Little pink houses

Cherry and Luke walked up the stairs from Union Station and headed toward Michigan Avenue. Cherry had her Walkman on, blasting her Cindy Lauper tape and wasn’t really paying attention to anything around them. Luke was trying to light his cigarette. He thought it was weird they wouldn’t let him light it right after he got off the train. It was never an issue before. The conductor started yelling at him not to smoke on the platform. Who cared about smoking on the platform? Then he saw the signs banning smoking and guessed it was a new policy. Which totally, like, sucked.

Luke took a long drag on his cigarette and looked toward the bridge over the river. He saw all these people with things up to their ears, like little portable transistor radios. But not. They were like, not radios. He nudged Cherry who continued to insist that girls just wanted to have fun. He nudged her again and she scowled at him and took her headphones off.

“What”, she demanded.

“Does something seem, like, not right to you?”

“Like no. A-dohy. It’s Downtown. So like, no.”

“What do those, like, people by the bridge have by their ears?”

Cherry looked to where Luke was pointing and she saw the same odd little boxes everyone was holding to their ear. She then saw a man in a dark suit push past and he was just talking out loud into a little wire by his neck. She looked at Luke and shrugged.  It was the big city and things were always a little different.

“So that doesn’t look, like, weird to you at all”, asked Luke.

“Don’t have a cow, its cool. Let’s go. I’m hungry.”

Cherry and Luke started walking up Adams toward Michigan Ave. and it was all the honking that caught his attention. All the cars, all the cars were like, futuristic or something. They were all low profiled and had all kinds of cool line. Luke was a car guy and this stuff was right out of popular mechanics. He stopped walking and Cherry bumped into him.

“Is the Auto-show this week baby”, he asked.

“No. A-dohy. You’re being weird”, replied a snotty Cherry.

Cheery snapped her gum and something slowly dawned on her. All the girls walking around her had the flattest hair. Like, none of them had even bothered to tease up their bangs. Everyone looked so bad in her opinion. And all the clothes were so drab, too many grays and browns. These girls were no match for her bright pink neon tights. She snapped her gum again. She looked at Luke to tell him about how all these skanks were ugly. She didn’t say anything though and followed Luke’s gaze up to the window of a store.

There was a TV in the window, but it was super small. Like it was thin but the screen was so big. It was just about the biggest TV screen Cherry had ever seen. That was when she started to think that maybe something was wrong.

“What the hell”, asked Luke.

“Um, maybe there is something a little, like, wrong”, said Cherry.

They both backed away from the window and into a guy in a business suit. He dropped his iPad. He grabbed after it and grabbed it before it hit the ground. He yelled at Luke.

“Watch it you dumb ass. You know how much these things cost!”

Luke could see something on the screen; it was like a movie playing or something. He mumbled an apology and grabbed Cherry by the hand.

“Let’s get the hell out of here”.

They ran back toward Union Station and back down the stairs and back to 1986.