Page 1 of Lily's Eagle

PROLOGUE

LILY

The dream is alwaysthe same. I’m eleven years old, and my grandparents had just died. It’s early spring at dusk. The air has the sharp, crisp quality of winter not wanting to let go, and it feels like a cold knife pressed to my cheek. What I can see of the sky through the shabby pines lining the dirt road we’re walking down is indigo slashed with silver.

My mom is walking beside me. Her arm is around my shoulders and her thin, long fingers are digging into my shoulder. She’s not trying to comfort me, she’s using me for balance as she navigates the root, rock and pine needles covered forest path in her high, thin-heeled, patent leather shoes. She’s also wearing a very short leather skirt and a blood red, see-through shirt under a black fake fur jacket. I’m in my jeans and hoodie and I’m getting very cold. Yet we just keep going deeper and deeper into the trees.

The pines around us are hissing in the wind that rarely stops blowing here. And the path is getting darker and darker. I don’t know why we’re here.

My mom mutters curses under her breath as her heels snag on the roots and rocks, but otherwise we don’t speak.

Suddenly a scream rents the air and a tall, strong man grabs me. I think it’s my own scream. I can’t see him at all, he’s wearing all black, every inch of him covered, even his face. All I feel is his arms holding mine. I kick and scream as he carries me deeper into the trees, into the darkness that the little light of dusk can’t penetrate anymore.

My mom is nowhere. The forest path we walked together is empty now.

And that’s the point in the dream where I always wake up.

Nothing like this has ever happened to me in real life. But each time I wake from this nightmare, I feel like it had.

Like it had, and I forgot.

1

LILY

I have absolutelynothing in this world to worry about. Nothing to fear. Nothing to dread or be anxious about. My life is good by almost anyone’s standards.

So why am I always fighting? Always looking for causes to obsess over?

It’s a question that’s been asked of me many times and it’s only lately that I’ve started asking it of myself too.

Especially today.

I’ve been standing in the heat in front of the old recreation center, which is meant for kids from unprivileged homes, my head feeling like my brain is boiling inside it, my voice hoarse from chanting mostly the same thing over and over. “Human rights belong to all!”, and “Stealing from the poor to give to the rich is a crime!”

Stuff like that.

They are tearing the rec center down tomorrow.

About twenty of us are gathered in the parking lot of the shabby, brownish-grey two-floor building that houses a gym, a computer room, library, several classrooms, and a small theater. About six months ago, a big developer out of Sacramento purchased it—or purchased the land it stands on, more like—and now wants to tear it down to build more store fronts, or a condominium complex, or some such nonsense.

I don’t think the town of Pleasantville can handle any more upscale buildings. As it is, I’m sometimes afraid that it’ll just collapse in on itself creating a big glittery, shiny, colorful pile of rubble. It’ll probably smell of roses or the perfume of five-thousand women, or something equally strong and invasive. When I moved here twelve years ago, the town was almost as run down as the South Dakota Indian reservation I was born on. Now it’s the place to be for the rich up and comers moving to the country.

This rec center is one of only a handful of buildings in the town center still standing from that time. I took a drama class here when I was thirteen. The play we put on was Pocahontas and I was the lead. And even though that’s cliched as fuck—the only Native girl for miles playing an Indian Princess—I loved it.

I want other kids with big dreams but small means to have the same opportunity. Or just be able to come here and watch movies they can’t afford to see in the fancy new cinema at the edge of town. To attend classes their parents can’t afford to send them to, find all their hidden talent and get the tools to make all their dreams come true. And to have fun.

But there aren’t a lot of unprivileged families living in Pleasantville anymore. They’ve long since been pushed out by the glitter of gentrification.

We’ll lose this fight for the rec center. Tomorrow the bulldozers will roll in and tear this building down to the ground. Good riddance, most people say.

The roof’s been leaking for years, there’s roaches everywhere, the facade is falling off in chunks, there’s a moth infestation in the costume room that nothing will ever get rid of, and the toilets don’t work more often than they do.

When the threat of it closing down first started looming, my dad, the big bad MC president offered to get it for me to do with as I liked. He also offered to buy any other property anywhere in town so I could build a new community center.

I said no.

My protest is not about that. It’s almost exactly the opposite of that.

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