Sugar Coated

by Shannen Crane Camp

  “You in?” Amber asked, raising an eyebrow at Brynn.

  “I’m actually kind of in the mood to go for a walk I think,” she answered, glancing at one of the large windows, which revealed a sunny day so perfect it couldn’t be real.

  “Can I come?” Ty asked.

  Ty and Brynn had a relationship similar to Bennett and Amber. They were practically inseparable. The fact that Ty had even asked to come with Brynn made her giggle.

  “No, I don’t like spending time with you,” she answered him sarcastically, even as she was leaving the room. “Message us when your movie is done so we can come watch,” she called over her shoulder, listening to the sounds of Ty following behind her on the dark hardwood floors.

  * * *

  Lying on the grassy hill with her eyes closed and her head leaning back, Brynn wondered if this was what heaven felt like. Along with the stories about the angels, Brynn’s mother liked to tell her about the wonderful place called heaven. At first she couldn’t see any difference between heaven and where she lived. Everything was at your fingertips. All you had to do was ask and anything you wanted would be yours. But as Brynn grew older, she could see the thing that made heaven so wonderful—the possibility.

  The possibility to build something that lasted. To make important things. You could make things and create all day long on your clothing pad or on the movie network, but none of it seemed very important for some reason. Everything was a game. Even when Brynn was young and actually had responsibilities, those responsibilities were a game. All of her schooling was done on an interactive touch screen in her parent’s house and not one single lesson was conducted without some sort of points system or instant reward.

  The thought seemed a bit strange to her now, that something as important as her education could be a game, but lying there on the grass next to Ty, somehow it didn’t seem to bother her too much.

  “We should do this more often,” Ty said, tilting his head so that he was looking directly at Brynn, his straight nose close to her neck.

  “I love it out here,” she agreed, her full lips parting into a smile as the sun warmed her eyelids.

  Ty took a deep breath, and then raised an eyebrow at his friend. “You smell like sugar,” he informed her, quite out of the blue. “Has your house been baking?”

  Brynn opened her eyes and looked over at Ty with a conspiratorial grin. “It’s my new perfume. I love sugar,” she explained. “I love the smell, love the taste, love everything about it.”

  “I already knew you loved the taste,” he said with a grimace brought on by a memory. “That reminds me, you should have warned me your new house freezes sugar into the ice cubes.”

  Brynn wrinkled her nose guiltily. “Oops!”

  She closed her eyes once more and leaned her head back, soaking in the sun like the perfectly grown plants in the park. “I keep having dreams about sugar,” she ventured, not sure if she really wanted to discuss her odd dreams with him or not. She and Ty had been friends for years, but he was such an easygoing person that she wasn’t sure if he’d understand something as unsettling as a recurring nightmare.

  “Why does that not surprise me one bit?”

  “They’re more like nightmares,” she corrected cautiously, opening one eye and glancing over at him to gauge the conversation. Brynn was excellent at knowing when she should continue on with a line of thought and when she should drop it so that her friends didn’t think she was crazy.

  Unfortunately, it was a skill she had to practice often.

  “Attack of the killer sugar?” he asked with a deep, rich laugh that made Brynn’s stomach feel warm.

  “Something like that,” she answered as a low-flying bird passed overhead, blowing their hair with the force of its wings.

  “Wouldn’t it be amazing if people could fly?” Brynn asked, deciding it was time to move the subject away from her nightmares. It was a topic she’d revisit later when Ty was in a more serious mood.

  “Like if people had wings? Like angels?” he asked, making Brynn smile at the fact that he talked about angels like they really existed.

  “Or like a bus with metal wings on it,” she suggested with a giggle, knowing that she was just being ridiculous now. “Can you imagine how fast we could travel around the world if we could fly instead of taking a train?”

  “So we’d get there in one day instead of...oh wait, it only takes one day,” Ty joked sarcastically. “Is there a big travel issue I’m not aware of?”

  “Point taken,” Brynn answered in surrender as Ty’s tablet pinged, indicating he’d gotten a message.

  Swiping his finger across the screen of his tablet, he scanned the display for a moment before turning his attention back to Brynn.

  “Bennett and Amber want us to come help with their movie. They said the software is being funny and they need our expertise,” Ty said with mock pride.

  “You’re the computer genius,” Brynn stated, not willing to be finished with her time in the sun just yet. “Tell them I’ll meet up with you guys once they’re all done. I think I’m going to walk down to the water.”

  At her words, Ty gave her a wary look. The ocean was a good thirty-minute walk from the city and none of the buses went that far out of the town. Even the trains didn’t pass by the ocean, though you couldn’t have gotten them to stop if they did. The water was dangerous and unpredictable. Even living thirty minutes from the ocean was too much for most people to handle. The citizens of Seaside were considered daredevils for building houses this close to the water.

  “Why are you going down there?” he asked with worry in his eyes.

  “I just want to take a walk.”

  “But the water is dangerous,” he said reasonably, warming her heart with his concern.

  “I’ll be careful. Besides, I don’t think this perfect day is going to suddenly turn into a natural disaster,” she joked as Ty helped her up from the ground.

  “Just don’t be down there for too long. You never know when the ocean weather will turn bad. Besides, the water is just creepy,” he finished with a shudder.

  It was the same shudder everyone got when they thought about the opaque, churning ocean and the unseen threat it presented.

  “I’ll come back the second you guys tell me you’ve finished the movie,” she promised, interlocking her pinky finger with Ty’s as they both kissed their thumbs in a ritual they’d practiced through years of promises.

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  Chapter 3: Insignificance

  The walk to the ocean took Brynn longer than she had anticipated. She wasn’t sure if it was just her imagination, or if the city had somehow managed to scoot farther away from the threat of the water.

  The silent enemy.

  The houses became sparser the farther she got from the city, until she eventually passed the point where even the bravest of people would live. It was an odd feeling, leaving civilization behind. She always found the line between the city suburbs and the “wild” amusing simply because of how literal the line was. Four feet past the yard of the last house, the sidewalk ended and the sand began.

  The waxy green ground cover seemed to spread on for miles in small rolling hills with bright pink flowers accenting the foliage every few feet. The chill breeze picked up as she neared the water and soon Brynn could taste the salt in the air, clinging to her clothes and hair like a thick mist.

  Even though she, like any reasonable person, was terrified of the water, she couldn’t help but feel drawn to the danger of the ocean. The feeling of constant change as the waves ebbed and flowed was so different from her life of steady pleasure and contentment that she had in the city.

  Brynn’s feet knew the path to the ocean well, and she wondered for a moment if the small trail through the underbrush had been made by only her feet and no one else’s. Was there anyone else out there crazy enough to walk right up to the ocean?

  Passing over the last hill, she was finally met with the sight that both terrifie
d and intrigued her. The sun glinted off of the ever-changing surface of the water in orange flashes of light and the wind blew a few stray hairs out of Brynn’s topknot. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath just as she had in her dream the night before. This time, she smelled the very distinct and strong aroma of salt instead of sugar and for once, she was glad for the change.

  Her boots weren’t exactly ideal for walking through the soft tan sand, so she pulled them off, stuffing her socks and tablet into the toe of one boot. Walking through the sand always made the arches of her feet sore, but she ignored the scratchy pain and continued on until she reached the place where the dry sand became damp sand, just out of reach of the waves.

  Standing that close to the water always made Brynn feel daring. It was the closest thing to an adventure that she would ever have and she often dared herself to run headlong into the water. Just to see what would happen.

  Today she was having a staring match with the waves, playing chicken as the large whitecaps crashed much too close to the shore. With every rolling set, Brynn had to talk herself into staying put. Right before they crashed, the waves always seemed to be so big and powerful that she had no doubt they’d come and knock her over with one single blow. But by the time the water finally reached the tips of her toes it had died down into nothing more than a small frothy puddle.

  Staring into the massive expanse of the ocean, Brynn couldn’t help but feel insignificant. Next to something so large and imposing, how could she possibly feel important? She thought of the white-clad Angels, of the one with the smooth, deep voice, and wondered how they would look next to the greatness of the water. Would they look as insignificant as Brynn or would they outshine even the most powerful thing in the world? They were certainly more beautiful in their own terrifying way. They may have even been more powerful, which Brynn was beginning to believe more and more as she dreamt about them every night. But were they as unpredictably changing and dangerous?

  Despite the things her Angel had said in her dream last night, Brynn was still prone to like her. She still wanted to make the woman happy. She knew dreams were nothing more than her mind’s abstract interpretation of what she thought about during the day, but it made life more interesting to put greater stock in them.

  Keeping her eyes locked firmly on the horizon, a crazy thought crossed Brynn’s mind. Maybe it was the thoughts of Angels and impossibilities, or the feelings of insignificance, or just the desire to do something out of the ordinary. But whatever the reason, Brynn lifted her foot from its safe place behind the water’s reach and took one step into the dark, wet sand.

  And then another. And one more. Until the next wave that came brought skin-numbingly cold water up to her knees, completely soaking her pants through. Brynn stood with her mouth open, shocked not only by the unexpected temperature of the water, but by her own bravery. Or stupidity. Depending on how the situation turned out.

  She looked around for a moment, almost wondering if anyone else was witnessing her moment of accomplishment, before a force like a brick wall hit her right on the side of the cheek, knocking her onto her back.

  Her head made contact with the icy water, then the soft sand below that. She dug her palms into the ground and pushed herself up, trying to regain her footing while blinking the salt out of her eyes. She took a deep and noisy breath just as another wave hit her in the face, filling her mouth with a bitter and salty taste.

  She opened her eyes under the water that now seemed much deeper and darker, but she couldn’t make much out in the murky and constantly moving abyss. The light reflecting off of the surface suddenly seemed to be much further above her than it was just moments ago, and now pushing up off of her palms wasn’t going to get her to the air. She’d need to kick off of the ocean floor with her feet.

  Don’t panic, she told herself, trying not to think of the many rumors of strange creatures in the water. You must have been pulled into a ditch. There’s lots of those in the ocean, she thought, remembering just one more of the terrifying facts about the ocean—random dark holes that anyone could fall into with one misplaced step.

  Calming herself down and looking up toward the surface of the water, Brynn kicked off of the ground hard, launching herself up toward the sun. When her head broke the surface she gasped and sputtered for air, coughing up the water she had inhaled on her last encounter with the now large waves. She wasn’t quite sure how the ocean had suddenly turned so tumultuous, but it only added to the theories that it was unpredictable and would turn on you at any moment.

  Brynn could see another set of waves gearing up to crash down on her. She tried desperately to swim back toward the shore that had somehow gotten farther away, but the current was pulling her back to meet with the crashing waves. Deciding it would be best to avoid yet another run-in with the deadly crashing swell, she took a deep breath, ducked under the surface once more, and swam with all her might toward the shore.

  Most people didn’t know how to swim. It wasn’t an important thing to learn since no one went into the ocean and the pools in the city were only a few feet deep, but Brynn’s mom had taught her to swim at a young age. When she was just a little girl she’d fallen into the adult’s pool in the city’s recreation center. The pool itself was only four feet deep and now the memory seemed so harmless. But at the time Brynn had flailed around under water, sure that she had made her final mistake.

  Her mother and father had enrolled her in their own private swimming lessons the next day.

  At that moment, with her feet flying up over her head with every crashing wave, and terror closing in on her lungs like the icy water that surrounded her, she was grateful to her parents for teaching her how to swim. When she couldn’t take the lack of oxygen anymore she came up for air, hoping she hadn’t picked the exact moment when a wave would try to crush her. To her surprise, however, she was once again in knee-deep water, the breakers far behind her and only small puddles of water rushing up around her knees and elbows.

  She crawled out of the water, shivering and dripping wet, and fell onto the dry, warm sand. Her plump lips were now blue from the icy water and her long black hair clung to her cheeks like ivy clinging to an old building.

  “Not okay,” she said to the ocean through chattering teeth. Her stomach was still rolling with the waves, and as she looked up at the sky she could swear it was moving. “Not okay at all,” she emphasized, trying to remember exactly why she had thought going knee-deep in the life-taking ocean was a good idea. Obviously people were scared of it for a reason. It was a terrifying thing that clearly didn’t like humans one bit.

  The sand blown around by the now-chill wind stuck to Brynn’s wet cheek and she imagined trying to explain herself to her friends. They already thought she was crazy enough for coming this close to the water. An “adrenaline junkie,” they had called her. But imagining their faces, if she told them she’d actually been in the ocean, was almost too much. They would probably have her brain scanned for abnormalities.

  It was best if she kept the incident to herself.

  * * *

  Walking on unsteady feet back toward Seaside, Brynn tried desperately to pull her salty hair back into a bun on top of her head. She realized there wasn’t much she could do about her damp and wrinkled clothing, but she could at least wipe the mascara off of her face and pull her hair up again. That way her friends wouldn’t have to find out about the stupid thing she had just done.

  Only crazy people tried to go in the ocean, and when they did, something bad happened to every last one of them. Some of the more superstitious people in the world said that the ocean was cursed; if the waves didn’t kill you, something else did after you went in.

  Brynn had heard about someone from her own city who’d gone in. He was a man in his late 30’s, constantly griping about everything being too easy. Obviously it was a well-known fact that he was mentally unbalanced, because what other type of person would complain that things were ‘too easy’? Most people wouldn’t
consider that a problem.

  He didn’t drown in the ocean, much to everyone’s surprise. He came out panting and dripping just like Brynn, overwhelmed by the raw power of the water. Then he stood up calmly, looked around at the group of people who’d come to see what would happen to the crazy man who tried to take on the ocean. He let out a sigh, turned back toward Seaside, and went home.

  The next day his house was up for grabs and no one ever heard from him again. Brynn found this odd to say the least, but her friends reminded her that the crazy man had just gotten completely thrashed by the ocean. He probably didn’t want to live anywhere near it now.

  It was funny how many things Brynn found odd about their lives until her friends explained it all away.

  * * *

  Bennett’s house was located closer to the center of the city, where they had large community rooms for viewing the week’s top ranking movies the citizens of Seaside had made, as well as the top ranking movies in the world of Halcyon. There were places to go ‘shopping,’ mostly for the novelty of it, since you could design all of your own clothes on your clothing pad at home. Amber said that sometimes it was just therapeutic to go to an actual store to get your clothes.

  There were even a few restaurants. It was the same food you could ask your house to make you, but the atmosphere made it fun. You’d sit down at a table, punch your order into the keypad, watch it rise up from the food dispenser attached to the table, and you’d get to chat with your friends.

  Brynn pushed the call button on Bennett’s front door, trying to do a once over in the door’s reflective surface to make sure she looked presentable.

  “Hello Brynn,” said a rugged male voice.

  “Hello Allen,” Brynn responded, using the name Bennett had given her house’s voice.

  The door opened itself to let her in and she was instantly hit with the strong smell of lemons. Bennett had a bit of an obsession with scents, so she had her house pump a constant flow of different perfumes into each room of the house. As you walked from room to room the scent changed, making you constantly aware of the perfume. Brynn liked it, but sometimes found it a bit overwhelming when exposed to the overpowering olfactory stimulation for long periods of time.