To the rest of the world, Brenna Johnson is an enigma, but to me, she’s just Brenna.

I’ve known her since we were both really little, decked out in some of the last clean diapers created before the Second Revolution, when our words were just incoherent gurgles and shrieks and our daily rituals consisted namely of naps and feedings. Her eyes were the color of ash and dust, and her smile sent shivers down my spine. That should have been my first sign that she would become a Second Revolutionist, but it wasn’t. Then in grade school, after she traded in her pudgy cheeks and chronic ear infections for thick, thick hair and pouty lips, she commanded the audience of our fifth-grade talent school with a riveting rendition of a pre-Revolution story about the dangers of radioactivity. I doubt I could have ever made it past the first page on my own, but when she read it, it was the most fascinating story in the world—but I still didn’t get it, not even then.

It’s now that we’re seventeen that I know.

She wants another Revolution.

No one expected it, but the signs were there. Our Brenna Johnson, the girl who had once sneaked me out of my house in the middle of the night to dance in the ashes and breathe in the chemicals, has joined the Second Revolution. I know because when I pass her second-story bedroom window, I see the red flags, and when I pass her in the hallways at school, I see her red clothes and the little red emblem she wears on her red bandana. I see it and I don’t say anything. But I know it worries her family and her friends, and I know it worries me too.

I hang out beside my bedroom window in hopes of seeing her before she dashes off to another one of her rallies. My forehead is pressed against the cool pane, and through the whirlwind of gray ashes and the orange haze of day transitioning to evening, I see her. Brenna Johnson. She walks up to the side of my house and motions with her hands for me to open my window, so I do.

My heart beats so loud in my ears that I’m surprised that I hear her voice at all as she shouts, “Hey, Theodore Junior, come walk with me!”

She’s the only one that can call me that. Everyone else calls me Theodore or Theo or, if they really want to press my buttons, Smudge—Smudge because I usually work at the factory after school to earn some extra cash for my oversized family, and I come out looking like I’ve spent five hours rolling around in a coal mine. Since my father’s first name is actually Xavier, not Theodore, Brenna is the only person on this whole planet that can make my given name not sound lame.

“To where?”

“I don’t know. Just come walk with me!”

Even though I don’t want to admit it, I know I am desperate for her attention. She is Brenna Johnson; the girl that brought midriff-baring T-shirts back from the dead and the person that convinced half of the school’s marching band to join the Second Revolution with a single bat of her eyes. She is beautiful and toxic like the radioactivity she strives to annihilate, and she knows it. I hate her and I love her, and I climb out the window like the pathetic, powerless loser she thinks I am so that we can walk and talk for what seems like the first time in months.

“Theodore Junior, I’m glad to see you.” And she hugs me.

“And me you, Brenna.” I hold her for as long as I can without it getting awkward.

The sun sinks into the earth, setting the sky on fire, all oranges, yellows, and pinks, as we walk side by side in the desolate
streets. She has on a backpack, which she takes off to fish out some masks. When the sun goes down and the moon comes out, everything glows a faint shade of neon green here. It’s pretty, but too much exposure can kill you. Our town learned that the hard way.

“You need to join the Revolution, Theodore Junior, and I’m going to show you why,” she says, hooking the straps behind her ears. I roll my eyes when I think she’s not looking. She is. She looks up at me with those twinkling grey eyes, and I swallow, nodding my head dumbly. “The corporations that think they can just exploit people like you and get away with it? They’ll be sorry, because they’re screwing up their own lives as well.”

“What do you mean?” All I can think is people like you and how degrading it sounds coming out of her mouth. “I’m okay with working in the factory. My parents need the money for the family.”

“Hush, Theo. I’ll show you what I mean. But we have to be quiet from now on, okay? These streets are really dangerous at night.”

So we do. We walk in silence, silently stepping around the dark pools of green water and the potholes. A prison bus wobbles down the road, its inmates staring blankly at us through the thick bars that confine them. It’s strange to think that Brenna Johnson was shipped away on one of those buses a couple months ago for creating an army of protestors and storming the factory. She just got back a few weeks ago. Then the first thing she did, of course, was raise a little hell in the band room and draft the other half of the marching band to her cause. Of course.

Brenna Johnson is not an enigma, but sometimes she scares me. Honestly, I’m surprised she’s not back in jail yet.

We walk and we walk and we walk until I feel like I can’t walk anymore. “Brenna, this is boring and it’s taking forever and I have a First Revolutionary War test in the morning. Can we please—”

“Shh!” Her eyes are murder. She smacks my chest hard, then again and again, bringing down enough force for me to stagger back a couple steps. I scowl at her and she scowls back. She turns around and continues to walk. I debate whether to follow her or not before realizing I wouldn’t even know where to begin even if I did want to go back.

I’ve never been this far from town before. I hang close to Brenna because maybe, just maybe, I’m a little scared. There is nothing here, nothing except dead trees, dead fish, and deadly, toxic mud. My boots suction to the ground with each step I take. I don’t know how she does it so easily.

“Theodore Junior, we’re here,” she whispers so softly, I almost don’t hear her.

“This dump is what you wanted to show me?”

“Shh!” She turns back just as I slip and almost do the splits into a puddle of . . . well, I don’t know what that is. Brenna Johnson is not an enigma, but this puddle sure is. It’s green and gold, like our school colors, and it’s wreathing like its alive or something. Brenna lets out a harrowing cry before running back to me—how can she run in this mud?—and shoves me so that I fall the other direction into a pile of radioactive mud.

“Oh my goodness, what is that?” I exclaimed, hurriedly wiping as much mud off of my clothes and skin as possible. I can feel it tingling at the base of my neck, and I can’t help but wonder if Brenna Johnson, the girl who had discovered my twin sisters face down in a puddle of green goo all those years ago, has dragged me from the rest of civilization so that she can kill me through toxic exposure for her cause.

“It’s radioactivity.”

“No it’s not. Radioactivity is green. That’s green and gold. Big difference, Brenna Johnson.”

“Let me explain,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ear. In this moment she looks so small and vulnerable, and even though I’m not much bigger, I want to protect her. From what, though, I don’t know. “You know how there was the war and how both sides were using nuclear substances to blow out the other? And you know how they left all this radioactive stuff behind? And you know how toxic it is?”

I nod.

“It made the fish glow and the trees and the water and the food, and it was so cool, until it wasn’t. Until it started killing people, like your sisters and my great-aunt and a bunch of other kids and old people in town. That’s why I wanted to join the Second Revolution, Theodore Junior. To stop this from happening.” She sweeps her arms around in a grand gesture, encompassing this vast waste-land. “There are parasites in the radioactive soil, and they don’t die like we do. They evolve.”

I look into the puddle of green and gold. Radioactive parasites. Huh.

“They love water. That’s how they reproduce.”

“Okay, and?” I can’t see what’s so bad. We all know to avoid making any sort of contact with anything that has neon green in or on it, especially the water. Radioactive parasites are all the more reason to stay away.

“They’re in the drinking supply. They’re in all of the supply! The only stuff they don’t touch is the salt water, Theo!”

“Yeah, so?” The only people that drink the green water are the ones that want to kill themselves—or the ones that read pre-Revolutionary comic books like Spider Man or The Incredible Hulk and think they can get mind-blowing powers from it.

“So? So we’re all screwed! They’ve been taking out whole towns for months, whole civilizations even; the only reason we didn’t know about it is because the government has been covering it up. This is it, Theo, the apocalypse.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Good. Because that’s what you become if you get infected.” And she points. And I turn. And I almost puke.

There, hobbling down from the top of a small hill, is a person. His arms and face are battered to an ugly purple. Where the skin is torn, pus and blood ooze out, bubbling with the green and gold parasites. His eyes are brimming with them. He shimmers like vampires in the sunlight, glimmering wherever the parasites wiggle in his putrid flesh. His clothes are torn, his hair is falling out, and he looks like he belongs on the cast of the pre-Revolutionary TV show, The Walking Dead. He is slow, thankfully, but he looks hungry.

Like a chicken, I cower behind Brenna.

“Quick, hand me my gun,” she instructs. For a second, I think I don’t hear her right, because what would Brenna Johnson, the girl who would cry over the farmer’s pigs who were stupid enough to roll around in the green goo and die, have with a gun? But when she shouts the command again, louder, more urgently, I reach into her bag and quickly locate it. It feels cold and clunky under my hand, and I fumble with it, fervently praying that I don’t accidently pull the trigger and kill someone.

She grabs it and aims. It doesn’t look clunky in her hands; it looks like a weapon, a real deadly one.
Brenna Johnson is not an enigma, but the fact that she might know how to use a gun definitely is.

“Brenna, you are not killing that man. All he needs is a good bath and some heavy-duty medicine,” I say. I make a grab for the gun, but she quickly yanks it away from my grasp, glaring with those magical eyes. It’s hard, but I voice my opinion, finally, anyway. “Is this what they’ve been teaching you at those rallies? To shoot people that roll around in the goo? This is crazy, Brenna. This is murder!”

She flips the safety off and trains the gun at the man’s head. He doesn’t look scared. Neither does she. “Get out of my way. If I allow it to live, I’ll be doing a huge disservice to the human race.”

I snap.

“Your Revolution is stupid! Do you really think you can save the world by closing down one factory, by dragging one boy out to the middle of nowhere and showing him this? Do you think any of us even really care? Because we don’t! All you are doing is setting the stage for another war, and war is what caused this in the first place. So just give up! Give up!”

I think she’s listening. Her gun lowers and her gaze drops. I think I’ve shattered her dreams, her hopes, but I can’t handle this anymore. I want my Brenna Johnson back. I want the girl who snuck me out of my house in the middle of the night to dance in the ashes and breathe in the chemicals. I want the girl who cried for the stupid pigs. I want the girl who stole my heart—and I’d like to think she won’t break it. My vision blurs with hot stinging tears and I quickly wipe them away when I think she’s not looking.
She is.

I am the pathetic, powerless loser she thinks I am.

But I don’t care.

“Look out!”

Suddenly, the oozing man shoves me from behind with all his might and I go flying into a puddle of green and gold goo with a sickening splat. It is the moment when you smash your leg into the side of a table and realize that in about thirty seconds, it’s going to hurt—a lot. I scramble out of the pool, but the parasites are burrowing into my clothes, into my skin, into my mouth. I look like our school’s cheerleaders all throughout Spirit Week. My everything burns.

I look around to see that the oozing man has a bullet hole in his head, still smoking, and that now Brenna Johnson has her gun trained on me.

Because I’m radioactive.

Because I’m contaminated.

S***.

“This is great, just great, Theo. Now we’re both screwed.”

And as I watch her finger pulls the trigger, I realize that Brenna Johnson, the confident, beautiful girl that I’ve loved since before the days our words were just incoherent gurgles and shrieks and our daily rituals consisted namely of naps and feedings, is an absolute mystery after all.