Excerpt: The Harbingers

It was one of those days that seemed completely at odds with itself- the sky was clear blue, highlighted by the cheerful sun, and the air snapped with cold.
I was worried about my hair.
It was that age where your hair defines who you are as a person- boring, unclean, excitable- anything you happened to be that day.
That day, I was a clear, biting blue. Not my hair, but my mood. The exact color of the sky on a winter’s morning. The kind of blue that you got lost in if you looked up, caught in just how infinite it was. It was a hopeful, optimistic, promising color and that day, I felt hopeful, optimistic, and like I could keep my promises.
Yesterday I’d been a cheery yellow. The day before, ripe-tomato red. But that’s unimportant. What mattered was that that day, I was blue and I was worried about my hair.
Another thick squirt of hairspray battered a blonde wisp into submission, but it was not alone. The recalcitrant lock had brought reinforcements.
It was quite possible that I would need another bottle of hairspray.
Spray, tuck. Spray, tuck. Spray, tuck, smooth, wait. Spraytucksmoothwait. Over and over and over and over until every soldier went down, pasted to the top of my skull.
It took a long time to consider myself ready.
There was hair and clothes and makeup and perfume and earrings and purses to worry about. Outfits were chosen days in advance, or, in the case of Homecoming, months.
Now I look back on it and it seems so silly that, right there, right then, it was so important. No flyaway hair, no wrinkled clothes, no gauche makeup. All forbidden, signs that you were incapable of ever belonging in the complex infrastructure of female society. We were expected to have an intimate and intrinsic knowledge of this unspoken law and while our styles varied, every girl was exactly the same.
Shallow, emotional, and, more important than anything else, pretty.
Because that was all that mattered to us. We needed, pathologically, to be accepted.
We needed to be pretty.
And then the Anti-Materialist Party came and suddenly the only thing that mattered to everyone else was unification, and still I worried about being pretty.
But I wasn’t thinking about it that day- I didn’t if I could help it. That day, I was blue and my hair was perfect and I was pretty.
Maybe I was so busy looking at myself that I couldn’t hear the brush of the winds that would bring change to our lives. Maybe I saw them, knew they were there, but I didn’t want too see them, because that gave them sound and reason and made them real.
Or maybe I was just genuinely clueless.
Whatever the reason, I didn’t see them, didn’t hear them, didn’t realize they were there until it was too late.
By then, there was nothing anyone could do.