by Sarah Cross
My fingers itch with the desire to pop Cinderella’s head off and stuff it into Godzilla’s open maw so it looks like he’s eating it.
But I resist. I’m competing with a guy who has a driver’s license and wears jewelry—I doubt he does stuff like that.
Nicholas dumps Darla onto a pile of beanbag chairs. “You want to check on them?” he asks me. “The sewing room’s back there. Sophie probably wants to show you her costume sketches anyway.”
Nice. More semi-alone time with Jacques. I bundle up in a blanket toga and matching cape (yeah, there’s a style for you) and lumber over to the sewing room. Fingers crossed that I don’t get turned into a Popsicle.
I hear them before I see them.
“. . . tonight it’s a dinner party. No big surprise there,” Sophie says, with an eye-roll kind of tone. “They’re never here. And I guess it’s convenient sometimes but I wonder if they even remember they have a kid, or if they just think they hired an underage housekeeper.”
Jacques laughs awkwardly, sort of stiffly and politely. “I doubt they think you are their housekeeper. But I know what you mean. My mother is frequently away . . . always with something more important to do. People to meet. You know.”
“The worst thing is when they’re actually here and we’re eating some kind of gross macrobiotic takeout and my mom will have the nerve to be like, ‘Oh, remember Snitzi so-and-so? She’s editing her school’s newspaper now!’ And it’s like, oh, I’m sorry—is there some journalism ambition I’m supposed to have that you never told me about? Or do you just like knowing what other kids are doing and not your own?”
“Their priorities are warped,” Jacques says. “They are so busy looking elsewhere, they don’t realize how special you are.”
Sophie giggles. “Thanks, Jacques. That’s sweet. Okay, enough of my whining: arms up? Ooh, it looks awesome! Not that we’ll even have a chance to wear costumes. Darla’s being so bossy lately . . . and if she doesn’t want to include you, it’s gonna be like this constant war with her . . .”
“Even so, thank you. I like it very much.”
Jacques is standing with his arms way out at his sides while Sophie makes adjustments to the motocross-looking costume he’s wearing: it’s pearl white with armored plates on the knees, elbows, chest, and back, and a silver snow-flake emblem on the chest—like where Spider-Man has a spider and Batman has a bat. Sophie’s got a row of pins pressed between her lips, but she still manages a grin when she sees me.
“I don’t know if I can compete with that costume,” she says.
“I figured I could be blanket-toga man. You like the look?” I do a model spin, confident that while Jacques might be cooler than me (literally), he can’t rock a ratty blanket like I can.
“I’m impressed,” Sophie says. “But if you want to see the sketches I did for you—you know, just so you can see how inferior they are . . .”
“Bring ’em on.”
She sticks a few more pins in Jacques and dismisses him to get changed, then watches over my shoulder while I flip through her sketchbook.
The amazing Avery costumes range from old-school spandex to Jacques’s motocross-inspired look. I have my choice of logos, too: a badass eagle, a clenched fist, a silhouette of a strongman, and a star. Not every design is to my taste, but they’re all really well done. “Wow,” I say. “You do art, you bull-ride, you teach your Barbie dolls guerrilla warfare. You’re like a Renaissance girl.”
She pokes me in the ribs, but she’s totally smiling. “I do not bull-ride. Want to see mine?”
She flicks through a rack of costumes—all skimpy or with cutouts and mesh panels to take advantage of her power. Some are sparkly figure-skater-style numbers, covered with sequins; others are sleeker and more practical. There’s even a spandex jumpsuit for Darla: purple with orange racing stripes. “So she can fit into her mecha better,” Sophie explains.
“Mecha?”
“Umm . . . it’s like this giant robot Darla built to ride around in. Have you ever seen Gundam? Almost like an armored bodysuit but bigger, because it has a cockpit.”
“Wait—for real? As in, she really built this and it works, it’s not just papier-mâché or something?”
“Supposedly it works. I haven’t seen it do much.” She whips out her measuring tape. “Enough stalling! Drop the toga, blanket man. Time to surrender your measurements.”
“Foiled!” I curse. “The Fleece Gladiator is no more.”
Five minutes later Sophie has all the numbers necessary to start work on my faux-fur-and-vinyl catsuit. (Kidding—we’ll save that one for Catherine.) Back in the main part of the basement, Nicholas and Darla are engrossed in a game of Rainbow Six. Darla keeps yelling, “Go go go!” then grumbling when her character gets blown off the map.
“Darla has the hand-eye coordination of a sloth,” Sophie informs me.
“That’s all you need when you have a shotgun,” Darla says, teeth stabbing into her bottom lip, deep in concentration as her character slinks around the screen. She somehow manages to blast a hole in an enemy who’s nowhere near her. “Yeah! Check out my boomstick!”
Jacques is lounging on one of the couches in the corner, idly surfing the web on his expensive cell phone . . . but of course he flashes a frosty death glare when I show up.
Making an effort to ignore him, I pull a bar stool up to the Ping-Pong table and start messing with Sophie’s battlefield: switching sides so that Master Chief is massacring the cutesy trading figures, and the Disney princesses join forces with Godzilla. The G.I. Joes overturn an alien grunt and use it for cover, biding their time until a clear victor emerges. I figure the more chaos I create, the more likely Sophie is to spend her time chastising me—time that won’t be spent cozying up to Jacques.
Sophie scolds me, right on schedule—but I only get a few minutes of her attention before Nicholas begs me to take Darla’s controller, and Sophie curls up on the couch and starts showing Jacques some pink-haired manga girls she drew.
I concentrate on sniping virtual terrorists so I don’t have to see them whispering together. I’m glad I don’t have super-senses; I seriously don’t want to know what they’re saying. Much more satisfying to invent a conversation for them.
Sophie: You should be nicer to Avery. He’s cute and his power is awesome.
Jacques: You’re right. I’m so ashamed. (weeps)
Okay, even I don’t believe that.
Eight-thirty rolls around and Sophie hustles us out; her parents are supposed to be back at nine and she’s only allowed to have two people over. We trade numbers and IM names and Nicholas and I make plans to hang out sometime. Darla thanks me for coming and says (out of earshot of Sophie, of course) that our next meeting will be better because Jacques will absolutely not be invited—and she tells me I should be excited, because she has awesome plans for us. Sophie promises to retire my blankets to the bad costume hall of fame. And then—and this is the best part—she hugs me good-bye on my way out. Yeah, she hugs everyone else, too—but that’s not the point.
When I fly home through the dark, flying feels more like floating than it ever has. I’m everything in the world, all compacted into one person, vibrant and pulsing and alive. Every thought, every feeling, every wish, every dream.
I can still feel Sophie’s skin, the way she stuck to me for a second when she hugged me. I close my eyes and see Darla’s maniacal smile, the weird joy she got from bringing us together. I hear Nicholas’s laugh, when we were commiserating about how sometimes our powers are more powerful than we are, and how it’s hard to know how to deal with that.
Every single one of us has secrets. Only now we have them together.
Something’s starting here. I can feel it.
· D. CARMINE · FILE #00224 Sophie Miller: ORIGIN STORY
* SECURITY LEVEL: Top Secret
* CATEGORY: Autobiographical Account
NOTE: The following account was written by Sophie Miller approximately six months after her power
manifested, and delivered to Darla Carmine in exchange for two explosive glitter boomerangs and one box of giant-size strawberry Pocky. Let the records show that Sophie demands bribes, unlike Nicholas.—D.C.
Ienvy people whose powers sort of make sense when they first show up. That wasn’t the case with mine at all.
Flashback to the class trip at the end of eighth grade: fifty prep-school girls swarming an amusement park, pairing up by twos in the buddy system, finally free from our hideous uniforms. I could still pass for mostly normal back then—I always had too many toys dangling from my backpack, but I never did anything out-and-out freakish, like brag about getting a Killtacular in Halo. So I guess I made an acceptable replacement for girl number four in our class (on the popularity scale) when she came down with mono and number three needed someone to ride rides with.
And it was like . . . back then I just didn’t say no to people. I thought there was still room for me in that world—or that there could be, if I got serious about “real” fashion instead of sewing my own stuff, and . . . you know. I’m sure there’s a list somewhere.
How was I supposed to know that that was the day I’d become a freak for real, with everyone watching? That I’d be branded as that girl like I was too bizarre for words?
It’s all the fault of the Phantom Loop: a metal roller coaster that spirals upside down twice, for people who get their kicks cheating death—and who have way more faith in engineers than I do. Set me at the edge of a cliff, and I’m fine; I’m not afraid of heights, because I trust myself not to take that extra step. What I don’t trust are machines—kind of funny considering my best friend’s robot obsession, but it’s true. Don’t give me a so-called safety harness and start telling me about physics and expect me to feel secure.
Unless you’re one of the three most popular girls in my ridiculously insulated prep school: then I guess all you have to do is tell me to shut up and stop being a baby, and I’ll do whatever you want. When Liza, Hannah, and Riley want to ride the Phantom Loop, you do it—no matter how sick the thought makes you. What’s a little death risk compared to being an outcast?
We waited in line for over an hour. I was sweating the whole time, trying to be accommodating and friendly and normal so they’d like me, and so maybe I could be the fifth wheel to their foursome, and get invited to sleepovers and to the mall and parties, and eventually I’d catch their popularity like a virus, and I wouldn’t sit in my room wondering why my supersocial parents were always out at parties and functions and I hadn’t inherited any of that grace—because I was usually alone.
It totally didn’t matter that I was bored and zoning out in the presence of the Queen Bee trio, that I wasn’t into the boys they liked or the music they listened to or the celebrity gossip that made their worlds go ’round. They were extending an “it girl” apprenticeship to me like a golden ticket, and I knew I’d be stupid not to take it.
My body had other ideas.
As soon as I sat down and locked the safety harness into place, I was seized by terror: this was it, this was real. It was like someone flipped a switch in my brain. Anticipating the ride had been bad enough; now that I was two seconds away from the slow creep up the hill and the nightmarish plunge doooown, my eyes welled up and I clenched them shut to keep the tears in. No such luck—I was crying all over myself. I dug my nails into the bar so I wouldn’t gouge Riley’s arm when my fear ratcheted up to killer levels.
Terror is hard to explain. Like, for some people, a roller coaster is just a ride, and they’ll never see it as anything else. It scares you a little, but it’s fun to be scared, so it’s a rush. Not for me. We started inching up the hill—click, click, click, click—closer and closer to going over. Riley was trying to calm me down: “Relax! Nothing’s going to happen! Open your eyes!”
My shirt was pushed up in the back a little, and my back and my thighs stuck to the plastic seat, drenched with sweat from the heat and from panic. I was praying under my breath—and then the clicking stopped. For an instant, we were poised on the edge of a precipice. Pure and total silence.
And then my stomach dropped. My heart rose into my throat. I screamed, the rumble and the speed battering my head against the restraints as we tore around the track, flipping upside down in tight, spiraling loops, our screams rising to a crescendo just as, breathless, we pulled into the loading station.
The whole trip took less than a minute. I wiped my eyes, grateful to be done with it. Riley grinned at me. “See, that wasn’t so bad.”
Our safety harnesses unlocked and lifted automatically, and everyone began to disembark. I wanted to be out of there like lightning, racing down the ramp and on my way to the Dodge ’Ems, or the carousel—something I could trust.
But I couldn’t move.
My legs—mostly bare in a pair of shorts that had crept up when I sat down—were stuck to the roller coaster seat. The next group of riders was starting to board, and the couple waiting for my row to empty out stood to one side, eyeing me with annoyance. People were staring. Liza, Hannah, and Riley waited awkwardly at my side. The ride operator made his way toward us.
This was like a felony, in it-girl world. We were too cool to be this kind of spectacle.
“Come on,” Hannah hissed impatiently. “Get out already!”
I gave a weak smile, but panic was setting in. My bottom half literally felt like it had bonded with the roller coaster—like I’d sat in Super Glue and it dried. Shifting even a millimeter was impossible.
My eyes spilled over when I tried to speak. How was I supposed to explain this when I didn’t know what was happening? The ride operator asked me what the holdup was. He had a sympathetic face, so I played the last desperate card I had: crying-girl-with-a-simple-request. I apologized; I told him that I rode the Phantom Loop last summer with my grandpa, and that he wasn’t with us anymore, so I was kind of emotional, and could I ride one more time? Please?
The thought of going through those loops again nauseated me—and the stupidity of the lie made it worse. Liza, Hannah, and Riley made it clear they thought I was a mess—and that they wouldn’t be waiting for me when I got off. Minutes were ticking by and I still wouldn’t budge, so the ride operator finally gave in and I had to go through the whole nightmare again. Terrified, sick, panicked—three more times total before I became so emotionally exhausted that I unstuck. Eight upside-down loops. I stumbled down the ramp and threw up in the flower bushes next to the “You Must Be This Tall to Ride” sign.
After that, I was worse than “not normal.” The Queen Bees spread the word: I was a head case, mental patient, schizo freak. Unfit for it-girl consumption, I withdrew into myself even more. At school the next year, instead of trying to fit into their boxes, I entertained myself drawing hot manga punk boys, princesses with plasma rifles and Gothic Lolita ruffles. At home I honed my first-person-shooter skills, read about parkour, and started practicing stunts (don’t laugh!), using my stickiness (now that I knew what it was) to give me an edge. I sewed my first costume. Met Darla and Nicholas: people who got what I was about, who didn’t expect me to be exactly like them and wouldn’t want that anyway.
I turned into a freak—and it saved my life.
14
I’M BACK ON A SCHEDULE: all work and no play. The video games Cherchette bought me are buried in my closet, untouched.
I do my homework during school hours, typically while the teacher’s busy breaking up a fight. Sit at the back of the class whenever possible so I’m more likely to see a chair coming if someone throws one at my head. Participate in Reality Management just enough to make sure Principal Arnold hears about my progress and feels like he made the right decision.
I brainstorm with Darla during lunch about how we can make an impact; what’s our next move? She promises she has awesome plans for us—like actual missions—and I don’t doubt that she’ll pull us all together, but she needs help figuring out what we might realistically be able to do. How can we help people in our city—not just as
individuals, but as a team—and maybe get in some powers practice at the same time?
I also make a daily attempt to lure Catherine to our table with treats: neon-pink marshmallow rabbits, some overpriced cookies I swiped from my dad. (It doesn’t work. The only day I manage to convince her is when Darla’s absent.)
I spend an hour after school at Roast, drawing patrol routes on a city map in different colored markers, starring points of interest in between pestering Catherine, showing her my plans whenever she has a chance to sit down.
From four-thirty to six-thirty I hit the streets, following a different route each day. I stop by the elementary school, the local park, the soccer field, the mall—almost wishing for a flash flood or a freak volcanic eruption to force my hand, to make me show people what I can do. Instead I find some kids lobbing rocks at ducks in the park, and use the threat of my fist to teach them a lesson about animal cruelty. Their moms aren’t too happy—but I bet the ducks are.
I break up a fight outside a burger place: two girls not quite ready to stop tearing each other’s hair out. I get between them and get a slap to the face for my efforts.
By the time I get home and eat dinner, fend off my parents’ prying questions with a folder full of finished homework, I’m exhausted. I take a shower, watch a movie or sit at the computer for a while, IMing Darla, Sophie, Nicholas—whoever’s on. I scan the police blotter, wondering why I’m never in the right place at the right time. I sleep for an hour or two, wake when the house is silent.
Then I fly. For hours. Soar through the sky until three in the morning, always unwilling to let go, to return to earth and be grounded, heavy, like everyone else.