by Jenn Gott
Hopefuls #1
The Private Life of Jane Maxwell
by Jenn Gott
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Gott
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book.
ISBN: 978-0-9908914-4-4
To the creative teams behind the DC “Arrowverse” and the MCU—thank you for getting me hooked on superheroes and never letting me go.
&
To all of the forgotten women who’ve helped shape the world of comic books since the art form first began. Ladies, this one’s for you.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Jenn Gott
The day that Doctor Demolition finally managed to seize control of Grand City Capital Bank, the Heroes of Hope were meeting to plan his capture in an underground parking garage, and Jane Maxwell was fired from her job.
She stood in her boss’s office, staring down at him like the dumbass that he was.
“Wait . . . You’re firing me?”
Her boss—weedy, thin faced, poor posture and poorer skin—nodded as if he was in the row of bobbleheads that lined the edge of his desk. “Effective immediately.”
Jane threw her arms wide, as if she couldn’t possibly accept the enormity of the stupidity before her. Which she couldn’t. “Because I dared to stand up for myself?”
“Because you insulted our readers.”
“One reader,” Jane said. “Well . . . and all the trolls he brought along for the ride, but—”
“You called him a fuckface, Jane.”
“He is a fuckface!”
Her boss shrugged. “And that’s why you’re out.”
“I don’t believe this,” Jane said. She put her hands on her hips and began to pace the office like a caged animal, that was how much she didn’t believe this.
All around the room, framed posters of heroes and villains towered over her. City skylines at night, valiant protectors standing tall as they surveyed their domain, rubble flipping through the air in the wake of a furious explosion. Jane caught flashes of enormously flexing muscles, and women in skintight catsuits twisted up in impossible poses.
She stopped in front of one in particular, a cover shot of six people: the Heroes of Hope, each striking their signature pose. Windforce, covered head-to-toe in blue spandex, hovers several inches off the ground as his skydiving wingsuit flares around him. Granite Girl, petite but oh-so-deadly, her skin hardened as she throws one of her lethal punches. Rip-Shift, in cyberpunk black and mirrored sunglasses, steps out of a rip in the fabric of reality, the world parting around him like a curtain. Pixie Beats, grinning in her masquerade mask, her punk-rock-meets-ballerina styling bright even in miniature, is shrunk down and standing on Mindsight’s upturned palm. Jane’s eyes, as usual these days, avoided looking at Mindsight too directly, though the image of her filled Jane’s mind: the film-noir aesthetic of trench coat, fedora, and shingle bob, the mask obscuring her face, the fingerless gloves. Finally, in the middle of it all, gazing heroically beyond the camera, the leader of the group. Muscles run tautly beneath the sleeves of an armored suit drawn in what Jane called “Hero Red.” Light gleams around his fingertips, outstretched toward the sky. A red mask obscures only his eyes, leaving a chiseled chin and a blinding smile fit for a toothpaste ad.
In the corner of the frame was a set of autographs in silver ink. Jane stared at hers, the familiar scrawl.
She turned back. “I gave you Captain Lumen.”
“Yes, and we’re all very grateful for your work—”
“Fuck you, Eddie. If you were grateful, I wouldn’t be out of a job. If you were grateful, QZero would stand up for me.”
Eddie pinched his lips. Through the skylight of his office, the sun was hitting him in just the right way to accentuate his bald spot. Jane took note of the way the shadows divided his face, her brain already chewing on an idea for the way she’d design Doctor Demolition’s new statue of himself, when she realized with a jolt that she’d never get to design it.
She stormed out of the office. Eddie was midsentence, something about the reputation of QZero, about Jane being a public figure now, about not letting herself get dragged into mud fights—as if it had been her fault that some knuckle-dragger had started sending death threats to her office. All Jane had done was talk about what was happening. The “fuckface” remark wasn’t even in her first blog post, wasn’t even directed at her stalker. It was only after forty-eight hours of being flooded with comments, of needing to shut down the flamewar now raging on her blog, of being a trending hashtag on Twitter, that she’d finally snapped.
Jane cut a sharp path through Quantum Zero Comics. In her mind, she saw the panels perfectly: a view from above, lines across the image as if it’s being seen through a security camera. The hall is empty save for a silhouette in the distance. A close-up of clenched teeth, another of clenched fists held fast beside her body. Her finger, pressing the elevator button, the thick lines of her ring drawn in loose, bold strokes. On the next page, a series of employees scattering at the sight of her, ducking into cubicles or back into the restroom.
She didn’t look at anybody as she stalked through the jungle of desks and drawing tables. A bank of enormous windows looked out over the city, and Jane marched straight to her own table, right in front of them. The best view in the house—or at least, in this department. Pieces of her reflection caught the bright sunlight: the yellow of her plaid shirt and the shine of her glasses.
In comics, you always get a nice file box to carry your stuff outside; Jane mashed everything that she could fit into her messenger bag and the pockets of the jacket that had been hanging across the back of her chair ever since it had finally warmed up in April. An umbrella hung off her wrist and banged against her thigh as she lugged an armload of reference books out the door.
Twenty minutes later, her stuff was piled on the table around her as she fired off a series of angry texts from the corner of her favorite Starbucks. Her phone jerked underneath the mash of her thumbs, her whole body curling over the table in frustration.
I mean, where’s the loyalty??? Like I haven’t given them fucking EVERYTHING.
I’m sorry, Janie, her mother te
xted back. I know it’s rough.
Rough?? It’s OBSCENE. I should sue them. I wonder if I can sue them.
You want me to ask your father?
Jane shook her head, an automatic response. She pulled up the emoji menu, trying to find one that would express her feelings on that idea, when someone came up beside her.
“Jane?” he asked. “You okay?”
Jane jerked, startled out of her little bubble. Her thumb struck a picture of a pair of red ladies’ shoes, and then slid over to “send” before she realized. She looked up, already frowning. “You really don’t want to ask me that today, Cal.”
Cal gave her a sympathetic smile as he took off his sunglasses. “That bad?” he asked, pulling out the empty chair beside her.
“You could say that. I—Oh. Sorry, one second.” Jane’s phone chirruped in her hand, her mother sending back, I don’t understand—is that a yes or a no?
No, Jane typed. Later, mom, GG. Love you.
“I hope that I’m not catching you at a bad time, then,” Cal said as Jane put her phone facedown on the gritty tabletop.
Jane slumped back in her chair. “You did, but I’m kind of grateful for the distraction. What’s up? You back in town for long?”
Cal hesitated, just long enough for Jane to notice. He shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Listen, though, um . . . I was hoping that you’d have time for something tonight. Can you meet me? Say, at seven?”
“This is all very mysterious.” Despite herself, Jane almost laughed. “What’s the deal?”
“No deal . . . nothing I want to talk about here, at any rate.”
Cal glanced around the Starbucks, at the baristas chatting as they made drinks, the bored trail of customers yawning and glancing irritably at their phones, the group of old ladies with their knitting, the one pretentious arty type that had set herself up with a laptop and a chipped mug from home. He seemed to be scoping the place out, and when his attention returned to Jane, finally, there was a tiny frown wrinkling his forehead.
“Can you do it? Seven o’clock? I’ll meet you back here?”
Jane raised an eyebrow. There was something . . . different, about Cal today. Beyond his behavior, beyond this shadowy “meeting” that he was insisting on. Jane’s artist eye trailed him up and down: he was good-looking in a movie star sort of way, his blond hair mussed just so, his jeans and t-shirt perfectly tailored, a leather jacket that was exactly the right amount of broken-in. There was a reason that Jane had modeled Captain Lumen after him, and not just because QZero had refused the scripts where Jane had written her as a woman.
Jane shook herself—she must have been imagining it. “Yeah, whatever.” It’s not like she had plans anymore. “Seven is fine.”
Cal let out a breath. “Thank you.” He stood up to go, tapping his phone against hers. “My new number,” he added. “In case . . . in case you run into trouble between now and then. You let me know, all right?”
“Sure.” Jane frowned as she turned her phone over. New contact, it said. “I’ll do th—”
But when she looked back up, Cal was already gone. Jane craned her neck, then leaned over in her chair to get a better look at the door, out the window, up at the counter. Despite a clear view of the street, there was no sign of him.
Jane scowled. “You’re seeing things, woman,” she muttered, as she pulled up her Twitter feed to see if news of her departure had broken yet.
* * *
When Jane was fifteen, she almost died.
This isn’t an exaggeration. It wasn’t that she was caught doing something and that her mom was going to, like, literally, kill her for it—no, this was actual, life-and-death death, and it had come so close that Jane had felt the coldness of its jaws against her skin.
Only six other people knew the truth of this story, and those only because they were right alongside her when it happened.
It wasn’t as exciting as it should have been. Jane was out with her friends: Cal and Devin and Keisha and Marie and Tony . . . and Clair. Always Clair. This was the night of Tony’s sixteenth birthday, and he was pissed because his parents hadn’t let him schedule his driving test yet. Everyone agreed that this was vastly unfair. He was the oldest, and they’d been counting on him to be their ride. Now they’d have to wait who knows how long—God, maybe all the way until December, when Keisha would be next.
For seven teenagers stuck in the outermost stretches of the suburbs, this was as good as death.
They rode their bikes out, then, since fine, they didn’t have a car. Like a bunch of dumb kids. Tony wanted to do something different, so they were out hunting new hotspots to meet up. That’s what they called it, “hotspots,” like if they started hanging out there, then obviously all the cool kids would follow. Never mind that it had never worked before. Tony had heard of an abandoned building on the far edge of town, a chemical factory that had been empty since the eighties. This seemed the ultimate height of cool, so they’d peddled out farther than they’d ever gone, the night sky stretching out endlessly above them. They roved as a pack, whooping it up and cruising down the middle line of the road or even into the oncoming traffic lane—feeling like total badasses—until they’d see headlights in the far, far distance, and then they’d all scramble not to collide as they jerked out of the way.
Years later, when Jane drew the version of this that didn’t happen, the infinitely cooler one that needed to appeal to the all-important 18–25 demographic, she’d crammed them all into a bumblebee yellow-and-black Camaro from 1973. There was beer in the backseat, and the hint that maybe someone had a joint hidden away for later. But in real life, they were on Schwinns and Walmart specials, helmets safely strapped to their heads, Pepsi and Snickers bars crammed into Cal’s backpack.
It took ages to reach the factory. Long enough that their legs were aching, that their shirts clung to their sweaty backs. Long enough that they’d started to talk about turning around. But then the building rose up out of the horizon like some kind of apparition, the castle finally coming into view at the end of a long and grueling quest, and that had been enough to refuel their enthusiasm.
They ditched their bikes at the chain-link fence that edged the property, and made the rest of the trip on foot. Dry grass came up to their knees, shushing as they trampled through it. Jane had tied her jacket around her waist, letting the cold air pour against her. Clair’s arm kept bumping against Jane’s, though it was hard to say if she was doing it on purpose, or if the ground underfoot was just so uneven that in their haste she hadn’t noticed. This was after they’d come out to each other, but well before they dared to tell anyone else, and so Jane didn’t take Clair’s hand, even though she desperately wanted to.
When they got to the factory, the door was locked. Tony and Cal tried to bust the lock, and even Keisha went over and gave the door a good kick because her legs were so strong from ballet, but it refused to open. They tried looking for another one, or maybe a window they could break—but this was the only door, and the windows, if there were any, were so high that they disappeared into the dark.
“This sucks!” Tony said, a sentiment that was quickly agreed upon by all. But, with nothing to do about it, they began to shuffle back toward the road, grumbling and mumbling about how nothing cool ever happens around here, anyway.
That was when they spotted it.
Well, Clair spotted it. She’d always had sharp eyes, wide and observant. Plus, she was taking one last look back. “Look!” she’d shouted, and she pointed to a spot behind them. A large piece of equipment lay rusting out on the lawn, a box that might have been a generator or something. Just beyond it, they could see the faintest glow, haloing it as if it was a mission point in a video game.
They all ran over it.
This is where their stories differed. The others, in an unspoken agreement, concluded that someone must have accidentally snagged on a power cable leading up to it, which for some reason hadn’t been shut down properly. The cable made contact with the
generator, sending out a jolt of electricity that threw them all back, and scrambled their heads for a good ten minutes or so. That was the reasonable explanation, and despite the group’s collective love of science fiction, they also prided themselves on being so rational and scientific. Cold, hard logic was their mistress, and any hesitation there might have been at accepting this obvious explanation was quickly swept aside.
For a long time, even Jane accepted this. Even once she started telling her story, she framed it as a great jump-off point for an RPG that Devin was trying to develop, modeled after Dungeons & Dragons but more sciencey. What if that wasn’t what had happened to them, she said? I mean, obviously it was—but just for the sake of the game, let’s use this as the backstory.
But little by little, she’d started to remember more, or maybe she just imagined it. It was hard to say. So little by little, she’d started to write it down. A strange device, sitting just behind the generator. A mechanical base with a green orb pulsating in it, wires and cables hooking it directly to the generator of the abandoned factory. “Do you think it’s aliens?” they asked in the comics, years later, when the issue hit the stands. “Maybe a government conspiracy.” By this point, the RPG was long since shelved, and so Jane was free to use her tale in a different medium.
And so the Heroes of Hope were born: transformed by the radiation of the alien/government device, each with unique abilities that allowed them to band together and fight crime wherever it may arise. And in the real world, the seven of them woke up with wicked headaches and a mad thirst. They chugged down all of Cal’s Pepsi, and raced back to the main streets to buy some pizza or something, laughing at how close they’d come to death, because everyone knew what happened when you touched a downed power line. They collectively swore to never tell their parents, and that, it seemed, was that.
* * *
Cal was late, and when he did show up, he was out of breath.
“Come on,” he said, instead of “hi.” He grabbed Jane’s hand, dragging her into the street.