. We’d always been taught that albinism was the natural evolutionary course of our species. That’s what divided us, the main reason Pigs were considered second class. We were less evolved. Degenerates. Maybe that meant I was defective. Whatever it meant, it didn’t really matter. I still had to stand behind a coffee bar, hands on my hips and deal with the first wave of after-school coffee fiends as they filtered through the glass door.

The Lotus Coffee and Tea was our small town’s most popular hangout. It sat alone on a quiet street just a few blocks from our picturesque main street. The owners, Sala Jaeger and his wife Gayda transformed an old hole-in-the-wall diner into a swank sanctuary more than fifteen years ago. The shop was decorated in an Eastern Indian motif. Along one wall was a carved teak bar with a purple top. Covering the floor was a ruby red carpet. Above, gold and silver ceiling panels shone in the soft light and low wooden tables were spread throughout the room. Each one was decorated with intricate carvings painted with bright purple, fuchsia, and gold. Along two walls, a spacious wraparound bench sat low, almost like a bed, with an elaborately embroidered cushion and dozens and dozens of pillows in rich tones thrown into haphazard piles. Silky drapes of fabric hung down from the ceiling like vibrant cloth waterfalls. It was the gaudiest place in town, but I liked its garish charm. I didn’t even mind the sparkly plastic bindi I had to stick between my eyebrows at the start of every shift. The work was easy and I adored the Jaegers. If it weren’t for the customers, my job would be perfect.

I pulled my long hair into a low ponytail and took a deep breath to steel myself against the onslaught. That’s when I saw him. Following a crowd of lively kids through the door was Grey Redcrest. I hadn’t seen him since elementary school, but I knew him instantly. Even without the vague memory I had of him, this town was small enough that a new face easily stood out. I felt my mouth go dry as an intense wave of anticipation coursed through me.
Silly. Just another boy. Another Fluff
. But, Kind was right.

Grey was adorable.

“Geana?” I called from the counter. A tall girl with brilliant white pigtails took her drink without even a nod or a thank you. What’s new?

A familiar bubble of sarcasm escapes my lips. “You’re welcome,” I said. She looked over her shoulder with astounded wide eyes and huffed.

My mousey coworker, Alisha, was mixing up a green tea smoothie when Grey approached the counter so I reluctantly turned to take his order. Something about him made me feel shy, an unfamiliar emotion. He was surrounded by a group of kids from school. One particularly snotty girl spoke first.

“Hey you, give me a caramel latte. Extra foam, extra hot.”

“Name?” I managed, but just barely. I couldn’t even look up from the register.

“Cass with a C,” she offered arrogantly. I could almost thank her. I felt a familiar pique come back to me.