She looked a little hurt, “Fine.” Pouting a little, she waved a hand in the general direction of my clothes, “What do you think?”
I tried to adjust the collar. I liked the abstract design on the right side of the shirt, but the v-neck collar came to a point near where my ribcage ended and my stomach began. “Top is cut too low, jeans are too tight.”
“You need to get used to showing some cleavage. Like I said, be bold in your fashion choices.”
“I’d be fine with showing some cleavage if I had anything to show,” I pointed out.
“You’re a late bloomer?” she tried.
“My mom was a B-cup, and not always then, depending on the brand of bra. And that was after she went up a partial size being pregnant with me.”
“That’s fucking tragic.”
I shrugged. I’d been resigned to being broomstick thin and flat as a board pretty much from the point I’d started puberty. I just had to look at the genetics on either side of my family to know what I was in for.
“And my condolences about your mom. I didn’t know.”
“Appreciated.” I sighed. “I’m vetoing the shirt.”
“Fine, you’re allowed, but we’re keeping the jeans. They show off your figure.”
“The figure of a thirteen year old boy,” I groused.
“You’re taller than a thirteen year old boy, don’t be silly. Besides, whatever you look like, whatever your body type, there’s bound to be someone out there who thinks you’re the hottest fucking person they’ve ever seen.”
“Fantastic,” I mumbled, “There’s a sketchy pedophile out there with my name on him.”
Lisa laughed, “Go, try something else on. But throw the jeans over the top. I’m buying them for you, and if you never wear them, I’ll have to be content with you feeling guilty about it.”
“Find me the same jeans one size larger, and I’ll wear them,” I negotiated. Then, before she could protest, I added, “They’re going to shrink in the wash.”
“Point. I’ll go look.”
Things continued in that vein for a little while, with Lisa doing a little shopping for herself, too. We stuck to talking about the clothes, and it was clear that Lisa was carefully avoiding the earlier topic. When we finished, the woman at the cash totaled it up on a notepad and passed the slip of paper to us. Four hundred and sixty dollars.
“My treat,” Lisa said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“A bribe in exchange for your silence,” Lisa winked at me.
“About?”
She glanced at the cashier, “After.”
It was only after we’d left the stall well behind, the pair of us laden down with bags, that Lisa elaborated. “Do me a favor and don’t go telling the gang how badly I let things slip, as far as Panacea being one of the hostages. If they ask outright, you can say, I won’t ask you to lie. But if they don’t ask, maybe don’t bring it up?”
“This is the silence you’re buying?”
“Please.”
“Alright,” I answered. I would have without the gift of clothes, but I think she knew that.
She grinned, “Thanks. Between them, I don’t think those guys would ever let me live it down.”
“Would you let them, if the tables were turned?”
“Hell naw,” she laughed.
“That’s what I thought.”
“But about our earlier conversation… last I’ll say on the subject tonight, promise. If you ever decide you do want me to directly interfere in any of your personal stuff, just say the word.”
I frowned, ready to be annoyed, but I relented. It was a fair offer, not pushing anything. “Okay. Thank you, but I’m fine.”
“Then that’s settled. Let’s go eat.”
Fugly Bobs was fast food of the most shameless kind, sold out of a part-restaurant, part-bar, part-shack at the edge of the Market, overlooking the beach. Anyone who lived in the area had probably eaten there once, at some point. Anyone with any sense then waited a year to give their hearts a chance to recuperate. It was the sort of place with burgers so greasy that if you ordered takeout, you could see through the paper bag by the time you got home. The specialty burger was the Fugly Bob Challenger: if you could finish it, you didn’t have to pay for it. It probably went without saying that most people paid.
Brian and Alec were already there when we arrived, and we ordered our food right off. Lisa and I agreed to split a bacon cheeseburger, Brian ordered a portobello-beef double-decker and Alec matched him with a Hideous Bob – Fugly Bob’s interpretation of a Big Mac.
None of us were hungry, brave or dumb enough to order the Challenger.
Brian and Alec had been sitting outside so they could spot us when we arrived. After a brief debate, we agreed to stick to the table they’d been sitting at. It was by the window, so we could see the TV. It was still cool enough that most people had ventured indoors. The only others outside were some college-aged guys, and they were sitting on the opposite end of the patio, occupied with beer and the game on the TV. The primary benefit was that we enough had privacy to talk.
“I don’t want to be a nag,” Brian said, eyeing the piles of bags, “But I did say you shouldn’t spend so much so soon after a caper. It’s the kind of thing cops and capes watch for.”
“It’s cool,” Lisa brushed him off, “It only raises flags with the credit card companies or banks if it’s a dramatic change in a given person’s spending habits. I buy close to this amount of stuff every week or two.”
Brian frowned. He looked like he wanted to say something in response, but he kept his mouth shut.
“So, what comes next?” I asked.
“Dinner, then dessert,” Alec replied, his attention on the TV inside.
“I meant in terms of our,” I lowered my voice, “Illicit activity.” A quick double-check showed the college guys at the far end of the patio were still engrossed in the game. I couldn’t make out anything they were saying, and they were being loud, so I was pretty sure they couldn’t hear us.
“Is there anything you want to do?” Brian asked me.
“Something less intense,” I decided, “I’m kind of feeling like I jumped into the deep end of the pool without entirely knowing how to swim. I’d prefer to get to know my powers better in the field, figure out how to deal with situations, before I’m up against people like Lung and Glory Girl, who are literally capable of tearing me limb from limb.”
“Hah. Something easier then.”
“If Rachel was here, she’d be calling you a wuss again,” Alec commented.
“I’ll just have to be glad she’s not here, then,” I smiled.
Our food arrived, and we used extra plates to divvy up our individual side orders so we all had a little bit of each. That left each of us a mix of fries, sweet potato fries, onion rings and deep fried zucchini on an individual plate. The sides alone would have been more than enough raw foodstuff for a meal on its own, but there were also the burgers themselves, each large enough to take up nearly an entire plate. Lisa and I cut the bacon cheeseburger in half, and we each took a portion.
“I guess you’re not the type that gains weight,” Lisa eyed me.
“I have to work to put it on.”
“Dammit,” she grumbled.
“If it’s any consolation,” I said, after taking a bite and wiping my mouth with a napkin, “This is going to be hell on my skin.”
“That does help,” she grinned.
Alec rolled his eyes, “Enough with the girl talk.”
“What do you want to talk about, then?” Lisa asked him.
He shrugged and took a bite of his burger.
I had a suggestion. “I know it’s kind of cliche, but when people with powers get together, isn’t it kind of standard to share origin stories?”
Apparently, I couldn’t have picked a better way to kill the conversation. Lisa turned away, for once without a smile on her face. Brian and Alec gave me strange looks, not saying anything.
“What?” I asked. I double checked there was nobody in earshot. “What did I say?”
4.03
Alec, surprisingly, was the one to break the nerve-wracking silence. “Let me put it this way. When you got your powers, were you having a good day?”
I didn’t have to think long. “No.”
“Would I be really off the mark if I guessed you were having the worst day of your life, when you got your powers?”
“Second worst,” I replied quietly, “It’s like that for everyone?”
“Just about. The only ones who get off easy are the second generation capes. The kids of people who have powers.”
Lisa leaned forward, putting her elbows on the table, “So if you needed another reason to think Glory Girl is a privileged bitch, look no further.”
“Why?” I asked, “Why do we go through that?”
“It’s called the trigger event,” Lisa answered me, “Researchers theorize that for every person with powers out there, there’s one to five people with the potential for powers, who haven’t met the conditions necessary for a trigger event. You need to be pushed to the edge. Fight or flight responses pushed to their limits, further than the limits, even. Then your powers start to emerge.”
“Basically,” Alec said, “For your powers to manifest, you’re going to have to have something really shitty happen to you.”
“Which may help to explain why the villains outnumber the heroes two to one,” Lisa pointed out, “Or why third world countries have the highest densities of people with powers. Not capes, but a lot of people with powers.”
“But people who have parents with powers?”
“They don’t need nearly as intense an event to make their powers show up. Glory Girl got her powers by getting fouled while playing basketball in gym class. She mentioned it in a few interviews she gave.”
“So you basically asked us to share the details on the worst moments of our lives,” Alec said, before taking another bite of his burger.
“Sorry,” I replied.
“It’s okay,” Brian reassured me, “It’s one of those things you only really hear about from other capes, and you only know us. Maybe you’d hear more about trigger events if you took a university class in parahuman studies, but I doubt you’d get the full picture there. Kind of have to go through it yourself.”
Lisa reached over and mussed up my hair, “Don’t worry about it.”
Why had I brought up origins? It would have eventually have been my turn, and I would’ve had to share my own story.
Maybe I’d wanted to.
“Lisa said you guys were talking about me, talking about how you thought I was having a hard time, speculating on what it was,” I managed to say, “I dunno, I think a part of me wants to talk about it so you aren’t coming to the wrong conclusions. Talk about when I got my powers. But I don’t know that I can get into it without ruining the mood.”
“You already ruined the mood, dork.” This from Alec.
Brian punched him in the arm, making him yelp. Glaring at Brian, Alec grudgingly added, “Which means there’s no reason not to, I guess.”
“Go for it,” Lisa prodded me.
“It’s not an amazing story,” I said, “But I need to say something before I start. I already said it to Lisa. The people I’m talking about… I don’t want you to take revenge on them on my behalf or anything. I need to be sure you won’t.”
“You want to get revenge yourself?” Alec asked.
I found myself at a bit of a loss for words. I couldn’t really explain why I didn’t want them interfering, “I don’t really know. I think… I guess I feel that if you guys jumped in and beat them up or humiliated them or made them tearfully apologize, I wouldn’t feel like I’d dealt with things myself. There wouldn’t be any closure.”
“So whatever we hear, we don’t act on it,” Brian clarified.
“Please.”
“It’s your prerogative,” he said, taking a deep-fried zucchini off of Lisa’s plate and biting it in half. She pushed her plate closer to him.
“Whatever,” Alec said.
I took a few seconds to get a few bites of my bacon cheeseburger and composed my thoughts before I began.
“There’s three girls at school that had… have been making my life pretty goddamn miserable. Doing pretty much everything they could think of to make school suck, humiliate me, hurt me. Each of the three had their individual approach, and for a good while, it was like they were trying to outdo each other in how creative or mean they could get.”
My heart was pounding as I looked up from my plate to check the expressions on the others’ faces. This is who I am, I thought. This is where I’m coming from. When they heard about the real me, without whatever notions or ideas they’d gotten into their heads about me or how capable I was, how would they react?
“It went on for almost a year and a half before things quieted down. Last year, around November, they… I dunno. It was like they got bored. The pranks got tamer, then stopped altogether. The taunts stopped, and so did most of the hate mail. They ignored me, left me alone.
“I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I made a friend, one of the girls who had sometimes joined in on the taunting came to me and apologized. Not one of the major bullies, more like a friend of a friend of the bullies, I guess. She asked me if I wanted to hang out. I was too gun-shy, told her no, but it got so we were talking before and after classes and eating lunch together. Her approaching me and befriending me was one of the big reasons I could think the harassment was ending. I never really let my guard down around her, but she was pretty cool about it.
“And for most of November and the two weeks of classes before Christmas break, nothing. They were leaving me alone. I was able to relax.”
I sighed, “That ended the day I came back from the winter break. I knew, instinctually, that they were playing me, that they were waiting before they pulled their next stunt, so it had more impact. I didn’t think they’d be so patient about it. I went to my locker, and well, they’d obviously raided the bins from the girls bathrooms or something, because they’d piled used pads and tampons into my locker. Almost filled it.”
“Ew,” Alec interjected, putting down his food, “I was eating here.”
“Sorry,” I looked down at my plate, poked at a piece of bacon, “I can stop, it’s cool.”
“Finish now,” Brian ordered me, if you can say he was ordering me gently. He glared at Alec.
I swallowed, feeling a flush creeping across my face, “It was pretty obvious that they had done it before the school closed for Christmas, by the smell alone. I bent over to throw up, right there in a crowded hallway, everyone watching. Before I could recover or stop losing my breakfast, someone grabbed me by the hair, hard enough it hurt, and shoved me into the locker.” It had been Sophia, I was almost positive: She was the most physically aggressive of the three. But these guys didn’t need to know her name.
Why had I brought this up? I was regretting it already. I looked at the others, but I couldn’t read their expressions.
I couldn’t leave the story unfinished, after getting this far, as much as I really wanted to. “They shut the locker and put the lock on it. I was trapped in there, with this rancid smell and puke, barely able to move, it was so full. All I could think was that someone had been willing to get their hands that dirty to fuck with me, but of all the students that had seen me get shoved in the locker, nobody was getting a janitor or teacher to let me out.
“I panicked, freaked out. My mind went someplace else, and it found the bugs there. Not that I knew what they were, at that point. I didn’t have a sense of proportion, and with all the info my power was giving me then, my brain didn’t know how to process it all. As far as I knew, all around me, in the walls of the school, in the corners, and crawling around the filthy interior of the locker, there were thousands of these twitchy, alien, distorted things that were each shoving every tiny detail about their bodies a
nd their fucked up biology into my head.
I sighed, “It’s hard to explain what it’s like, having a new sense open up, but you can’t understand it all. Every sound that they heard was bounced back to me at a hundred times the volume, with the pitch and everything else all screwed up as if they wanted to make it as unpleasant and painful to listen to as possible. Even what they were seeing, it’s like having my eyes open after being in the dark for a long time, but the eyes weren’t attached to my body, and what they were seeing was like looking into a really dingy, grimy kaleidoscope. Thousands of them. And I didn’t know how to turn any of it off.”
“Damn,” Lisa said.
“When someone finally let me out, I came out fighting. Biting, scratching, kicking. Screaming incoherently. Probably putting on a good show for all the kids that had come out of their classrooms to watch. The teachers tried to deal with the situation, paramedics eventually came and I don’t remember much after that.
“I figured out what my power was at the hospital, while they observed me, which helped ground me, make me feel sane again. Bugs are a lot easier to wrap your head around, when you realize they’re bugs. After a week, maybe, I was able to shut some of it out. My dad got some money from the school. Enough to pay the bills for the hospital stay and a little extra. He was talking about suing the bullies, but no witnesses were really talking and the lawyer said it wasn’t going to be successful without hard evidence to identify the responsible. We didn’t have the money for it, if it wasn’t going to be a sure thing. I never wound up telling my dad about the main group of bullies. Maybe I should have, I dunno.”
“I’m sorry,” Lisa put her hand on my shoulder. I felt grateful that she wasn’t pulling away or laughing. It was the first time I’d ever really talked about it, and I wasn’t sure I could’ve dealt if she had.
“Wait, this thing with those girls is still going on?” Alec asked me.
I shrugged, “Basically. I went back after being in the hospital, and things were as bad as they ever were. My so called friend wasn’t making eye contact or speaking to me, and they didn’t even go easy on me after seeing my, uh, episode.”
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