CLASS OF ’68

Book One of the Colony Cycle

By Ekona Del Rey Monroe

The year was 1968. In Bellweather, the air still carried the mixed scents of cut grass, exhaust from cars without catalytic converters, cigarette smoke, and the sweet syrup of the soda fountain at Carter’s Drugstore.

Rotary phones sat on kitchen counters.

Record players turned 45s until the grooves wore gray.

Girls wore skirts to school more often than not, though the hems had begun to climb.

Boys still held doors.

The war flickered on early color televisions in living rooms after supper.

But on Friday nights the entire town still poured into the stadium under the tall floodlights, and the senior class still lined up for the yearbook photograph as if the future were something bright and orderly and guaranteed.

In that photograph six girls stood in the second row, arms loosely around one another’s waists, smiling the precise, practiced smiles expected of them.

Their names were Claire, Donna, Vivian, Gloria, Nancy, and Carol.

Chapter One: The Photograph

Miss Ellison arranged them on the front steps of Bellweather High on a clear Tuesday in early September.

The oaks still held most of their leaves.

The light was the particular soft gold of late summer turning toward fall.

She told the tallest to stand in the back and the rest to cluster naturally.

Claire stood a little apart at first, posture relaxed, almost languid. Donna reached out and drew her in by the wrist, fingers lingering a moment longer than necessary.

Claire allowed it. She rarely resisted contact from the others.

When the temperature dropped later that autumn she would simply grow stiller, but no one yet knew to watch for it.

Donna kept one hand on Claire and the other on Vivian’s shoulder. She needed the contact the way other people needed air.

If one of the six wandered too far during lunch she became restless, touching arms, asking where the missing girl had gone.

Everyone thought she was simply the devoted friend.

Vivian stood perfectly straight, head tilted a fraction as she watched the photographer adjust the camera. She blinked less than the others.

When someone spoke she sometimes waited three full seconds before answering, as if studying the way lips formed words.

The other girls teased her gently for staring.

She always smiled after the pause and said she was sorry.

Gloria’s gaze kept drifting toward the bright classroom windows behind them. Fluorescent light pulled at her attention the way a magnet pulls iron filings.

Later, under the stadium lights, the pull would become nearly unbearable.

For now she only shifted her weight and smiled when told.

Nancy stood nearest the front, soft-spoken, almost shy. She rubbed her bare forearms absently even though the afternoon was warm. Heavy sleeves bothered her.

When a boy from the football team walked past she turned her head slightly, nostrils flaring for half a second before she caught the motion and smoothed it away.

Carol stood in the center. She had insisted they all wear the same pale blue cardigans.

When Claire briefly stepped aside to straighten her collar, Carol’s expression tightened until Claire returned.

She watched the photographer, the other students, the angle of the light, already measuring how the finished picture would look in the yearbook.

The shutter clicked.

Six smiles.

Ordinary.

Perfect.

Chapter Two: First Weeks of Senior Year

Judy Harmon transferred into Bellweather that September. Her father had taken a job at the plant on the edge of town.

She was quiet, the sort of girl who watched more than she spoke. On her third day Donna waved her over at lunch.

“You can sit with us,” Donna said, already shifting to make space. “We don’t bite.”

The others laughed. Nancy’s laugh was soft. Vivian’s came after that small delay.

Claire only smiled without showing her teeth.

Carol gave a single small nod, eyes assessing the new girl for a second longer than the rest.

Judy sat.

The cafeteria smelled of institutional pizza, milk cartons, and the faint metallic tang of the steam tables.

A transistor radio on the counter near the kitchen played The Ronettes: “Be My Baby.”

The drums were bright and insistent. Most of the girls tapped their fingers in loose time. Claire’s hands remained perfectly still on the tabletop.

Judy learned their names and the small orbits they moved in. Claire was the quiet one who never seemed bothered by drafts. Donna knew everyone’s schedule and appeared at lockers with the exact book or pencil needed. Vivian moved as if she had all the time in the world and watched faces the way other people watched television.

Gloria always chose the seat nearest the brightest light.

Nancy sat close enough that Judy sometimes felt the faint warmth of her arm. Carol rarely spoke first in a group, yet the others adjusted around her decisions without discussion, when to leave the table, which hallway to take, which teacher’s questions required an answer and which could be smiled away.

They were friendly.

They walked Judy to class the first week so she would not get lost.

They shared notes. They invited her to the diner after school. On the surface they were simply a tight group of seniors who had known one another for years.

A record player in the student lounge spun The Beach Boys one afternoon, “God Only Knows.” The six of them swayed a little.

Carol’s hand rested lightly on Donna’s back.

Donna’s fingers brushed Claire’s wrist and lingered.

The contact looked affectionate. Judy thought it was sweet.

Chapter Three: The First Wrongnesses

The first clear wrongness arrived with the cold.

It was late September. The mornings had turned sharp.

In homeroom the radiator clanked uselessly in the corner near the windows. Claire sat there every day.

One particularly cold morning her pen stopped moving.

Her shoulders settled.

Her chest did not rise.

Her eyes remained open, fixed on the chalkboard with a stillness that was not sleep.

Judy leaned over. “Claire? You okay?”

No answer.

She touched Claire’s shoulder.

The skin was cool, almost matching the temperature of the air. For a moment Judy thought the other girl had simply fainted with her eyes open.

Then the bell rang. Claire’s head turned with deliberate slowness. Her eyes focused.

“Low blood sugar,” she said mildly. “I skip breakfast sometimes.”

Donna was already at her side, hand on her arm, guiding her up. The other four closed ranks without a spoken word.

Carol was already speaking quietly to the teacher, her voice reasonable, her expression concerned in exactly the right degree.

By the time the others reached the door the incident had already been given a tidy shape.

Judy watched them leave. Claire walked normally. By lunch she seemed fine. But Judy had felt no breath under her palm.

The second wrongness belonged to Nancy.

They were in the library. A boy from the basketball team walked past, still warm from practice, pulse visible at the side of his neck. Nancy’s head lifted. Her gaze fixed there. She rubbed her own forearm slowly.

“Your blood smells different today,” she said to Judy without looking away from the boy.

Judy blinked. “What?”

Nancy turned, offered the soft smile. “I was joking. You used different soap or something.”

Judy laughed because the moment seemed to require it. Later she noticed the small itchy marks that began appearing on the arms of several classmates, tiny punctures easily blamed on the last mosquitoes of the season. Nancy always seemed mildly tired in the mornings and strangely settled by afternoon.

Gloria’s strangeness was easier to observe. At the drive-in one Saturday night the neon sign burned bright orange and pink.

Gloria stood beneath it long after the others had ordered. She stared upward, lips slightly parted. When Carol touched her arm she turned.

“Sorry,” Gloria said. “I was just looking.”

A fine pale dust clung to Carol’s dark sweater afterward. Gloria brushed it away too quickly.

“Chalk,” she said. “From art class.”

There had been no art class that day. The dust did not dissolve under water.

Vivian simply watched. She could sit without shifting for the entire length of a study hall. When Judy once asked why she stared so long, Vivian tilted her head and said, after the usual pause, “I’m listening.”

Donna always knew when one of them was missing. One afternoon Claire stayed late. Donna grew agitated, touching the others, asking again and again where Claire was. When Claire finally appeared, Donna pressed her forehead briefly to Claire’s temple.

Carol watched the exchange and gave a single small nod.

If the group began to scatter after school Carol would simply start walking the usual route.

The others fell in without being told. When Judy once suggested splitting up for a project, Carol looked at her for a moment and then said, “We stay together.” The tone left no room for discussion. The others did not argue.

Chapter Four: Music and Growing Unease

October brought cooler nights and the first homecoming posters. In the student lounge The Mamas & the Papas played, “California Dreamin’.” The six girls sang along softly. Their voices blended almost too well.

Judy had begun to notice the way they moved around one another, never quite separating. She had also begun to notice the absences around town.

A junior boy who walked the railroad tracks at night stopped coming to school.

A stray dog vanished. Someone’s cat. The town blamed the highway, coyotes, ordinary runaways. When a teacher asked about the missing boy, Carol offered a gentle, plausible theory about family trouble.

The teacher nodded and moved on. No one asked further questions.

In English class the teacher left a radio on low. The Zombies came on, “She’s Not There.” Judy looked up and found all six girls watching her. When she met their eyes they smiled in near-unison and returned to their papers.

Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” seemed to follow her through the halls.

Once she turned a corner and found the six already standing at the far end of the corridor, waiting.

Donna lifted a hand.

The others did not move until Donna did. Carol’s gaze rested on Judy a second longer than the rest.

Chapter Five: Blood and Heat

The mosquito marks increased. Several girls complained of unusual fatigue. The school nurse spoke of mild anemia.

Nancy remained soft-spoken and helpful. She offered to walk tired classmates to the nurse’s office. She sat close.

One afternoon Judy found Nancy alone in the restroom, sleeves pushed up, examining tiny dark points on her inner arm. When she saw Judy she pulled the sleeve down.

“Mosquitoes,” Nancy said. “I hate them.”

Later Judy sat beside her during a free period. Nancy turned.

“You’re nervous.”

“How can you tell?”

Nancy’s smile was gentle. “You’re warmer. Your pulse is faster.”

Carol passed in the hallway, glanced in, and continued without comment.

Chapter Six: The Cold Classroom

November arrived with a sudden freeze. The heating system in the east wing failed. Breath showed in the air.

Claire sat by the window. Midway through the period her pen stopped. Her shoulders settled. Her eyes remained open.

Judy whispered her name. Nothing. She touched Claire’s hand. The skin was cold. No pulse she could find. A boy said, “I think she’s not breathing.”

Donna was out of her seat at once. She placed both hands on Claire’s face and exhaled slowly against her cheek. The other four rose and formed a quiet wall around the desk.

Carol was already speaking to the teacher in a low, reasonable voice. By the time Claire’s eyes opened again the story of low blood sugar was already in place.

Claire drew a deliberate breath. “I’m fine. I got too cold.”

At lunch the six sat closer than usual.

Carol touched each of them in turn, wrists, the backs of necks. brief contacts that looked like concern.

Judy sat elsewhere and began writing in a notebook she kept under her mattress.

Chapter Seven: Powder and Light

At the Thanksgiving assembly the stage lights were bright. Gloria sat in the front row and looked only at the lights.

When it ended Carol turned her shoulders toward the exit with a firm hand.

Later Judy hugged Gloria goodbye. A faint silvery dust clung to her sweater. Gloria brushed at it with quick hands.

“Lotion,” she said. “It gets everywhere.”

The dust did not dissolve in water. Over the following weeks Judy found it on her pillowcase, inside her notebook, on the seats of Carol’s car, on the bathroom sink.

Gloria shed constantly. When she grew agitated the shedding increased.

Judy collected the traces. Carol noticed once and said nothing, only watched her a moment longer.

Chapter Eight: The Injury

Claire stayed after school to help clean the biology lab.

A beaker slipped.

The cut on her palm was deep.

Judy saw the fluid that welled up, pale amber, almost brown, smelling faintly chemical.

Claire closed her fist. Donna appeared in the doorway though no one had called. She took Claire’s hand and led her out.

The other girls arrived within minutes. Carol was already moving them toward the exit with quiet efficiency.

Judy wiped the single drop from the floor. It left a sticky residue that did not behave like blood.

That night Jefferson Airplane played on the radio, “White Rabbit.” Judy thought of the amber fluid, the stillness, the way they always arrived without being called.

Chapter Nine: Homecoming Week

Homecoming week arrived with posters and pep rallies.

The six girls participated perfectly.

Carol handled the small permissions and explanations that kept their movements looking natural.

The others followed her lead.

On Thursday night The Rolling Stones came through a car radio, “Paint It, Black.” Claire stood under a streetlamp. For a moment her body went completely still.

A leaf landed on her shoulder and she did not brush it away. Then Donna called, and Claire moved.

Judy kept writing.

The stillness.

The wrong fluid.

The dust.

The marks.

The synchronized heads.

The absence of ordinary flinching.

Carol’s quiet management of every public moment.

Chapter Ten: Friday Night Under the Lights

The homecoming game was everything a 1968 Friday night was supposed to be.

Packed stands. Marching band. Cheerleaders.

Popcorn and cigarette smoke under the floodlights. The six girls sat together, smiling, clapping at the right times.

Then a player went down hard. Dark stain spread on white pants.

Six heads turned at exactly the same moment, toward one another.

Nancy’s lips parted. Gloria’s gaze flicked to the lights.

Vivian went still. Claire’s expression did not change.

Donna’s hand tightened on Carol’s arm. Carol’s shoulders squared.

They stood. Carol smiled at the people around them. “We’re going to get drinks.”

The sentence was already shaped to be believed. The six moved down the bleachers.

Judy watched them disappear beneath the stands.

Minutes passed. The marching band swelled, brass and drums rolling across the field. The crowd shouted with it, thousands of voices rising and falling together.

Then Judy heard something underneath the noise.

A scream. Short. Cut off.

She turned toward the stairs.

Another.

Nobody around her reacted. The band kept playing. People laughed and shouted at the field.

Judy listened harder.

The sound came from beneath the bleachers.

A boy stumbled out, his sleeve dark and wet, shouting something Judy couldn't make out over the band. Someone nearby laughed and told him to sit down.

Then something dripped through the wooden boards.

A pom-pom lay on the steps.

A single white shoe.

Gloria emerged first, mouth and chin dark, eyes still tilted toward the lights.

She saw Judy and smiled the yearbook smile. Nancy came next, looking almost dreamy.

Vivian moved with sudden liquid speed when a guard approached, then slowed again.

Claire and Donna supported Carol; Carol’s face was already composing the next necessary surface.

They walked past Judy. Carol glanced at her once.

“You should stay in your seat. The second half is starting.”

They climbed back into the stands.

They sat. They clapped.

Under the bleachers the screaming had stopped.

The town continued its Friday night.

Chapter Eleven: Aftermath

The official story became a mugging, a fight, wild dogs.

Two dead.

Three injured in ways the doctors called unusual.

The police interviewed everyone.

The six girls gave calm, consistent statements.

Carol’s voice was the one that set the tone; the others simply matched it.

Judy said nothing. She had the notebook, the dust, the memory of six heads turning together, the amber fluid, the way Carol had looked at her, measuring.

“Sympathy For The Devil” played everywhere in the days that followed.

Judy walked the halls and felt their eyes.

They still smiled. They still invited her to sit.

But the smiles had thinned. Carol watched her with particular care.

One afternoon in the cold stairwell Claire was motionless again. Judy stood over her.

When Claire’s eyes opened there was no pretense for a moment.

“You’re not breathing,” Judy whispered.

Claire drew a careful breath. “I forget sometimes.”

She walked away.

Chapter Twelve: Further Cracks

Judy watched how they reacted to pain. A book fell on Donna’s foot; Donna looked down, assessed, and kept walking.

Gloria scraped her arm and only brushed at the pale fluid and the increased dust. Vivian sat motionless for lengths of time that made Judy’s muscles ache.

Once Judy walked past her, turned a corner, and when she glanced back Vivian was six feet closer, no sound, simply closer.

Nancy could tell when Judy was afraid by the heat of her skin.

“You’re warmer again,” she would say.

“You should try to stay calm.”

One afternoon Judy slammed a locker on Donna’s fingers.

Donna froze without a sound.

Across the courtyard Claire looked up.

Vivian stopped on the stairs. Nancy rose from a desk out of sight.

Carol appeared in the hallway within a minute.

“Who hurt Donna?”

Judy stared. “How did you know?”

Carol’s expression did not change. “She called.”

Chapter Thirteen: The Old Photograph

In the public library Judy found a brittle 1931 edition of the Bellweather Chronicle.

A school photograph. Six teenage girls outside the old high school that had burned decades earlier.

Different clothes, different names in the caption, but the faces were the same.

Claire. Donna. Vivian. Gloria. Nancy. Carol.

They had not aged.

Bellweather was not the first town.

Judy sat very still under the fluorescent lights.

The six of them had been moving through places like this for decades. Learning the current customs.

Wearing the current clothes. Practicing the current smiles.

Feeding when required.

Moving on. And one of them had always been the one who learned the new rules of each decade, how the schools worked, how the police thought, how parents explained a disappearance so that no one looked too long.

Chapter Fourteen: The Woods

Judy followed them on a gray afternoon.

They walked past the railroad tracks into the thin woods.

They moved without speaking yet in perfect coordination. Donna led.

Carol watched the rear.

In a small clearing Claire dropped to her knees and began to dig.

The others formed a loose circle, facing outward.

Nancy lifted her head and scented the air.

Judy stepped on a branch.

Six faces turned.

For a moment they still looked like the girls from the yearbook. Then the surfaces began to fail in uneven, ugly fragments.

Claire’s skin stiffened, going rigid and wrong, her body locking into a stillness deeper than any human could hold.

Donna’s body began to vibrate with a fine, continuous tremor.

Vivian’s limbs shifted at angles that did not match human joints. too many bends, a sudden liquid repositioning. Gloria’s scales came off in visible sheets, the human outline of her arms dissolving into drifting residue.

Nancy’s mouth widened and thinned, the structure beneath rearranging itself. Carol’s face split first along the jawline.

The human skin tore. What moved beneath it was segmented and chitinous. There was no second layer of girl.

There was only the thing that had been wearing the girl.

Judy understood, in a single sick lurch, that there was not a human body underneath any of them.

The skin, the hair, the cardigans, the yearbook smiles, none of it had a person inside it.

Carol’s voice came layered with a faint vibration that did not belong in any throat that had ever been human.

“You weren’t supposed to see that.”

Judy ran.

Chapter Fifteen: The Colony Hunt

She ran without direction at first, branches whipping her face.

Behind her there was no immediate crashing pursuit. That was worse. She glanced back and saw them separating, not chasing in a pack, but spreading, silent, purposeful.

Donna did not run after her. She simply turned onto a different line through the trees. The others did the same.

They were not six individuals chasing one girl. They were a single system closing routes.

Judy crashed toward the road. The trees thinned. Asphalt ahead. Empty. She kept running.

Carol’s voice came from somewhere behind and to the left, calm.

“Judy.”

She did not stop.

Nancy’s voice drifted from a different angle, soft.

“You’re getting warmer.”

Judy angled right.

Gloria’s voice came from above somehow.

“The lights are on.”

Judy broke onto the road. Empty. She turned toward town. For a moment she thought she had made it.

Then she saw movement at the curve ahead, Vivian, already there, standing perfectly still in the center of the road, head tilted, waiting. No footsteps had announced her.

Judy spun the other way.

Claire was further down the road in that direction, simply present, body still half-stiff, blocking the route with patience.

Donna emerged from the trees on one side. Nancy on the other.

Carol walked out last, unhurried, the human face still mostly in place except for the dark split along the jaw.

Gloria drifted nearer to the nearest streetlamp, scales still falling.

They had rearranged themselves around her like a colony cutting off every exit.

Judy backed up until her shoulders hit the cold metal of a guardrail. There was nowhere left to go.

She made herself speak.

“What are you going to do to me?”

Carol looked at her. A long pause. The others held their positions, waiting.

“Nothing,” Carol said.

Judy almost believed her. For half a second the word hung in the air like mercy.

Carol smiled. The split along her jaw widened slightly.

“You’ll just disappear.”

Then the six closed in.

Epilogue: The Photograph Remains

The 1968 yearbook still sits on a shelf in the Bellweather public library.

The Class of ’68 smiles out from its pages.

In the second row six girls stand with their arms around one another, cardigans matching, expressions bright and ordinary.

Few people who look at the picture now know what happened under the stadium that homecoming night, or what was left in the woods behind the plant, or why six seniors left town so abruptly before graduation and were never heard from again under those names.

But sometimes, late at night when the old fluorescent lights flicker, a fine pale dust settles on the open page.

And if the room grows cold enough, the photograph seems to hold its breath.

In a different archive, in a different town, a 1931 newspaper photograph shows six girls with the same faces and different clothes.

And somewhere else, in some other decade, another group of six is already learning the current slang, the current fashions, the current ways to smile for a camera.

The colony continues.

The imitation continues.

And the one among them who understands the surface best continues to keep it intact for as long as the surface is useful.

- THE END