Town was too small to have proper goths; you had to go to Altman or even Tilmitt for that, but Amory Oklona did her best with the tools and materials available. She had to get by with dark grey and navy when black was too hard to come by, and Sharpie tanked from the middle school stood in for nail polish. HughesNet only allowed for a few minutes of download late each night, so the death metal and grunge was low-bitrate and high-virus. The nightly download was a welcome sanctuary from watching her four younger brothers as an unpaid babysitter-serf, and although she thought the theme songs to the kids shows that lulled the little rugrats to sleep were kind of catchy, she’d never admit it even under thumbscrews.

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