A Symphony in Shorts

Radioactive

Dedicates: Imagine Dragons, Maggie Stiefvater, AnimalLuver39

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Radioactive

*

To the rest of the world, Brenna Johnson is an enigma, but to me, she’s just Brenna.

I’ve known her since we were both really little, decked out in some of the last clean diapers created before the Second Revolution, when our words were just incoherent gurgles and shrieks and our daily rituals consisted namely of naps and feedings. Her eyes were the color of ash and dust, and her smile sent shivers down my spine. That should have been my first sign that she would become a Second Revolutionist, but it wasn’t. Then in grade school, after she traded in her pudgy cheeks and chronic ear infections for thick, thick hair and pouty lips, she commanded the audience of our fifth-grade talent school with a riveting rendition of a pre-Revolution story about the dangers of radioactivity. I doubt I could have ever made it past the first page on my own, but when she read it, it was the most fascinating story in the world—but I still didn’t get it, not even then.

It’s now that we’re seventeen that I know.

She wants another Revolution.

No one expected it, but the signs were there. Our Brenna Johnson, the girl who had once sneaked me out of my house in the middle of the night to dance in the ashes and breathe in the chemicals, has joined the Second Revolution. I know because when I pass her second-story bedroom window, I see the red flags, and when I pass her in the hallways at school, I see her red clothes and the little red emblem she wears on her red bandana. I see it and I don’t say anything. But I know it worries her family and her friends, and I know it worries me too.

I hang out beside my bedroom window in hopes of seeing her before she dashes off to another one of her rallies. My forehead is pressed against the cool pane, and through the whirlwind of gray ashes and the orange haze of day transitioning to evening, I see her. Brenna Johnson. She walks up to the side of my house and motions with her hands for me to open my window, so I do.

My heart beats so loud in my ears that I’m surprised that I hear her voice at all as she shouts, “Hey, Theodore Junior, come walk with me!”

She’s the only one that can call me that. Everyone else calls me Theodore or Theo or, if they really want to press my buttons, Smudge—Smudge because I work at the factory after school to earn some extra cash for my oversized family, and I come out looking like I’ve spent five hours rolling around in a coal mine. Since my father’s first name is actually Xavier, not Theodore, Brenna is the only person on this whole planet that can make my given name not sound lame.

“To where?”

“I don’t know. Just come walk with me!”

Even though I don’t want to admit it, I know I am desperate for her attention. She is Brenna Johnson; the girl that brought midriff-baring T-shirts back from the dead and the person that convinced half of the school’s marching band to join the Second Revolution with a single bat of her eyes. She is beautiful and toxic like the radioactivity she strives to annihilate, and she knows it. I hate her and I love her, and I climb out the window like the pathetic, powerless loser she thinks I am so that we can walk and talk for what seems like the first time in months.

“Theodore Junior, I’m glad to see you.” And she hugs me.

“And me you, Brenna.” I hold her for as long as I can without it getting awkward.

The sun sinks into the earth, setting the sky on fire, all oranges, yellows, and pinks, as we walk side by side in the desolate streets. She has on a backpack, which she takes off to fish out some masks. When the sun goes down and the moon comes out, everything glows a faint shade of neon green here. It’s pretty, but too much exposure can kill you. Our town learned that the hard way.