Golden - Softcover

A Native Oklahoman, Jennifer Lynn Barnes is a senior at Yale University. She wrote Golden at the age of 19, and her second novel, Tattoo, is due out in 2007. She lives and writes in New Haven, Connecticut.

1
blue
Dark.

Looking around, I saw nothing, but I could feel the wrongness of it all in the air, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. Why couldn't I see? I was blind and terrified, and the ground shook violently beneath me. The earth burst into flames, and with the heat on my neck, images raced through my mind. Three intertwining circles, rings of different colors on a silver shield. Grams and Mom, Lexie and me. Paul. Fire and colors, color and fire, even though it was still dark. Shadows and light. Shadows and light and color, and then, there was nothing.

My eyes flew open, and I gasped for air. Where was I? Why was my face squashed up against a window? Was I drooling? And who were those girls staring at me?
My mind still a mess of images from my dream, I eased my numb face off the window and quickly checked my chin for drool. Ewww. Two days trapped in a car with my family, and I was drooling.

"Back to the land of the living, Lissy?" my mom asked from the front seat. I would have shot her a dirty look (how hard was it to remember that I wanted to be called Felicity and not Lissy?), but I couldn't seem to look away from the window. Or, more specifically, the scene outside the window.

You know those mythical creatures that have snakes for hair and if you look at them, they turn you to stone with their deadly gaze? Well, the looks the three teenage girls in the car next to us were sending my way had me good and stoned, and not in a Just Say No kind of way.

The blonde in the driver's seat had this soft, sick smile on her face, and she met my eyes as if to clarify that yes, she was laughing at me (and my drool), not with me and that no, I didn't have a right to be looking back at her. I wanted to look away. I tried to look away, but the best I could manage was shifting my gaze from the blonde to the passenger seat. A girl with long, dark hair arched one eyebrow in my general direction, somehow managing to stare down at me, even though she was in a tiny convertible and I was in an SUV. Impressive.

Again, I tried to look away, but I was stone. Stone that still might have had some drool on the left side of her chin.

I turned my attention to the last girl in the car. An obvious fake blonde, she snarled at me for a full four seconds and then glanced down at her fingernails. Apparently, I was just interesting enough to merit a snarl, but not more interesting than her French manicure.

"What were you dreaming about?" Lexie's voice broke into my mind, and finally, I was able to look away from the convertible. When I glanced back a microsecond later, I'd faded from their radar, and they sped up and passed us on the left.

"Were you dreaming about Paul?"

I narrowed my eyes at Lexie, but apparently, my snarl needed a little work.
"You were dreaming about Paul," my little sister declared softly, her eyes wide and her voice sure. "Weren't you?" Lexie looked earnestly up at me, a lopsided smile on her pixie face.

It was impossible to stay mad at my sister, even when I wanted to, much like it was completely impossible not to think about the fact that the only teenagers I'd come across so far since we'd entered this "state" had seen me with my nose pressed up against a window. What if they'd seen up my nose? As if the drool wasn't bad enough.

"Lissy? Dream? Paul?" Lexie was nothing if not persistent.

"Among other things," I muttered, casting a cautious glance in my mom's direction. She didn't know about Paul and me, if there was anything to know, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend the final leg of our car ride playing the Probing Questions game. Lexie got the message loud and clear, and she didn't say anything else. I stared out my window, watching the trees and telephone poles fly by and keeping my eyes peeled for blue convertibles. After a while, the trees blurred together, I stopped wondering if anyone had seen up my nose, and I let myself get caught up in memory.

Paul Carter: next-door neighbor, partner in crime, best friend. Paul, who called me Weasel and insisted it was a term of endearment. Paul, who laughed with me, even when I wasn't funny. Paul, who had held my hand on the first day of kindergarten and sat on the beach with me after our first day of high school. Paul.

I could practically see him as he had been when our car had pulled away: standing on the beach, sand in his dark hair, his eyes locked on mine. He'd kissed me. I'd been ubercrushing on my best friend, Paul Carter, ever since he'd dumped sand down my back when we were four, and right before my parents, Lexie, and I had packed our bags and moved halfway across the country, he'd kissed me. Actually kissed me. We'd meant to say goodbye then. We'd wanted to go out on a high note: s'mores on the beach and then watching horrendous science fiction B-movies, completely without any mention of the fact that I was leaving. Things had been proceeding according to plan, and then boom: he'd kissed me.

In retrospect, it hadn't been a boom at all. It was actually more of a whoosh, as my lungs collapsed and my heart stopped beating, followed quickly by an imaginary sound that I could only describe as the accordion noise cartoon characters always made after they'd been hit with an anvil.

And now, a thousand miles away from home and who knows how far from civilization, all I had left of Paul was the seashell he'd given me on my sixth birthday, his last words to me ("I'll miss you, Weasel"), and a memory of him on the beach. The colored lights around him had stood out, midnight blue against the stark white sand, moving in slow waves as he watched me drive away forever.