The Atlantis Gene by S.A. Beck

Author:S.A. Beck [Beck, S.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beck Books

Chapter 10

JUNE 27, 2016, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

11:00 AM

Jaxon couldn’t believe her luck. She had told her foster parents that she wanted to take the bus to meet some of her friends in downtown Hollywood, and they had actually let her go. Stephen and Isadore seemed eager for her to make friends at her new school and didn’t ask too many questions. That was fine by Jaxon. She didn’t want to answer questions about which friends she was going to meet or what they were going to do. That would have been hard to answer.

Hard to answer because Jaxon had no friends, and she wasn’t going to be meeting anyone.

She really was going to downtown Hollywood, though. Long ago, Jaxon had learned that telling too many lies soon got confusing, and it was best, if she were going to garnish the truth a little, to leave in enough truth that she could keep track of her own story.

Jaxon tried not to think how pathetic it was to lie about having friends. She was used to not having any, and while it was lonely, she didn’t want to talk about it. Isadore, with that fake enthusiasm she always showed when she was trying to act like a supportive mother, would only encourage her to try harder.

If her foster parents wanted her to have friends, they should have sent her to a different school. The kids at hers were as fake as their nose jobs. Maybe she was naive, but she had never seen a teenager with plastic surgery before, and at her new school, it was hard to find one who hadn’t had some, even among the boys.

Jaxon sat on the bus as it rolled through the city, gazing out at the long stretches of residential neighborhoods and strip malls and gas stations, all looking alike. She shook her head. The city was as fake as the kids at her school. All glitz and glamour with no heart, like that neighbor of hers with the big, rich house, the man who liked to beat up prostitutes. Briefly, Jaxon felt worried that he would notice she lived on the same block. He might be looking for payback.

After a moment, Jaxon stopped worrying. The guy was a loser, and if she could beat him up once, she could beat him up a second time. It wasn’t as though he was going to call the police. What would he tell them?

They were passing an office building with a thin strip of grass between the sidewalk and parking lot, a pathetic attempt at making it look as though the place had a front yard. Jaxon spotted a man in overalls who had a big metal container attached to a sprayer that was shooting out a fine mist of green paint onto the grass.

Curious, Jaxon turned in her seat to watch as they passed. She heard a laugh behind her.

A young black man sitting nearby said, “You must be new to LA, sister.”

“Um, yeah. What was he doing?”

“Painting the grass green.

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