Shimmer

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Chapter One

The refrigerator was empty, and Emma Driscoll groaned, because it meant she'd have to buy something from one of the vending machines at school. What good was having a chef for a mother if the woman never brought food into the house? Well, Emma didn't have time to worry about it; she was running late for the bus.

Grabbing her black parka with the faux-fur-lined hood, she ran to the door and threw it open in time to see the bus easing toward the corner. "Oh, crap," she muttered, fumbling with the house keys. She managed to lock the door and get her parka on before the bus came to a stop, but she was going to miss her ride if she didn't run. Emma juggled her books, secured them against her chest, and started running.

She hated taking the bus, but she figured she'd hate missing the bus more. School was two miles from the duplex her mother rented. It was already snowing and the wind was picking up. There was no way she was walking, so she ran.But running wasn't easy. Deep snow slowed her steps no matter how hard she willed her legs to move. The bus door began to close though Emma was still two houses away.

"Hey!" she cried. "Wait!"

She poured on the steam. The bus's doors closed, and her heart sank, but she kept running, grateful the vehicle wasn't yet pulling away.

In any other city the school board would have already declared a snow day, but not in Winter. Apparently, snow was so common that half the school year would be forfeited if they let a few inches of accumulation close things down.

"Wait!" she repeated, gasping in a lungful of icy air.

She was out of breath by the time she reached the bus. Normally, she could have run ten times as far and not even broken a sweat, but the freezing cold and the thick snow exhausted her prematurely. She leaned on the side of the bus and knocked on the door with a flat palm.

Oh great, I forgot my gloves, she thought.

The door opened and a wall of welcomed heat poured out. "Thank you," Emma told the bus driver, a heavy man in his late forties whose name she did not know.

"Welcome," he said, slapping the doors closed behind her. "Find a seat. I can't move this crate until you're sitting down."

"I'm on it," Emma said, still out of breath. She looked down the aisle of the bus, trying to ignore the glares of disdain she received from three quarters of the kids.

In Winter, Colorado, there was a feud underway. It had been going on for some time now, and it was between the longtime residents of the city and a bunch of newcomers. Though always a retreat for the wealthy, Winter was not a full-blown resort like Vail or Aspen, but that was rapidly changing. Not so long ago, ranching and copper mining were the money games in Winter, but now it was tourism. In the last three years, new condominium complexes and boutique hotels had sprung up in the village along with a number of high-end shops. The new hotel, where Emma's mother would be a chef, was pretty much the nail in the coffin of the old ways. The Hawthorn Resort and Spa was a twenty-two-floor building the color of sandstone. Emma thought the place looked cool, really chic compared to the old lodge-y looking hotels on the edge of the village, but she knew the locals thought it was awful, like a statue built to the gods of progress.

Since her mother was employed by this evil enterprise, naturally the town kids hated her: She was part of the problem, part of the invading force, climbing their mountain to destroy them with iPhones and flat-panel LCD televisions—not that Emma or her mother could afford either of those. As if moving to a new town wasn't hard enough, she'd walked into class that first day feeling like a convict headed to the lethal-injection gurney.

Near the back of the bus, a hand shot up, and Emma was thrilled to see her only friend. She waved back and moved faster down the aisle.

Christina Brown insisted on being called Betina. Betina wore all-black outfits, giving her an overly serious look. As Betina explained it, she was neo-goth. She admired the despondence of the goth movement, but thought the overall look was for crap, so she accentuated her dark attire with simple jewelry and almost no makeup. She also resisted dyeing her hair black, preferring it to remain a natural dirty blond.

Emma walked a little faster over the wet floor where clumps of snow melted into the narrow grooves of the rubber mat. The air in the bus was humid, and it smelled of damp wool and cotton. It was a familiar, even pleasant, scent, Emma thought. Just like in elementary school and middle school. So many other things changed, but not the funky scent of a school bus on a snowy day.

She took the seat next to Betina and noticed that her friend had written School Blows in the condensation on the window. She also noticed Betina had excellent penmanship.

"You shouldn't have run," Betina said dryly. "He wasn't going anywhere."

"No reason everyone should have to wait for me."

"That's so not goddess. It's reverse goddess. Anti-goddess, if you will."

"You get weirder every day."

"I'm a calendar of the bizarre."

Emma laughed and leaned back in the seat. "I figure most of these kids hate me enough without adding to the problem by holding up the bus."

"They'd hate you, anyway."

"Thanks, Betina."

"Look, it's tribal. They had something and now other people are coming in to take it away from them, and most of them are too stupid to realize it wasn't all that great to begin with."

"So they hate what I represent?"

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Excerpted from Shimmer by Dallas Reed, Thomas Pendleton
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.