Peach Soda

New York City 

Summer 2035 

Taker says freckles are a commodity. That was his answer when I said I didn't like mine—something about a privilege to show how long I've spent in the light, like the everybodies who live on the skylevel roofs or out in the flats instead of us asphalt-and-shade nobodies. I said he should learn what "commodity" means, instead of just reading the word somewhere and using it halfway out of context. (At least he's reading again.) You can't buy or sell freckles, though I wish I could. I accumulate them fast enough. 

It's one of those dumb adult things, the way he tries to sound semi-educated: I get what it's for, but I want no part in it. Like the pads and tampons Lohen's been hoarding ever since Taker told him he and I were born with bodies that would need them. But I'm not a girl, I'm not a boy, I'm just Fell. 

I've known that much since 2029, when Taker was twelve like I am now and we still had a pair of mothers to come home to. On our way to camp for three days outside the grocery pop-up (and inevitably return with nothing), I made Taker explain the old definitions of "woman" and "man" splayed in naked pictures on the lipstick-red-printed and photocopied zines the callers used to sell at the corner of Fifth. I had picked one out of the gutter. 

Taker said I should get used to it—there would always be part of the world believing everything should choose a side. Even back then I didn't feel like either one. After that he snapped at me to stop looking, and stuffed the pages away for kindling. 

"It's one of the big three," he'll still say, if I get him riled up about the state of the world or whatever. Sex, light, and ammunition. 

I always tell him he's wrong. Just because they want us to care about it doesn't mean it really matters. 

I flit between the slashes of sun left spilled over the ground, Sharpie- and mud-painted toes of Taker's old shoes carrying me. (I won't call them mine until they're small enough to fit me right.) I make it a game to avoid the light, to keep myself as poor—as freckleless—as possible. The rainbow weave of tarp-tent roofs strung down our street is jaded in the early sunset, a glow of strawberry blonde the same colour as my hair. I wonder if I'm backlit beige and orange like they are. If I'm a predator, camouflage, hunting down one can of peach soda from Lohen's trade-in score. 

The power isn't off yet. The few skyscrapers still veined with working wiring shine out with wasted electricity, everyone inside them and those who survive by extension cords snaked along the street rushing to finish charging whatever they can, to clean and cook and cool their homes and do whatever needs more power than the human body gives. 

I cross through our tent, empty of my brother, and through our neighbours', void of them, too. A crowd of laughing twentysomethings spills from a utility-entrance backdoor of the building across the road (the one where we use the bathrooms on the second floor, if the water's running). I study the guns strapped to their waists and the batteries/solar cells/charge packs/anything they own with a screen all gathered in their arms. I become a statue, squat to the ground. 

Sleep is coming soon—"the citywide shutoff of the electric, several times a day, every day (for as long as I can remember), in a government order to conserve energy and resources." (That's what our mothers used to say.) The twentysomethings must be going home. I wait until they're nothing but shadow, and then nothing at all. I slip unseen between encampments as I hide from the sun-glossed portions of the street, wading over a mosaic of plastic, rubble, and trash so deep I barely reach the pavement. 

"Stop," Taker demands as I'm just about to scale the fence at the back end of our camp with expert ease, not a touch of injury from the chain link weave. (Damn, he found me.) He bumps my shoulder and holds out a gripped fist. "Take this for sleep," he says, pressing a tiny solar-charge-battery flashlight into the palm of my left hand. His fingers are dirty. There's blood on his arm. 

"Are you okay?" I ask, before I look up to see that the blood came from his nose and the dirt came from presumably the same fight, along with the graze on his cheek. "Oh." 

"I'm fine and you're welcome, now get out before it's totally dark," Taker enables. He doesn't try to keep me home even though he's desperate to. He sulks back to our camp and lights a cigarette. I follow our street to the end. 

Without a warning the buildings go black, speckles of light down the street sparking out like bad match heads. It's not quite all at once; rather a fade like the way skin is covered in first blood from a cut. But it's quick, and it keeps bleeding, until everything is covered. Everything is dark. 

Everything is so dark. 

There's no stopping it. There's no saving it. 

One by one the yells emerge, spreading down from the north end like the shockwave at seeing said blood—seeing how much living has been lost. All that's left is the orange gilding. The low end of sunset. 

I know the way to Lohen's camp well enough to walk it with my eyes closed—though I wouldn't want to, as I'd inevitably trip on something, fall face-first into a gutter or trash heap or someone I don't know, and end up dead before I got there. 

Before Lohen, my first attempt at a companion—I was eight and she was ten—was Kess. She used to stay with us half the time, when our mothers and her father were alive to be friends. She still lives a block and a half down the street ahead, but she hasn't been home the last times I've come this way. I assume she's been out buying the colourful little pills she's shown me thrice, offered me twice, and swallowed in front of me once from the bag in her back pocket with a sip of stale coffee (kept in an old blue plastic bottle she bought from the peddlers by the riverside). 

The pills make her mean. Once she takes them she won't play adventurers with me like we used to. She won't climb with me over the rubble of the downed buildings on Tenth, she won't scour the ground with me for bottlecaps and dimes and empty cans. I found a penny once (Taker says they went out of use a decade ago). Kess found a solar cell (and immediately wasted its battery energy in her flashlight for the building we explored). 

Tonight she's home (or the car she calls such), her silhouette painted behind the windshield.  

"Kess!" 

She turns when I call and the long black braids of her hair swing over her shoulder. She absentmindedly readjusts her legs dangling from the high driver's seat (no doubt plastered there with summer sweat against her warm brown skin). The SUV was once her father's and once a single colour instead of the spraypaint second/third/infinite coat always touched up here and there by passing strangers. 

"Fell?" She stands. She's wearing nothing but hip-height short-shorts and a green bra with cups she couldn't fill the last time I saw her. She looks almost like a "woman". 

"I'm going to Lohen's," I rush. "He swore he'd get peach soda at the trade-in, the same kind we got last summer, when you bargained all those fabric scraps you found—" 

"You know I can't go." She breaks eye contact to nod to my right. A small shape moves beneath the two-by-four-propped awning spanned from the sunroof to the center of the road's right lane (no traffic has passed this way in a very long time)—her baby brother reaches up for her attention. 

"I wish my parents didn't have him," she's complained before. I didn't understand until she compared it to Taker being stuck with me, when he was only as old as me now. Even then I couldn't fully grasp how she could let it slip so decisively. I still want to judge her, but I can't. 

"Get out of here, Fell," she instructs now, a deeper meaning in her tone (But get out of what? Her business? The city? The life society destined us for?). Wordlessly I step ahead, the wake of my childhood friend left behind. She's changed in a way I don't want to. 

I pass her neighbours, I pass buildings and crowds outlined in the sunset dark, I cross streets whose names I don't remember but their ever-shifting lay of tents and campsites remains a certainty. Flames glance and grow like beacons in receptacles along the street, the most ancient form of making light which never went out of fashion. I look up to the stars. 

Barely in time I hop the curb away from a bus of yellowliners, those select few who can afford to ride the streets all day, chasing the fastlanes. The few vehicles running give no use for transportation anymore, packed with riders permitted to keep their seats as long as they pay. I could never stand the crampedness and the smell. 

Two streets later I'm at Lohen's. He's lived the best out of any of us—a storefront as his home (the bakery his father used to own), with two parents and two older siblings who have managed to survive. It's quiet where he lives, no riots or gunshots or yelps from strangers, no revs or hisses or other car-engine failures, no raised river levels lapping at the East Side. 

I can't make out his features but I know it's him in the dark, a scarlet glare of setting sun on his back as he scales the pile of construction debris that's been centered in the lot opposite his home for months now. He stumbles, and curses out a word I don't know the meaning of. I listen as the scuffs of his footsteps through gravel circle around to the front of the fabricated hill. 

"You showed up! And Taker let you!" he exclaims, meeting me snapshot-quick and dragging me by an arm and a few stumbled strides to his front door. He takes me inside, past plastic-crate-and-plywood shelves of canned food, folded blankets, firelogs, and a locked safe I've seen filled with batteries. He stands me still in the darkness and from his pocket pulls out his mother's old phone. It can't hold a charge anymore, and he brushes through lists and menus with startling speed and accuracy to find the place he wants.  

"Walk with me," he urges, the screen's white glow glinting off his glasses, highlighting their scratched lenses and remelted places where the plastic frames had broken. I follow him into a backroom, out a rear door, and into an alley, where he points by blue-light to a cardboard box at the dead-end wall. I coil the uncut lock of hair at the nape of my neck around my finger, hesitating to follow. (Lohen's hair is like mine, curly but brown where mine is orange-gold. Taker's grows chestnut and straight, evened with ease. He never learned to cut mine properly.) 

Lohen presses the phone's screen-side against the front of his shirt, concealing its light, as he leads me to his stash. He pulls me to a squat on the pavement, pats the damp ground, and at the speaker's minor volume he plays a song from half a century ago. It tells of an end of the world, of losing time and chances, tinged with the realisation that we're still here, alive, left behind. It mentions "God", and sounds like us. 

Lohen prays to something called "God". He once confessed to me that someone told him he wasn't worthy. That "God" wouldn't love him, or that whatever it was had abandoned the whole world. No one alone can care for the whole world. 

"Light this," he says, and passes me a candle in a metal can along with an old Bic lighter. I do as he says, and hold it up to illuminate his hidden cardboard secrets. 

He bends forward in the light and the neck of his shirt dips down to show his safety-pin-and-wire necklace of baby teeth and the thick pink cotton string that holds a golden charm. It looks like a lowercase "t". He calls it a cross. Even when I've asked he's never told me what it's for. I've started to wonder if even he knows. 

I watch him dig through one-dollar bills, maybe twenty, maybe thirty, but not enough to survive for long either way. Our waiting packs of pads and tampons take residence at the bottom layer. 

Finally, Lohen passes me a soda can, and takes one for himself. Its metal is beginning to cool, the liquid inside still sun-warm from being displayed at the trade-in. 

Blind save for the strobe of the flame before us I snap the pop tab and drink. A syrupy bite hits my tongue and the fizz nips after it, a coral-pink sweetness that tastes like summer nights and starry skies. It tastes like innocence and childhood. 

It will only last until it's gone.