Eyes Ever to the Sky (A Sci Fi Romance) (The Sky Trilogy) by Katie French Page A

mi amor . I’ll get better with that poison out of my system. I’ll get a job. I'll start looking tomorrow.”
    Cece shook her head and pulled away. She’d heard those promises before. She dried her eyes and shuffled to her room. God, why hadn’t she locked up the pills in the first place? This was all her fault. She pinched her hands together and forced herself to stop crying. Crying wouldn’t get the money she needed. No, she’d just have to work harder. Somehow. 
    “Cecelia?  My love?” Mama called.
    Cece kept walking. She didn’t slam her door when she entered her room. She didn’t have the energy to be angry any more.
     
    ***
     
    A knock sounded: knuckles on her window pane. Cece stirred and blinked into the darkness of her bedroom. Then she heard a voice through the glass.
    “Open up, penis. The mosquitoes are eating my ass.”
    Cece moaned. Her body felt like a giant knot. Her feet ached. Her head pounded. She wanted to sleep nine or ten hours and then drag herself to work in the morning. Fer would pull her into something fun . Cece didn’t feel like having fun.
    “ Seriously, dude.” Fer's eyes blinked at her through the three inch crack between the A.C. unit and the glass. “The mosquitoes are eating my whole ass. See?” A bare butt pressed against the window pane.
    Cece pulled herself up. “Seriously, Fer?” she whispered. “Mama is sleeping down the hall.”
    The butt disappeared and the face reappeared. “Then hurry up or she’ll hear my screams of agony as I die a mosquito-y death.”
    Cece tromped toward the window and wrapped her arms around the A.C. unit. “Lift the window up on three,” she said to Fer through the glass. “One. Two—”
    Fer lifted the window from her side. Cece gripped the heavy A.C. unit and staggered back with the weight of it, nearly dropping it as she slid it to the ground.
    “ Fer!” she hissed through her teeth.
    Fer hoisted her body over the window sill and rolled onto Cece’s floor. She lay there and looked up at Cece with her sardonic smirk. “Countin’s not ma strong suit,” she said in a mock hill-billy accent.
    Cece went to the window and pulled the pane down to keep out the ass-eating mosquitoes. Then she flopped back on her bed and threw her arm over her eyes. The bed dipped as Fer sank onto it beside her. Cece felt something wet and cold press into the flesh of her arm.
    “ What the—?” She jerked her arm back and looked at Fer.
    Fer held up a beer bottle and danced it merrily in the air. Moisture slid in rivulets down the brown glass. “Looky what Santa Fer has brought all the good little boys and girls.”
    Cece flipped her head away. “Can’t. Have to work tomorrow.”
    “ So do I, dummy.” Fer leaned closer, pressing her face into Cece’s shoulder. “There’s a par-ty .” Fer sing-songed in Cece’s ear.
    “ Don’t care.”
    “ With bo-oys, ” she sang.
    “ So?”
    “ Travis will be there.”
    Cece lifted her head. Why did Fer think she cared if Travis was there? Travis was cool. They’d talked about music and movies on one of the picnic tables just before he'd left. He'd seen Empire Records , a 1990s cult hit that no one else had seen. They'd rattled off movie lines for fifteen minutes. Cece thought about how the twilight crouched around them like velvet arms. How Travis’s winking cigarette looked like a red firefly in the dark. But, she didn’t like him like that , did she?
    Cece rolled over and looked at Fer. Her best friend slathered on a toothy grin and batted her non-existent eyelashes. Her purple hair hung in sweaty strips along the sides of her round face. She had put on a clean shirt with some band Cece had never heard of on the front, a trio of boys with spiky hair and eyeliner scowling for the camera.
    “Come on,” Fer said in the first serious tone she’d used. “You can't sit around reading brain magazines all night,” she said, pointing to Cece's collection of psychology magazines stacked beside