Those Pink Mountain Nights by Jen Ferguson EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Jen Ferguson
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Mental Illness
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Friday Afternoon
Calgary Herald headline: “Promising” Indigenous Teen Reported
Missing First Week of School
BERLIN
No one had noticed her new cat-eye glasses, bright red, with very faux
diamonds spread across the rise like perfectly positioned stars. Not a single
person had said a thing. All morning long. And now the other members of
the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Student Association—the FNMISA for
short—were too busy arguing about their upcoming fundraiser to notice that
Berlin wasn’t fully present. She sat at a desk, her body oriented toward the
circle, tracing a rough sketch of a pipe on the grimy surface with her finger.
“But should we really be calling them Indian tacos?” Darcie asked, then
promptly took a bite of her bologna sandwich.
She was a year younger, Métis from Lac Ste. Anne, whereas Berlin’s
family was from Treaty 1 and the Red River region. Berlin had recruited
Darcie for the FNMISA. It was lunchtime. They were meeting in Mr.
MacDonald’s classroom. They used to meet in the library, but nobody was
allowed to eat in the library. When Mr. MacDonald’s offer of space came
with a co-conspiratorial wink and a reminder that he didn’t enforce silly
rules like no food in his space, the vote had been unanimous.
Across the circle of desks, SarahLynn exhaled loudly. The stage-worthy
exclamation ruffled her bangs. “If you’re arguing for calling them Îyârhe
Nakoda tacos, I’ll take it. For my people, for my Nation. But I don’t think
you are. So what exactly are you arguing for? Navajo tacos? Or like
Indigenous tacos? If you say FNMI tacos, I’m going to cry. Literally. And if
I cry, I’m going to eff up my mascara, and if I eff up my mascara, I’m going
to give up on life today. Do you want to shoulder that burden, Darce?”
A bit over-the-top but it fit. If Berlin could cry, she’d probably be crying
too. Out of frustration. They had this discussion at least twice a semester.
Once, she cared.
“Can we not?” Vincent wasn’t eating. An unopened can of Coke sat on
the desk in front of him. “It’s way important to get this fundraiser going and
not important to worry about the words.”
He wore his hair in braids and was the only guy in FNMISA. His family
was from the Piikani Nation. He was also the only other member who had
firsthand experience with missing and murdered women. He’d been part of
the National Inquiry when he was a kid, telling stories about his mom. That
is, he’d been the only other member with firsthand experience until five
months ago, when Kiki disappeared. Seemingly without a trace. The first
week of school she’d been alongside them in the library skipping out on
lunch, working on drafting a non-cringe-inducing land acknowledgment for
the AAA hockey home games, and the next she wasn’t.
They all missed Kiki.
No one glanced over to the faded National Poetry Month setup on the
back wall. No one needed to reread Kiki’s winning poem from last year. It
had been an elegy for the missing and murdered, for her mother, for all of
them. Now it read like a foretelling.
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