Summertime

Prolouge-The Unfortunate Case of California in the Year 2019

Everyone knows about 2012, right? The world is supposed to end, everything explodes, Californiasinks into the sea, and national monuments crash into each other. Some are skeptic about it, some are not. But it’s not how everyone thinks. The world does kind of end in 2012, but not in the way most were expecting.California does not sink. In fact, it grows very, very dry.

So of course, no one expected it. The Fires of 2012 that devastatedAmerica. It became so dry and so hot during the summer that fires started and just wouldn’t stop. They started inCaliforniaand raged across the country, killing thousands of people.

Then Better Living Industries stepped in. They were a small organization that no one knew about, until they came out of nowhere and started putting out fires like mad. Millions of lives were saved. We owed them so much power, and they took it all.

BLI became our new form of government. It took over everything in our lives; internet, food, music—everything thatAmericawas about. And soon, just about everything was stamped with the Better Living Industries symbol—a little black smiley face.

We thought they were the good guys. They had evacuated us to the brand new capitals of our states, which saved us from the fires. BLI made sure that everything was fair and everyone felt happy. Of course, nothing like that works for long.

One day, sometime in 2014, they announced that they were working on something miraculous. They said it would change all of our lives—for the better, of course. We would never be upset or angry again. It sounded good to everyone. Even I thought it was a nice idea, until they revealed what it was.

My name is Terry Seymour, Terry being short for Terebellum. My parents and younger sister were killed in the fires, leaving me to my aunt. That devastated me. Not only was I forced to live with my bitch of an aunt, my family was dead. True, they never cared for me much, but they were better than Aunt Isabella.

She was as cruel as my parents were dead. She had long curly black hair and dark brown eyes. My aunt wasn’t married, but she was always inviting weird guys over to the house and sleeping with them. Some of them must have been fifty or sixty, and were all unforgettable, since they had a habit of being attracted to me as well as my aunt. One came after me when I was about fifteen, and I cracked him over the head with a rolling pin. It was extremely satisfactory.

Anyway, I could remember the day when Better Living Industries came out with the “Emotion Pills”. One pill and you’d be completely emotionless for the rest of the day. I heard that lots of people bought them, but no one at my school did and my aunt didn’t either. It was just something going on. Politics. They seemed to affect everyone but the people at my school.

2016. I was a senior in high school and seventeen years old. It was a really hard time for me; I was almost old enough to be freed from my evil aunt. She was still as bitchy as ever, and I can still remember that fateful October day when it all happened.