Missouri, 1991. Willow Mitchell spent eight years turning her runaway sister into a legend.
Morgan was the girl who climbed into a boy’s pickup with her hair wild in the wind and never looked back. Now Willow’s fresh out of high school and going nowhere, which is right where her mother wants her. When a package arrives from Louisiana, she is left holding what remains of Morgan—who has a favor to ask.
Ronni Cataret is the dependable daughter. She slices turkey at the local deli, and her future is already stenciled in red on the door of her father’s truck. She’s been Willow’s other half since second grade. But she’s never allowed herself to reach for the one thing she wants most. So when Willow needs a driver, Ronni grabs the keys to her ’82 Cutlass and turns on the radio.
Six hundred miles of highway stretch ahead of them. Each stop trades the sister Willow remembers for one she never knew, and every mile pushes Ronni further from the life that’s been designed for her. At the end of the road waits everything the legend left untold.
Two girls, one impossible summer, and a friendship that carries more than either of them understands. sky blue pink is a story about the promises we make, the family we choose, and the reasons we stay. It’s for anyone who has ever watched the colors of a perfect sunset and dreamed about someday.
For fans of Kristin Hannah’s Firefly Lane and emily m. danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post. This is a coming-of-age novel you won’t soon forget.
Excerpt
Willow
I was fifty-seven minutes into my first shift at the Dairy Queen when the chocolate soft serve wound up in my pants.
Not a metaphor.
From the belt to the cuffs, my brand-new khakis looked like I’d suffered a spectacular bathroom emergency. My fingers were still wrapped around the handle of the machine when I turned to Rita.
“Well, that’s one way to make an impression,” she said, not glancing up from the register. She’d been running this place forever, and everything I needed to know about her was tattooed on her right forearm: a dripping cherry-topped sundae surrounded by pink stars and the phrase Fudge it! Life’s a Swirl in the kind of cursive only found in a sixth-grader’s diary.
I didn’t move. A red-and-white paper hat squashed my bramble of blonde curls, while chocolate pooled in my sneakers. An eight-year-old customer laughed so hard, she choked on her strawberry Twizzler, and I had what my guidance counselor called a moment of clarity: Five years from now, I’d still be pulling soft serve while everyone else got the hell out of this town.
Jeffrey barreled over from the fryer like he’d witnessed a crime and nearly slipped in the chocolate puddle. Above his head, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face glared down from a promotional poster, all sunglasses and determined jawline. Terminator 2: Judgment Day—Coming Soon. Someone had pasted a Blizzard cup over the shotgun.
“What did you do?” he whined.
I looked at the cone in my other hand. Then at my pants. Then back at him. “I pulled the handle.”
“Did you prime it first?”
“Prime it?”
He stared at me like I’d violated the first law of soft serve, then looked to Rita. “You showed her how to prime it, right?”
Rita didn’t stop counting singles. “May have left that part out.”
“May have?”
“Willow’s a smart girl. Figured she’d figure it out.”
That coming from an old friend of my mother’s who once told her I had “more curiosity than sense.” She wasn’t wrong.
The kid was still wheezing, and now her mother was laughing too. She wore a faded red UMSL sweatshirt that was probably ten years old, and I wondered if she’d graduated or bought it at the Goodwill. The cone dripped onto my wrist, lopsided and sad. I walked it over to the counter.
“On the house,” I said.
The girl’s hands shot out and grabbed it before I could change my mind. Her mom blinked.
Jeffrey’s voice went up an octave. “Is she allowed to do that?”
Rita finally glanced over. The cone. My pants. The chocolate now spreading toward the register in a slow, unstoppable tide. “Jeff, fix the machine.”
“But—”
“Fix it.”
He muttered and yanked open the side panel.
The girl licked her cone and shouted, “Thanks, Willow,” like we were best friends.
Her mom steered her toward the door, still grinning. “Good luck, honey.”
It wasn’t clear if she meant with the job or with life, but I appreciated the sentiment either way.
The mop was wedged in the back corner, and its graying strings reeked of sour milk and bleach. I stretched over the cardboard tubs of soft-serve mix, grateful for once that my gangly arms were good for something besides knocking things off shelves. Its handle stuck to my fingers like one of those fly strips that Golden Wok hung by the front door. I dunked the mop head in the dingy water, then swirled the chocolate into a sickening smear across the lime-green tile. Ronni would double over laughing if she were here, then grab a second mop without me having to ask.
Rita went back to counting. Jeffrey grumbled that there was nothing wrong with the machine, and I swabbed the floor beneath Arnold’s stony stare.
Fifty-seven minutes. And five more hours to go in those pants.