by Perry Moore
I wanted to tell her that I didn't think she was supposed to be smoking, but so far this was the most we'd ever talked without any outright hatred, and I didn't want to ruin the moment.
She saw me staring at the cigarette.
"Don't judge me," she said, and took a long drag. "There's some things you don't know." She unbuttoned the top button of her jacket. "You ever wonder why you never see me without this jacket?"
"Once or twice, maybe." Of course I wondered, everyone did. Especially considering the grungy sleeves. I never understood why someone who cared so much about her appearance would wear a pizza delivery jacket with sleeves full of muck.
"You think I'm too poor to buy a new one, I can tell." That thought had crossed my mind, I have to admit, but I didn't say it.
"When I was a little girl," Scarlett said, "I woke up one morning and discovered I had breasts. I was in the sixth grade, and my dad had already left, and my mom resented me because I started to get attention from her boyfriends." She scraped around the floorboards searching for something as she spoke.
"About a year later, I started getting really high fevers, the kind they take you to the hospital for. One night at the emergency room they got worried that my temperature was so high I would die, so they put me in a tub full of ice." Scarlett found what she was looking for, a small plastic disk of blue and pink eye shadow. She adjusted the rearview mirror so she could see her eyes.
"It only took me a few seconds to melt the whole thing. I burned the nurses' hands when they tried to take me out of the water." She dug into the disk of eye shadow with the applicator.
"My mother was horrified; the hospital told her they couldn't do anything else for me, so she took me home." Scarlett carefully applied the makeup to her eyelids. "They wouldn't let me back in school because they thought I'd burn it down. I'd already tried to once, and that was before I even had powers, so I guess I can't really blame them. I spent a lot of time at home." She flung the case of eye shadow somewhere in the backseat and reached down for a bottle of makeup remover.
"Finally I got this scholarship to a special school for people like us, where they train you to control your powers. It was a bunch of spoiled rich kids, but it was okay, I didn't need to stay too long to get the hang of my powers." She reached over down by my feet and felt around. I scooped up a handful of cotton balls and handed one to her.
"I came home during the first Christmas break and found out that my mom was real sick, and she wasn't getting any better. The doctors said that it had been exposure to my high levels of radiation, before I'd learned to keep it under control.
"And then I started throwing up every day." Scarlett doused the cotton ball with makeup remover and began to wipe away the trails of mascara left on her face by her tears.
She tossed the used cotton ball in the back and I handed her another one. "You know how expensive it is to get chemo? Even with government aid, it still costs a shitload. And Mom's too tired to work most of the time because of it. I picked up four extra shifts last week just so they wouldn't repossess her wig."
Scarlett pulled a mascara wand out of a pocket inside her jacket and began to apply it to her lashes.
"What about you?" I asked.
Scarlett stopped with the mascara and turned to look at me. She shook her head. "You still haven't figured it out, have you?"
I scratched my eyebrows. I thought I knew everything, thought I was a smart kid, but there was still more to her story, another surprise. She unbuttoned her jacket all the way and opened it up. I looked at her belly in shock. The bag spread over her stomach like a pouch of colorless Jell-O and rested in her lap.
"It's a colostomy bag," she said.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"It means I won't be winning Miss America this year." She dipped her mascara wand into the tube. I'd heard the term before, but I didn't know what it really was. She could see the confusion on my face and sighed.
"It means I shit through a tube in my stomach, okay?"
Oh. I stared straight ahead.
Scarlett turned her attention back to her eyelashes in the mirror and began reapplying the mascara. She applied countless layers of black on her lashes, trying to make them longer and longer.
She saw my eyes grow wide as I stared at the bag, and I knew I should have hidden my reaction. I thought she'd kick me out of the car right then and there, but she didn't.
"He took me to dinner a few times, made out through a couple of movies, and we talked about our first time being special. But that night we both got out of work early and I started kissing him, working on his neck—he can't resist that, it drives him absolutely crazy—and we couldn't help ourselves. So we went at it right there in the parking lot." She blinked her eyelashes and began to wipe away the excess.
She said that last part wistfully, and it surprised me—that she'd waited a long time for anything she really wanted. It was the first time I really identified with her. I knew what it was like to wait for what you really want.
"The parking lot's full of gravel, you know, so he didn't really say anything when I told him I wanted to keep my jacket on; who wants a bunch of gravel digging into your skin? I told him to take it slow, because he's usually so fast about everything else. I really wanted to enjoy it. "She rested her head against the windshield and sighed. "I'd been waiting such a long time. I was so into the moment, I didn't care that he was getting close to my bare stomach. Maybe I even wanted him to find out." She stared at her eyes in the rearview mirror. "I thought about how the scene would play out when he reached down and felt the bag. I could picture the look on his face, the shock of discovering it." She suddenly pushed the rearview mirror away so she wouldn't have to look at herself. "Then I thought, well, if that's the worst thing that could happen, what the fuck. Better to know now than later. But the more I thought about it, I realized there was something even worse he could show."
"What?" I asked.
"Pity," she said. She turned and stared directly into my eyes. "And I will not be pitied. Ever." She took a deep breath, which made her chest look even bigger.
"So I told him to get his fucking hands off me, got in my car, and went home." She stared out the window.
"I don't even know why the fuck I'm telling you this."
It made me mad for her to clam up suddenly like that, but I thought about what Ruth had told me and decided what I'd do next. I reached out my hand and, without using my powers, squeezed Scarlett's hand, and this time she let me.
"Why would you ever let someone fall in love with you if you aren't going to be around to enjoy it with them? I know you think I'm pretty cruel sometimes. It's true. I can be. But I'm not that cruel. I wouldn't wish this on anyone."
We breathed the same air for a minute, and I watched Scarlett stare out the window.
"Maybe you should talk to him," I said. I hadn't read the handbook for these situations. "Maybe if you saw him and told him what was going on, I don't know, maybe he's just waiting to see you again to talk about it."
Scarlett took her delivery cap off. Underneath she was patchy and bald from chemo. Her blond ponytail was a hair extension woven, rather sloppily, underneath the cap. She reached under her seat and pulled out a new cap with a blond ponytail.
"What are you talking about? I see him every night," she said, and adjusted the cap so the ponytail looked even in the back. "So do you."
I didn't want to hear what came next, but she said it anyway.
"It's Golden Boy."
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I MET SCARLETT at her house, the prettiest trailer in the park, at exactly 7:30 a.m. the next morning. Scarlett said if we went early, maybe she'd get out in time to take a nap so that no one at tryouts would notice how exhausted she really was. "They're always 'running behind' at the doctor's office," she said. "Not exactly what you want to hear when every day could be your last."
On the way she stopped at a 7-Eleven for some biscuits and a Diet Dr Pepper. She spooned some
extra-spicy salsa out of the nacho fixin's container onto the biscuits.
"What do you care?" she said, when she saw me make a face at her breakfast. "I'm just going to throw it all up anyway."
We parked the car across the street, and she asked me to find her appointment card in the backseat while she wolfed down the last half of a biscuit. I found the small card underneath a repossession notice for the car. I decided not to bring that up. One crisis at a time. I read the card, which said we were about half an hour late.
"Oh, I almost forgot to ask," she said. "I need to borrow two hundred and fifty dollars."
I thought she had to be kidding. She waited until now to ask me to pay for it?
"Hey," she said, and shrugged, "good chemo ain't cheap."
I calculated how much I had in my savings and told her I'd write her a check. Thank God for those extra shifts I'd picked up to pay for Dad's dry cleaning. She said she'd pay me back as soon as she could, but I knew better.
"This wasn't part of the deal," I said while scribbling out the check. "I said I'd drive you because you were too tired after the treatments to pull it together for practice."
"Yeah, okay, whatever." She snatched the check. She wasn't even looking at me.
"You got a girlfriend yet?" she asked me as she yanked open the door to the concrete building. My heart dropped a little, my usual reaction to this question.
"Uh, no," I said.
"Well, when you do," Scarlett said as she tossed the remains of her ham biscuit in the waste bin, "try to pick one whose insides aren't rotting."
In the waiting room, I flipped through a Reader's Digest and found myself lingering on a page called "The Lighter Side of Life." Scarlett had been uncharacteristically restrained with the woman at the front desk, who castigated her for being late. She said it meant she'd have to wait a while longer because they were "running a little behind." Scarlett turned to me and grinned when the receptionist said that last part.
Scarlett went behind the closed doors, where husbands, partners, friends, and I were not allowed to enter. The excessive number of young people in the waiting room made me wonder what the hell we'd done to the world that this many kids were getting chemo. You could tell by the varying degrees of hair loss approximately how long each one had been in treatment. I scanned the room, and each one was too embarrassed to make eye contact with me. One of the teenage girls sat rocking back and forth like she had a bad cramp in her stomach and was waiting for it to pass.
I didn't realize how rude it was to be the one healthy kid staring at all the patients until I got to the last guy in the room. Apparently, he'd decided to make a joke out of the whole process—he'd painted arched eyebrows where his real ones had been, and he wore a towering bouffant wig on his head. He was grinning at me, waiting for my eyes to come to a rest on his. His middle finger was raised in my direction.
I laughed out loud—I couldn't help it—and saw that the entire waiting room was staring at me like I was crazy. This wasn't the kind of place where you laughed. I didn't have time to apologize. The emergency alarm on my ring went off.
The doors busted open, and Scarlett came running out, clenching her ring finger.
"We gotta go!"
She almost knocked over the crabby receptionist, who fell back in her seat. Scarlett grabbed my arm, yanked me out of my seat, and the next thing I knew, we were sprinting down the hallway.
The window at the end of the hallway was open. Good thing, because Scarlett heated up, lifted me off the ground, and seconds later we were flying through the air.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
"LOOK WHO DECIDED to show up," Golden Boy said. He eyed me and Scarlett suspiciously. She set me down, and I saw Golden Boy's eyes on our clasped hands. Scarlett knew he was looking, and gave my hand an extra squeeze for emphasis. She barged past Golden Boy.
"Where's the fire?" she said.
Golden Boy pointed toward the parking lot of the ramshackle apartments we'd been staking out. Scarlett turned on the heat, yanked me up into the air with her, and we were suddenly off again.
I tried to focus on the emergency, but I couldn't help but think about Scarlett. Was it safe for her to be back in action this soon after the procedure? I was about to ask her if she was okay, when she did something that threw me for a loop.
She dropped me. I whizzed through the air and thought for sure I'd splatter on the pavement, so I closed my eyes. Instead, I landed on top of someone and thought I heard a bone crack. It knocked the wind out of me, and when I finally caught my breath, I saw that I'd landed on Snaggletooth. And the cracking sound I heard wasn't his bone, it was his tooth. I'd landed right on the back of his neck and driven his tooth straight into the concrete sidewalk.
A pair of quick hands lifted me off the ground.
"Get up," Golden Boy shouted at me as he whipped around Snaggletooth at superspeed and tied him up. "We're supposed to apprehend them, not kill them." It was the first time I'd seen him since Scarlett had told me her news. He eyed Scarlett again as he wound up Snaggletooth.
Typhoid Larry was leading Transvision Vamp to Ruth's car. Her hands were tied behind her back, and Larry told us he'd first given her a wicked case of glaucoma so she couldn't resort to her usual eye tricks, and then he'd given her a debilitating case of tendonitis so she couldn't run. Larry was getting smarter with his powers. He'd also tied a bandana around her head to cover her eyes. She stumbled and hit her head on the roof of the car as she climbed in the backseat.
"Right on time," Ruth said. "I was waiting for you two to show up."
Golden Boy didn't offer me a hand to get up. I got the message loud and clear and got up just fine on my own.
"Where the hell were you two, anyway?" he said.
It wasn't my place to tell him.
"Shouldn't we get these guys to headquarters?" I wasn't very smooth at dodging questions, and he could tell.
His demeanor changed immediately. His molecules slowed down and he actually came to a full stop. He looked at me. I could tell he was wondering exactly how much I knew about him and Scarlett.
"Hey! Wake up!" Ruth shouted from her car. "We got trouble!"
She pointed down the street, where Scarlett had pinned Ssnake in an alley. She was pummeling him with her fists. Her arms flung wildly, weaving trails of flame in figure eights, and from the force of her blows, she didn't seem to care if she broke her hands or his ribs. She tore into his stomach like it was a punching bag.
"Stop her!" Ruth shouted.
Golden Boy got to Scarlett, who was still ripping into Ssnake with no intention of stopping. She was lost in rage, and it was our job to get her back before she killed this poor loser. Golden Boy grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her back. She whipped around, her eyes lit up with flames.
She looked around frantically for something to hit, her chest heaving, and she tried to get her bearings. Ssnake crumpled against the wall and slid down to the ground in a motionless heap, like a giant spitball thrown against a blackboard. Scarlett pushed Golden Boy to the ground, and I saw the shock on his face. Flames escaped from Scarlett's mouth as she seethed. I ran over to her and grabbed her, like my dad had grabbed me the first time I'd ever had a seizure.
"Scarlett, listen to me," I whispered into her ear. "Everything's going to be okay." My hands were burning, and I couldn't tell if it was my powers or hers, but it hurt like hell.
More than anything in the world, though, she needed to know that she wasn't alone, so I took a deep breath, braced myself for the pain, and hugged her tightly.
My skin sizzled as she sobbed into my chest. The burning was almost more than I could take—the worst pain I'd ever been through up until this point—but I held on tight. She was trying to spit some words out, but she couldn't manage to catch her breath from all the crying. "Shhh, you don't have to say anything." I stroked her hair and tried to ignore the fires burning my skin.
"But—" Scarlett gagged and sobbed. "I—" She choked back more tears. Then she go
t fed up with herself, shut her mouth, looked up at the sky, and counted to ten to catch her breath. She put her mouth next to my ear, and before the sobbing took her over again, she managed to get out one sentence.
"I left my purse at the clinic," she whispered. I saw Golden Boy, still on the ground, his eyes burning with envy that she was confiding in me and not him.
I held on to her as she began crying again, and told her not to worry about it, I'd take care of it. She cried and cried.
By now, Ruth and Larry had caught up with us. They'd hoisted Ssnake to his feet, lifted his arms over each of their shoulders, and helped him to the car. Larry tried to latch the Power Inhibitor around Ssnake's neck, but Ruth motioned for him to stop. It was an unnecessary precaution. He wasn't going anywhere.
I made eye contact with Ssnake; I was glad he'd regained consciousness. Underneath his mask he had cloudy, listless eyes, and the minute he saw me staring at him, he turned his swollen head away in shame. I guess supervillains could get embarrassed, too.
After Ruth and Larry escorted Ssnake away, Scarlett looked up from my shoulder and her face grew still.
"The fuck are you looking at?" she asked Golden Boy.
He stood there, silent. For a long while they stared at each other. I didn't know who was going to move first, and I wanted to be anywhere but in between them. I made my best effort to back away without drawing any attention to myself. I looked at Golden Boy's face, strong and earnest, but rattled. Then I saw Scarlett's face soften for just a second, and it made me think about how long she must have waited for the right moment to let him know how she felt about him, how long she must have waited for their first kiss. Kevin took a step forward and opened his arms up to hold her.
Scarlett pushed him away as hard as she could. He crashed into some empty metal trash cans and fell on his ass. Then Scarlett burst into flames and disappeared into the sky without looking back.