Nobody's Hero

by Katey Hawthorne

  Ah, what the hell. "So, if I ask you about the crosses, am I stepping over a line?"

  "I had your dick in my mouth after one date, Jamie."

  I laughed. "We had a half date before. The Lizard was a total setup."

  He considered. "Okay, one and a half. But still, if there was a line, we blew right over it."

  "Didn't think of it that way."

  He laughed into his coffee. "Didn't think you would."

  I raised my eyebrows. "You calling me easy?"

  "Yes. Yes, I am."

  I raised my eyebrows again, this time with less accusation and more suggestion.

  He put his coffee down. "Okay, wait till we're done eating to be super-hot, James. Your first lesson in Catholicism is that it's a sin to waste food when there are starving children on the street."

  "So, you're really Catholic? Not just hereditary Catholic? Go to mass, confession, all that?"

  "Not as much I as used to." He shrugged and set down his coffee, then opened the fridge. "I'm partial to the priest I grew up with, and he's way down in Medina. But in theory, yes, I am really Catholic."

  I admit that a priest crack flew to my lips, but even I'm not inappropriate enough for that. Instead I said, "I'm not trying to be a jerk, but…you're gay."

  He snorted. "Sherlock fucking Holmes."

  See, a few days ago, that might've stung. That morning I just smiled and took another sip of his supercharged French Roast. Yes, I was getting the impression that Kellan Shea was not a man who halfway did anything. "I'm just saying, the Church, capital C, thinks you have a disease that wants curing."

  He emerged with a carton of eggs. "They also think that God made me exactly who I am and that He loves me."

  "So how do you reconcile that kind of…?"

  "Hypocrisy."

  "I was looking for a nicer word, but yeah. That."

  "It's not about force-feeding dogma." He set the eggs down by the stove and didn't turn for a moment, head bowed. I thought that meant he was looking for a way to get out of the conversation and came up with several options. He turned around before I got any of them out, making a serious face, but earnest, not angry. "You're taught to use your conscience, meditate and pray on things that confuse you. I'm not saying it never bothers me that the pope hates me, but fuck it, I don't like him much either."

  "But he's God's representative. He's divine, right?"

  He barked out a laugh. "I'm willing to have this conversation, but you have to not be a patronizing dick about it."

  "I—Sorry." I flushed. "You're right. I don't get it, but it's fascinating. I really want to understand."

  "About the pope. And me."

  I nodded.

  His smile slipped into that lopsided shy thing. He shrugged once more, picking up his coffee. "Okay, there's the obvious answer: that believing anything unilaterally is stupid. Even Jesus had human moments and questions, and that's what made him awesome. So, the specific-to-Christianity answer is, if someone who's supposed to be the son of God can have doubts, how can anyone else be right all the time?"

  All I could think was that it was the first time in my life that I had heard a rational adult refer to Jesus as being "awesome." And my respect for both his sanity and his superior intelligence made it seem…kind of cool.

  (No, that was not my desire to fuck him talking, either. I'm perfectly happy to fuck an idiot. I spent most of my twenties doing just that with staggering success.)

  "I know it's picking and choosing—I want to believe in love; I don't want to believe in hate. But I've read the books. I know what the Man said and what he didn't. They're informed choices."

  "Yeah, that makes sense." I was careful not to take a tone, as my mother called it, when I asked, "So do you believe the stories, the gospels, in a literal way?"

  "Not how you're thinking, no, but it wouldn't change the point if I did. You're an atheist?"

  "Agnostic, I guess. I'm not saying there's nothing. I'm just saying I…" Actually, I didn't know what I was saying. I'd never given it too much thought, apart from wondering where my dad had ended up when I was much younger. But I'd long since reconciled myself to the idea that I wasn't supposed to know until it was my turn.

  Still smiling, he turned and started removing the bacon and tomatoes onto a bed of paper towels. "You don't believe your spiritual authority expands with the size of your hat."

  "Well, yeah."

  "I get it, believe me. I'm not trying to explain the inexplicable phenomenon of faith; I'm just coming at it from a rational humanist standpoint here." He finished that task, then made for the eggs again. "Two, three?"

  Jesus Christ, did I win the lottery or something? I stopped just short of telling him that this morning, I definitely believed in God. "Wow. Two, please?"

  "Scrambled, over easy, over hard, sunny-side up?"

  "You're incredible."

  He looked over his shoulder, flashing that dimple.

  Guh. "Whatever you're having."

  "Over easy." He started cracking eggs and dropping them into the bacon grease. "People act like Catholics can just commit murder and go ask God to forgive us, and it's fine; we're going to heaven. But it's the opposite. It's direct accountability to the Guy Upstairs. You personally have to face what you've done, and you have to be okay with it to move on with your life. If you do it right, it's really hard to make the same mistakes over again. You ever do something stupid you wish you could just accept so you could stop living in it all the time?"

  "God, yeah." Every weekend. Except this one. "So it's not a cop-out, you're saying."

  "Honestly…" He trailed off as he cracked the fourth egg, then swished the pan to settle them. When he turned around again, he said, "It's really hard. It sucks, admitting what an asshole you are. But it keeps a fourteen-year-old poor kid whose parents don't have time to wipe their own asses from doing a lot of stupid shit. I know it can be a form of tyranny. But it's not supposed to be."

  "Historically, it has been."

  "Any human organization ends up that way. We're imperfect; that's my point. But when you're on your deathbed, it's just about you and God. I'm talking personally."

  "I…" I paused with my coffee halfway to my lips again, working this over and over in my mind, wondering at the alien shape of it, finding that it wasn't so alien after all. "I could see that."

  "And unlike me, you have everything going for you, probably always have. Only thing to single you out in a potentially bad way is that you're gay, and you probably made it into a fad at your high school."

  That got me to prickle a little, though it wasn't even what he'd said. "I wasn't exactly out then." Just that, you know, I wasn't even completely out now. And I definitely didn't have everything going for me—Good job. Good family. Good friends. Never gone hungry. Never been lonely. Hot guy with a libido to rival mine making me breakfast.

  Also, incredibly high-level electronic manipulation, causing my own people to envy, covet, and expect great things of me all at once.

  Well, fuck. Couldn't complain about any of that, could I?

  "But you see my point," he said.

  Too well. One of my tried-and-true conversational techniques was necessary: turn it back around. "How do you not have everything going for you, exactly? You're ridiculously smart, I know you make more than I do, and you're painfully hot."

  He looked over his shoulder and rolled his eyes.

  "Plus you can cook, which is icing on the sex cake. So—"

  "Easy on the flattery."

  "I'm trying to rack up points here."

  "Yeah, I lost count last night." He paused to pry the first egg from the Teflon and gently flip it, then continued down the line. I was about to jump on this opportunity to get out of looking like an overprivileged dick, but he started before I swallowed my coffee. "In school, I was the nerdy shy kid in hand-me-down clothes that you would've pretended didn't exist. Your friends probably would've given me shit, even if you wouldn't. It's easy to ignore God when you d
on't need him, especially as an invincible teenager."

  "First of all, I was really nice to everyone in school—especially the nerdy kids in hand-me-downs. And second…" Well, okay, some of my friends would've been dicks to him, but, "I wouldn't have kept any friends that gave you shit."

  He laughed.

  "I would've defended you to try and get laid, if nothing else."

  "That, I believe." I heard the smile in his voice even if I couldn't see it.

  That set me a little more at ease. Anyhow, if I was going to question his religion, I could at least be gracious about him questioning my socioeconomic privilege. "But I take your point, otherwise."

  I spared a moment to appreciate the weird profundity of it too. I'm not sure why I hadn't expected that my initial question would be biting off so much. I only got into these conversations with people like Sarah and Clark usually. Hell, sometimes even Derrick and Mike, if we were all really fucked up and still hanging out at the end of a long night's work downtown.

  It did lead to one more, incredibly self-centered thought, though. As he finished up the eggs, I considered him with…not new eyes, but a new depth of perspective. He didn't just inspire prickliness; he was practically a porcupine himself. But he was apparently feeling pretty open to me after last night. Why not? "So, would you confess about me?"

  He hesitated. Then, quietly, "I don't know."

  "Sorry. Too much. Strike that one from the record."

  "No, it's…" When he turned around, he was smiling, but in a sheepish way that implied he'd been the one to say the wrong thing. "Okay, a little too much. But not in a bad way. It's cool."

  Jesus. Kellan Shea was actually capable of being gracious. Who knew?

  He shuffled the eggs, tomatoes, bacon, and forks onto a pair of plates and pushed one across to me. "Good morning."

  "It really is."

  He looked away, flushing a little.

  What the hell was he doing to me? One second, we were having a serious conversation about God; the next, I wanted to get down on my knees and give him fucking everything.

  In the circumstances, I kept it to, "Thank you."

  "Anytime." He sipped his coffee while I took the first couple of bites—which did not disappoint, because it was even better than it smelled. And then, before even touching his own food, he said, "Okay. I will say this: if I confessed, it wouldn't be because you're a man. And it definitely wouldn't mean I regretted it."

  More graciousness. The fucking sky was falling. "Well, that's a relief."

  Then he started eating.

  *~*~*

  We didn't realize just how like Dad I was, just how powerful, until I was fifteen. Mom was running a drive at a soup kitchen just off Euclid, and I sneaked out the back to smoke with some of the other awakened kids, including Billy Armin. A back alley behind a shelter—smart place for a bunch of swaggering teenagers in overpriced shoes to hang out sneaking cigarettes. But if anyone needs evidence that we're just as human as sleepers, they can have that for proof, I guess.

  Of course we were approached by one of the city's many homeless, probably a vet, definitely not in his right mind. All our families were into the "help the less fortunate" scene, but most of the kids were spoiled dickheads, me included. Though that day made it pretty clear that, at least comparatively, I had a little compassion in me.

  And that it wasn't necessarily a good thing.

  Anyhow, we were out in this shitty neighborhood, this poor guy ranting at us about how he was going to shoot all us worthless brats in the head. It scared me a little but not as much as it probably should've. Even the cockiest of us wouldn't dare to use his powers on the guy unless it became actually dangerous, but we all knew how to handle ourselves.

  The oldest boy among us was sixteen, a handsome, swaggering athlete type called Mason. He was a hot-thermal manipulator—the opposite of Billy, he could make fire from thin air. And he started egging this poor guy on, telling him to go ahead and do it, pull out his gun and shoot us, or get his crazy ass into the building where he belonged. Effectively mocking the guy for being shell-shocked.

  Mason was hot, and I was a horny adolescent, but I wasn't exactly starving for the approval of my peers. Kellan was right about me in that. While the two other guys laughed uncomfortably around quivering cigarettes, I told Mason to shut the fuck up.

  We got into it right there, him threatening to fight me, this guy still yelling that he was going to blow our brains out against the wall, electricity crackling about my fingers, the temperature rising a sudden twenty degrees all around Mason.

  I thought I was doing the right thing, standing up for someone who couldn't stand up for himself, like I was raised to do. Like a Monday. But it was just as much bullshit grandstanding as Mason's mockery. I should've just gone inside and gotten help for the guy and ignored Mason strutting like a cock in a henhouse.

  But I didn't, and Mason went after me.

  And the random guy pulled an actual gun.

  If Billy hadn't seen him and jumped between us, I don't know if we would've noticed. As it was, he managed to knock Mason out of the way, but I just got sideswiped. So I was left staring down the barrel of an unhinged—if understandably provoked—man's gun.

  I still remember that moment, every single detail of it, or at least it feels that way. That's probably why the nightmares stuck so hard when they came. Mason's leftover heat all over my skin, soaking through my T-shirt, my jeans. Billy gasping for air, trying to make something calming come out of his mouth, unable to think of anything. The other guy—I hardly knew him, some kid from one of the Akron families—probably staring into the back of my head, waiting to see if it'd explode.

  The guy's hand was shaking, and his finger was on the trigger. And I was fifteen and scared and stupid and vibrating with electricity. I'd never been amped up that high before; it coursed through my bones, like they'd pulverize if I didn't let it out.

  So I shoved my hand out, palm to the middle of the guy's chest, and let it fly.

  There was a huge pop, and he was thrown backward like someone getting Tasered in a cartoon, limbs and layers flying, gun held out wide. His finger squeezed the trigger—they dug a slug out of the brick wall later. He hit the far wall and slumped into a pile, eyes shut, gun clutched tight in his lap.

  I was fifteen and scared and stupid, and I thought I'd just killed someone. Electricity still running up and down my right arm from the charge, and just me, staring, my throat full of puke and my heart squashed under my feet.

  Billy ran to him, grabbed the gun, and sent it skittering across the alley. He felt the guy's neck, told us he was alive, and yelled for someone to go get his mom.

  Mason was still frozen against a wall, and the Akron kid didn't move either.

  So I went and got Dr. Armin myself.

  My mom didn't say anything about what I should and shouldn't have done. She just kept saying it was all right, everything had come out okay in the end, and I'd thought quickly. She understood why I'd done what I'd done. She knew I agreed with her already about why I shouldn't have.

  I told her I wanted to go to bed early that night, but really, and maybe for the first time in my life, I just wanted to be alone. It wasn't until she hugged me—weird in itself, as our usual practice was to shout "good night!" down the hall at each other—that I noticed her hands were shaking. The next morning, her eyes were bloodshot, but she smiled and made me breakfast—another oddity, since she was usually out the door before I rolled out of bed on a weekend—and asked if I had homework. Her voice and hands were steady. I never saw them shake again.

  I don't know how many kids that age realize how lucky they are to make it that far. I wonder how many parents take it for granted that theirs have. And I wonder how many awakened, knowing what we can do, how much damage we can cause, soothe their conscience by performing anonymous good works. I wonder if it makes them feel like their world is safe from them.

  I've never had the heart to ask my mother. Hell, I've nev
er even had the heart to tell her about the nightmares, so I definitely wasn't going to ask her about her own issues. Sometimes I tell myself she does it because it makes her feel like her life matters—like most people, sleeper or awakened, who get into charity. Sometimes I tell myself it's just the way she was raised, and she took to it.

  *~*~*

  And sometimes I just have to realize I don't know the first fucking thing about her.

  She came up to Coventry for dinner at Tommy's Saturday evening, a tradition we'd kept up about once a month since I was a kid. Mom's schedule was so crammed full that it was about the only time we got alone. Peanut butter and grilled cheese and a giant chocolate shake to wash it down, for me. She liked to go through the spinach-pie menu and then start back at the beginning. Today she was on the MR3, so it was a mess.

  I was still thinking of Kellan, enjoying the lingering tiredness, the physical reminder of one hell of a night, and wishing harder than ever I could be honest with my mother. Not because I'd tell her about him—she never asked about my love life, and God knew I considered that a convenience. But I was still high on the nice-boy thing. I had this romantic idea in my head that Kellan was the kind of guy you tell your mother about. Eventually.

  "I feel like you've been avoiding me," she said about halfway through.

  "This from you?"

  Her manicured eyebrows pulled down and together. "Honey, I always answer your calls."

  I laughed it off because if I didn't, she'd start sectioning off extra time in her planner for me. That was just about the last thing my life needed. "No, I just missed the call. Date went later than I expected."

  The eyebrows went up. "Oh."

  "I do date sometimes. It's a thing single people do." I poked at my shake with the straw. "You could try it."

  In twenty-five years, she'd had one boyfriend and a handful of dates that never went anywhere, that I knew of. There must've been more, but she never seemed impressed or inclined to take anything very seriously.