NaNoWriMo Update and Excerpt

 NaNoWriMo has begun and the keyboard smashing is already on its way! So far, so good, though I hope I won't have to keep staying up to midnight to finish my daily word count XD. No one tells you just how much collage work sucks up your time through one way or another (procrastinating doing it counts). Here's an excerpt from the first chapter that's made it past the rough editing pass:

Citizen—Edison, his real name—rounds the corner, hands in his coat pockets and a faint smile on his face. “Hey.” His hair is slightly more wild today, bearing the signs of constant ruffling, and there is a fresh nightshade sticking out of his breast pocket. He must have recently pilfered it from the flower section of the garden; it wasn’t there when we came here.

Placing the fern in the hole beside me, I brush off my pants with a faint smile of my own. “Hey. Time to go?”

He nods, offering me a hand. “Yep. You got cats waiting for you.”

A spark of light flashes in my chest along with a tingle of ice down my fingers. Yes, cat time is next! “Is Skittles there today?” I gather the tools and the rest of the ferns into a neat pile for the real gardener to put away before taking his hand and pulling myself to my feet.

“As far as I know.” He raises his eyebrows, the corner of his mouth twitching upwards. “You and that cat, huh?”

I don’t hold back a smirk and nudge him as we start walking down the path. “Hey, she’s the best cuddler! We love each other.”

Edison relinquishes his attempt at seriousness and smiles with an easy air. “Skittles and Elias, the best snuggle team ever. At this rate, you two are going to dominate the world with free cuddles.”

Elias. Even after months of hearing it, it’s still strange to hear my old, now primary, name and respond to it. It fits like an old, familiar code language that should’ve long since gone obsolete yet still runs perfectly. Familiar, yet strange, fitting, yet not, just like so many other things in my life.

But it’s better than Denizen, though. Denizen is not real. He’s someone else that I pretended to be, a face that I tried to graft on as my own, a person that no longer exists, and I can’t bear to be called by his name.

“And free ice cream.”

Edison’s words are quiet but strange enough to crash me back into the present. Shoot. Did I forget to answer again? Has it been too long? Why do power suppressant patches have to have the side effect of spacing out? Gah, keep it together, Elias! Clearing my throat and giving myself a mental kick I say, “Free ice cream?”

The plants on either side fall away and we approach the biodome’s door. Edison taps his holowatch on the keypad and types in the code as he speaks. “Yeah. It’s an inside joke we used to share as kids.” The door swings open and the sound of voices, shoes on hard floor, and the soft hum of security fields breaks the peaceful silence. We step out and head for the far hall on the other side of the Great Intersection.

“Ice cream was expensive in our area and we thought it a crime against kid-kind, so as our imaginary hero personas, we made a pact that when we were influential, we’d make ice cream free. Everyone was supposed to love that so much that we’d dominate the world through free ice cream.” He chuckles, a fondness coloring his voice. “We had a lot of wildly unrealistic dreams like that.”

“Sounds fun.” I don’t know what else to say, because it does sound fun. It’s so ridiculous, so far out of touch from reality, it sounds like normal kid chaos. That in and of itself isn’t too special, but to me it says we were normal kids. We had normal lives. Normal impossible dreams. Normal sibling interaction.

And that fills my heart with a swelling emptiness lined with the fading warmth of loss and at the same time, cracks my mouth open in a wistful smile in a way I can’t explain.

Edison meets my gaze, the corners of his eyes tight and his words thick with coded undercurrents. “It was. It was a lot.”