by Kay Cordell
“I’m coming.”
“Is everything okay?” Carter asks after she hangs up. He strokes her arm, comfortingly. Without his glasses, his face seems more open, more vulnerable.
A little more awake now, she takes in her nearness to him, the concerned way he watches her, the something else she can’t quite put a finger on.
Falling asleep with Carter isn’t anything new. How many times has Carter crashed in her room? But something is different this time. Hell, everything is different. She’s such an idiot. She jumps to her feet, scans the floor for her shoes. “Thanks for dinner, and for letting me crash, and the bouquet of fruit snacks. You’re a really good friend, Carter. I don’t know if I tell you that often enough. A really, really good friend.”
“Erin—”
“Sorry, I’m rushing out of here.” She tries to sound casual, but from the way he says her name, she knows that she’s going to regret the next words that come from his mouth. She spots her shoes and crams her feet into them, snatches up the fruit snacks and beats a hasty retreat. “I really have to go.”
He takes her hands before she makes it to the door, pulls her back to him. “Wait, let me say this.”
“Or, I could just—”
“Your life is crazy—”
“—go.”
“—whether you’re in a super suit or jeans and a hoodie. I understood that when I asked you out, and I assumed I could handle being in the spotlight, but it was harder than I thought it would be.”
“Exactly!” She practically shouts her agreement, so relieved for an easy out. “Like I said before, you don’t want any of that. I completely understand.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“It was nice of you to do all this for me anyway. I guess. I’m glad we can stay friends after all this.”
She swings the door open. Across the hall, her own door is wide open. Toya, Jos and Nate look up from whatever conversation they’d been having and watch Erin and Carter with undisguised interest.
Carter follows her into the hallway. “Erin!”
“What?”
“Whatever bull I have to put up with out there to be with you, I’ll learn how to deal with it. I think—I know that you’re worth it.”
Behind Erin, Toya squeals.
Carter lowers his voice. “And there’s something I should tell you, something I should’ve told you a long time ago, but I can’t tell you out here.”
Erin glares at Toya and Nate before shutting her door, and nudging Carter back through his own. She only half shuts the door behind them, not wanting to close herself in.
She’d failed to nip this in the bud last night. Failed epically. So they’re having this conversation now, at 2 o’clock in the morning. But Carter doesn’t need an audience for what’s about to happen next, regardless of how humane Erin intends to be about it.
“You’re one of my closest friends here,” Erin says. “I don’t want to complicate things between us.”
“Why does it have to be complicated?”
She narrows her eyes at him in annoyance. “It’s already complicated.”
“Then there’s nothing to lose at this point.”
He’s trying to be cute. She doesn’t laugh.
“Okay,” he says. “What if I promise that if things don’t work out, I’ll still be your friend?” He flashes his two-second smile, still teasing, still not getting it.
“Once things change,” she says, “it’s for good. There’s no unchanging them.”
“I’m not Jos.”
“What does my little sister have to do with this?” Her voice is cold with warning.
He extends a finger to adjust glasses that aren’t there, rubs a hand over his hair instead. “Never mind. Maybe you’re right. Maybe now that I’ve told you how I feel, I can’t go back to the way things were. Maybe I can’t go back to pretending I don’t want to be more than friends. Especially not when I know you feel the same way, but you’re afraid of some what-ifs that might never happen.”
“Don’t tell me how I feel. And what do you mean you can’t go back to the way things were?”
“I don’t know. I just—”
“Are you saying if I don’t want to date you then we can’t be friends? That’s it? Either or?”
Their voices are rising. Like each is trying to out shout the other, and de-escalation doesn’t seem to be an option. Gravity has gotten a hold of this giant snowball and there’s no stopping it from rolling down the world’s steepest hill. And straight over the cliff at the bottom.
“No. Of course not!”
“That’s what it sounded like to me!”
“Because you’re putting words in my mouth!”
“They’re your words, Carter! They came out of your mouth!”
“Fine! Maybe that’s what I mean! Because a part of me thinks you’ve always known how I felt about you. And it isn’t fair to me. You know that all you have to do is bat your lashes and give me that flirty smile of yours and I’ll bend over backwards to give you whatever you want.”
“So I’m supposed to apologize that you can’t man up and say ‘no’ when a friend asks you for something?”
“Nah, but you can admit that you’re fine with a guy being in love with you as long as you don’t have to give anything back.”
In the brief silence that follows, the hardness of Carter’s expression chips away into regret.
“Erin—”
She throws the stupid plastic bouquet at his feet.
“Wait, Erin. I didn’t—”
“Screw you, Carter.”
With her mind, she tears open the door open and slams it closed with the full force of her psychic power, paying no heed to Toya, Nate and Jos scrambling to get out of her way, shame and guilt written across their faces. She blows open her own door and bangs it closed just as hard.
She stands in the center of her room shaking, unsure what to do other than call Carter the worst names she can think up. After a few seconds, she swings her door open again.
“Jos! Get in here!”
Her little sister scurries inside.
“Are you okay?” Toya peers in from the doorway.
Erin shuts the door in her face. She can sleep in her own room for once. Or in Nate and Carter’s room, or in the common room with Common Room Camille for all Erin cares. Screw them all.
11
“Are you okay?” Chin tucked, Jos peeks up at Erin through the long bangs of her blue wig, all doe-eyed innocence.
“Me? What are you doing here? Does Mom even know?”
Jos flinches and Erin checks her tone, reminds herself that Jos isn’t who she’s mad at.
The light hits the tiny, luminescent flecks scattered across what little of Jos’ stone-like black skin she allows to show. Beneath all those layers of black clothes, she’s a statue carved from a piece of the night sky.
Erin grabs the cordless phone from the shelf on her desk and dials the number for home. Exhaling a slow breath to calm herself, she asks Jos in a kinder tone, “What happened?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to get away for a little while.”
“At two o’clock in the morning?”
“Amber snuck out to see Marcus Reed.”
“Of course she did.”
Mrs. Everett picks up on the fourth ring, not sounding at all happy about it. She’d been sleeping and had no idea that her two youngest had absconded into the night.
Amber almost gets away with it. Mrs. Everett is checking that Jos’ bed is in fact empty—because of course she can’t just take Erin’s word for it—when she hears scuffling from Amber’s room and catches Amber with one foot in her room and her other out the window.
Erin waits for her mom to pause in yelling at Amber long enough to remember she’s holding the phone.
“We’re on our way,” Mrs. Everett says into her phone. “Where are the keys, Tony? Put your jacket back on, Amber
“It’s late, Mom,” Erin says. “You don�
��t have to drive out here tonight. I’ll bring her home tomorrow. Or I guess later today, technically. I just wanted you to know she’s here and she’s safe.”
“Narc!” Amber shouts in the background.
“Tell Amber I love her too.”
After Jos suffers an earful from Mrs. Everett, with a promise that it’s just the beginning, they hang up and it’s just Erin and her baby sister.
Jos sits on the very edge of Erin’s bed, eyes glued to the round, multicolored rug in the center of the room. Erin sits opposite her, on the bed Toya claims.
“You wanna tell me what happened?”
“Why did anything have to happen?”
Erin crosses her arms and pins her little sister with a stare and silence. Jos meets her eyes for only a fleeting second before looking away again.
“Seriously,” Erin says, “how are you?”
“I’m fine.”
Fine. Jos is always fine, fine, fine.
“And school?”
“It’s whatever. Mrs. Strickland and Vice-Principle Davis are still trying to kick me and Amber out now. Can’t really blame them. Who wants somebody like us going to school with their kids?”
“You have as much a right to be there as anyone else.”
Jos picks at the frayed edges of her sweatshirt’s cuff. “That’s what Mom keeps saying. She’s fighting it. Found this lawyer who keeps talking about our right to a public education and all that. But it wouldn’t be the worst thing if we had to be homeschooled.”
“Why? Are the other kids picking on you?”
“Not really.”
“Then what is it? Why don’t you want to go to school?”
“Uh. Cause it’s school?”
There’s more to it. Obviously. Jos wouldn’t be here if everything was “fine.” The thought of the student body of Dwayne Morris High School teasing her baby sister makes Erin want to fly straight to Englewood, NJ and punch every one of those pimply, hormone monsters in the face.
“You know you’re beautiful, right?”
“Sure, it’s just a different kind of beautiful. Right?”
“Jos—”
“Who’s that guy you were arguing with?”
Hopping off the bed, Erin crosses to her dresser, snatches the top drawer open. “He’s nobody.”
“He really likes you.”
“That doesn’t make what he said okay.” Erin tosses an oversized t-shirt and pajama bottoms onto the bed beside Jos.
“Is any of it true?”
“Of course not.”
“Why’d he mention me?”
“Because he’s an idiot,” Erin says, yanking her sweatshirt off.
“Your friend Nate said you guys deserve each other, you just don’t know it yet.”
“Nate is also an idiot.”
Erin replaces her fitted T and jeans with her most raggedy, hole-ridden pajamas, the ones she wears when all she wants to do for the next 24-hours is lie in bed watching A Different World re-runs.
Jos pulls the offered pajamas into her lap, absently wrings the fabric.
“If I were different,” she says, “I mean, if I weren’t this thing, would you give that guy a chance?”
“Why would you say that?”
Jos shrugs.
Erin waits.
“It’s just,” Jos says, “sometimes it seems like you’re holding your breath, waiting for something that’s never going to happen. And sometimes I wonder if you’re waiting on me to…I don’t know. Be normal again.”
Erin’s denial, her reflexive cry of “That’s not true” or “I don’t care about normal or not normal” dies on her tongue. She presses her back against the dresser, thoughtful.
Is that what she’s been doing? Is that why Jos no longer confides in her? Why their relationship changed so much after they got their powers?
“Phenom?” The familiar electronic voice comes muffled from the comm device around her neck.
Erin grabs comm to activate the outgoing audio. “Wassup, Tech?”
He doesn’t respond. Erin straightens. Is he in trouble? Calling for help? How is she supposed to find him?
“Talk to me, TechStorm. Are you okay? Where are you?”
“I’m fine,” he says. “I have eyes on Mr. Mytholic. I wouldn’t have bothered you. This late, I mean. But—”
“I don’t mind. I’m up. He’s at Thirty-Fourth & Ninth?”
“The same alley where he was spotted before. And he’s got a couple of friends with him this time. I recognize one of them. He calls himself The Extractor. He’s able to draw events from the past into the present, as long as he’s near an object or location connected to that event.”
“The same guy who was able to make those explosions go off around the city because they were old bombing sites?” Erin has already pulled her purple, white, and black super suit from the closet.
“That would be the one,” TechStorm says. “I don’t know who the woman is, but it looks like she’s itching for a fight.”
“What are they doing?”
Ripping off her pajamas, Erin changes. A gift from the League, the suit is made from protective materials and fits her like a glove, covering her from her neck to her wrists and ankles.
“The Extractor has pulled some piece of the past from the alley, but he hasn’t made them physical. They’re hard to see. Shadowy. One of the past shadow figure things is Mr. Mytholic. I recognize his profile. The Mr. Mytholic shadow is in some kind of a fight, but he’s outnumbered. He’s falling, and now he’s running off.”
“Mr. Mytholic, the real one, he’s just watching?” Erin asks, lacing up her boots.
“They all are. The past shadow things are speeding up now. Like The Extractor is fast forwarding through it. Okay, it’s back to regular speed. There’s a new shadow figure. It’s picking something off the ground, and now it’s going into that photography store through the alley entrance. An employee, maybe?
“Wait. The woman with the real Mr. Mytholic and The Extractor must be a super too. She just did something to the doorknob. They’re following the shadow inside.”
“Messing around on the New Am U campus and now breaking into a photography store?” Erin says. “What is he up to?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Well, let’s ask him. I’m on my way.” Erin pulls on her gloves and then pushes open her window, turns back to Jos. “I won’t be long.”
“I’m going with you.”
Erin hesitates a few seconds, that overprotective, big sister instinct is still strong within her, regardless of Jos’ indestructible status. “Let’s go.”
12
Erin soars over the buildings of the Upper West side, racing toward Midtown, towing Jos along with her.
Jos, for the record, is being amazingly trusting about this arrangement. And why wouldn’t she be? Erin has only ever dropped her that one time. Okay, twice. But that second time didn’t count. They were barely six feet off the ground.
“What are you looking for?” Jos asks, squinting into the night, following Erin’s wondering gaze.
“Nothing.”
She’d just been expecting TechStorm to meet up with her by now. He’d usually catches up with her pretty quickly, wherever she is.
“They’re coming out of the photography store,” TechStorm says through the comm. “Doesn’t look like they took anything. Still following the shadow. It’s leading them up the street, toward 8th Street.”
And then silence. Like earlier.
“Shouldn’t you be resting if you’re coming down with something?” Erin asks after a while, recalling their previous conversation.
“I’d prefer to keep busy,” he says, flatly.
“I know the feeling actually.”
“They’re splitting up. The Extractor’s following the shadow into Penn Station. Mr. Mytholic and the woman are heading back toward Ninth.”
“Stick with Mr. Mytholic.”
“I didn’t leave only one Bot in the
area. I can tail them both.” Did she detect hostility in his tone? Just a little?
“Right,” Erin says, lamely and listens to the rest of his play by play without adding her commentary.
“The Extractor is waiting on the platform…Mr. Mytholic and the woman are getting into his car. It’s a beat up looking, turquoise Ford Aspire. They’re waiting for something…The Extractor is following the shadow onto the platform. He’s getting on the one train…And now Mr. Mytholic and the woman are heading north up Tenth.”
“Talk about timing,” Erin says, diving toward the ground. “I see them and I got this. Putting you down Jocelyn.”
The street is nearly empty of traffic, the sidewalks quiet compared to the horde of pedestrians that would be roaming the area during the day. But that’s not to say it’s dead. It’s Friday night, or early Saturday if you want to be technical about it, and sprinkled here and there are the establishments catering to the committed partiers and insomniacs.
On the next block, a small crowd loiters around the dingy exterior of a club spilling thumping music onto the street every time the door opens. Groping couples and boisterous groups of friends teeter drunkenly toward the few 24-hours restaurants dotting the area.
Erin drops to the street, directly in the path of Mr. Mytholic’s sad little jalopy.
“I got your back,” TechStorm says, his techform fading in from stealth mode at her side. He nods a greeting toward Jos, whom Erin has deposited on sidewalk. “Hey, Oddity.”
Erin grimaces, even though he’s only calling Jos by the hero name she’d given herself. An unfortunate choice no one in the family had been able to talk her out of.
Bracing herself, Erin reaches out with her mind and grabs hold of the Ford Aspire.
The car doesn’t come to an immediate stop. Its momentum pushes her back but only a few feet before they’re both at a standstill. She hefts the entire car into the air and herself with it.
“Hey there, Mr. M and friend,” Erin says, hovering beside the driver’s side window. TechStorm peers in through the passenger side window. Whatever bickering the two villains had been in the middle of comes to an abrupt halt. “What you up to tonight?”