Again, things that she’d known the shape of, though not the details. Everyone knew that the original Little Bird had fallen to the dark side of the job, but Zip had never thought to ask why he had turned into a vigilante. The way the story was usually told, Marshal Underwood had turned into a vigilante due to the ol’ apple not falling too far from the tree. They talked like he would have gone over the line sooner or later.
They said the same thing about Mal. Sooner or later, he’d crack. The way the gossip went, Kinglet had an expiration date. He’d go bad, just like every other man in his family.
“Why’d she bring it up in class, d’you think?”
“Because it was a lesson,” Mal said shortly.
“One worth teaching, I’d figure.”
“One that Mother utterly failed to learn herself.”
The viciousness in his tone startled her so bad, Zip dropped the fry she’d been nibbling on. She plucked it up off the floor, blowing on it before popping it into her mouth. It’d been less than ten seconds, and Mal kept his room very clean.
“That doesn’t seem fair,” she said, reaching for more fries. He wasn’t eating his. He wasn’t eating much of anything. That just made her nervous, which made her hungrier.
“According to my mother, Father never recovered. I wouldn’t know, as I have no point of reference. I was born a year after, so the broken remnants were my inheritance. Yes, my father all but wrote the sidekick training book himself, but he was no longer a teacher by the time it was my turn to learn from him. He was so far gone, so unbalanced, Mother purposefully kept me from him for most of my life. If she had learned from losing my brother, she would have had the good sense not to have me.”
Translated from his convoluted Mal-speak, it sounded like he was saying that he wished he hadn’t been born. She could barely fathom unhappiness that went that deep, but there was no denying it. She’d watched him cut himself without any reaction, but that confession had hurt him more than four inches of steel slicing him up.
“Look at it this way,” Zip said, scooting closer to him and packing her voice full of sunshine and half-full glasses. “If you didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have a partner. So you might not be glad that your mom took a chance with you, but I am.”
“You would still have been assigned a partner,” Mal said, flatly.
“Sure I would. A sixty-seven,” Zip said, leaning into him. He didn’t squirm away, so she slung an arm around his shoulders. “But lucky for me, your folks had you, and there’s not a number around sticky enough to stick to you.”
“Numbers aren’t...” Mal gave his biggest Zipporah, please sigh of the night. “...I understand what you’re trying to say. I believe.”
“Good,” she said, crumpling her used napkin. “’Cause I didn’t want to come out and drop the f-bomb on you, but I was prepared to do it if you didn’t get the picture sooner or later.”
“F-bomb?” He asked, faintly befuddled.
She threw her balled-up napkin at him. He didn’t blink when it bounced off his nose.
“Friend, boss,” Zip said, heaving her best Mal, please sigh.
And then, he smiled back at her. Not a sneer, not a smirk, but a honest-to-goodness smile. Mal looked like a completely different person when he smiled. She’d have to make a point of dragging those out of him more often, she decided.
°
June’s relocation to the Wright family home for the evening was a purely practical choice. She needed to get sewing done, and her room didn’t have nearly enough room for her to work. The little yellow house that Ernest and his dad shared was big for two people— even two men as big as the Wrights were. June had plenty of elbow room, so she could really spread out the hurricane of her creative process. Ernest barricaded off a corner of the living room table for his text books, then let June have the run of every other flat surface. It had everything to do with her sewing homework and nothing to do with the fact that she didn’t feel like being alone in her room after strategy class.
June was of the opinion that anxiety was like a kid that acted out for attention. If she didn’t acknowledge its existence or encourage it, it’d give up and go away eventually. She was way too busy to mope about the stupid hypothetical questions that Queen Fancypants had thrown at her in class. She wasn’t sold on marriage as an institution, and she had solid evidence that if she spawned, her children would end up minor dictators. Instead of dwelling on the nasty legal side of being a two-legged flamethrower with a great shoe collection, June wrestled with fabric and patterns.
For her end-of-the-year project, she had to fully design two costumes from the ground up. This was no small undertaking. She’d planned on making two costumes for herself, but her peer design reviews were making her itch to rip everything up and maybe burn a small forest down in order to vent her frustration. The reviews had been positive across the board, but the comments were full of tiny poisoned barbs. Her favorite had come straight from the teacher.
Remember: you will probably go through several variations before you finalize your designs. You can save fabric by scaling the pattern down for a friend!
She’d had it up to her eyeballs with hypothetical scenarios and helpful comments. It’d been a long, emotionally trying day, and June was very done.
“That’s it!” June groused, loudly. She threw her pencil. “I quit. I quit, I quit, I quit. This is me, quitting.”
Ernest poked his head in from the kitchen. He’d spent all of fifteen minutes concentrating on his homework before announcing that they could use a snack. There were perks to having him around, and most of those perks translated into tasty baked goods.
“Huh?”
Flinging her pencil wasn’t enough. She was still destructively mad. June ripped out pages of her notebook, crumpling up each one individually before setting it on fire.
“Not even an 80s montage could save this project.”
Ernest blinked, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “A who and what now?”
And that, right there, was why she kept him around.
“You haven’t been watching any of the movies on the list I gave you, have you?”
“I’ll get around to it,” Ernest said, dusting his floury hands off on his apron. “How ‘bout you explain what it is you’re quitting instead of sassing me about Rocky’s Breakfast Club again?”
Barring homeworkpocalypses, they spent their Saturday nights watching movies. Maillardet’s culture heavily emphasized the practical knowledge that they had to absorb, so the kids that had been there since they were in diapers didn’t have very much exposure to media. They had the internet and could check out movies from the general store’s collection, but most of them spent their time other ways. Ernest hadn’t known what he’d been missing out on before June came into his life. She was feeding him spoonfuls of the pop culture soup he’d be thrown into as soon as he ventured out into the real world, but it was a slow and arduous process. He was easily overwhelmed, so June had to pace him.
“This project,” June clarified, waving her slightly-singed sketchbook. “I’m done with the ladywear.”
“But what you had drawn up looked so good,” he said, confused. “Was it too hard to sew?”
“Technical difficulty is not my problem. I’m just getting sick of being told that I should make my outfits more economical.”
“Economical?”
It was dumb. Just dumb. So, so dumb. If the Queen of Psychology hadn’t messed with her head, the dumbness wouldn’t have gotten to her so much. She was positive of that.
“Smaller,” June said tightly, glaring at her sewing machine. She was afraid that the blurriness in her vision would turn into tears if she let herself blink, so she didn’t.
“Oh,” Ernest said, his voice soft. “Oh, June, you— “
“No. This is not a thing that we’re going to talk about,” June said, because she wasn’t feeling emotionally stable enough to discuss how her classes had made her feel that day. The last thing
that she needed was to get weepy in front of Champ the Carebear. He’d never let her live it down. “Look. Do you have a costume? Or is your only Champ outfit that spandex number from your chubby phase, which we also don’t talk about?”
Watching him flush and flap his hands made her feel a tiny bit better. She kind of loved how pink his ears got whenever she pushed his shy buttons.
“I’m not actively patrolling with Dad right now, so I don’t need a uniform,” Ernest said, his ears deepening from pink to scarlet. “But, um. My old tights might still fit me. I’d have to see.”
“Tights?” June repeated, utterly scandalized. “Oh, honey. No. Once you hit six feet tall, you graduate into big boy pants.”
If he didn’t know that, he needed help. Helping him meant distracting herself, and June was all for that.
“I’m making you my project. Apron off, Big Hunk. I need to measure you.”
Ernest bunched his hands in the hem of his baggy cardigan. “Are you sure?”
“You heard me. I’m way done with ladyherowear. It’s time for me to switch up to manpants before I stab myself with my seam ripper.”
“If you’re worried about, uh, saving money on fabric, I’m not— y’know. Smaller.” He pushed his glasses up his nose again, quickly adding, “I mean, I’d be honored to wear something you make, but— ”
“It’s different,” she assured him. Maybe they’d been the same kind of big before puberty had bricked him over the head, but now he was the socially acceptable definition of big. “And don’t wax poetic about honor too soon. Designing dudeherowear is all new ground for me. You’re my guinea pig, so I make no promises.”
Ernest smiled. “I’m sure it can’t be worse than putting a chubby kid in spandex and tights.”
“Cut the cute and strip.”
Underneath his cardigan, he had a white t-shirt and an unfair amount of muscle definition. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but his figure— and his bewildering modesty— always surprised her. He hid it under big grandpa sweaters, but he had the body of a strapping young superhero.
June opened up a fresh page in her notebook, fishing her measuring tape and a pencil out of her sewing kit. She slid the tape around his upper-arm, looked at the number incredulously, and tried it again.
“Wow. Okay. So I got that right the first time,” she sighed, shaking her head. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re well on your way to ridiculously ripped?”
“You’ve mentioned it a time or two, I think.”
“It bears repeating. Maybe someday, I’ll get you into clothes that actually fit you.”
“My clothes fit me fine,” Ernest said, firmly. In the four months that she’d known him, she’d only found a few things that Ernest disliked, and only one thing that he disliked to the point of hatred. He didn’t like rap music, he didn’t like swear words, he didn’t like clothes that were anything less than one to two sizes too big for him. What little hatred that he had in his heart was reserved for broccoli, and only because he was highly allergic to the green stuff. His aversion to broccoli kept the Venn Diagram of Things My 87 Year Old Grandfather Hates and Things My 15 Year Old Alpha Hates from being a perfect circle.
The fashion issue wasn’t worth fighting him on. June knew that she’d break him eventually.
“Do you mind if I practice my speech for acting class?” Ernest asked as she worked. “Madame Ghostlight found out that Mr. Carter made us write up our origin stories, so she’s having us memorize the whole thing and say it in front of the class. I’ve got it mostly memorized, but I think it, uh— it wouldn’t hurt to get in some practice that isn’t in front of the bathroom mirror.”
“Sure,” June said, jotting down his hip measurement before moving on to the next. “I’m all ears.”
“Okay, so. My name is Ernest West Wright, aka the Champ. I’m— ”
“Hold up,” she interrupted, poking his arm with the eraser-end of her pencil. “Your full name is Ernest West Wright? Your initials are E.W.W.?”
“West was supposed to be my first name, since Dad loves old spaghetti Westerns so much, but Mom was so worn out by the time they got me out of her, she flipped it around on my birth certificate,” he explained, rubbing the back of his neck. “Dad didn’t have the heart to switch it back.”
Ouch. She hated to think how drugged you had to be to get your own kid’s name wrong.
“That poor, poor woman.”
Ernest cleared his throat. He continued his speech, talking quickly and mechanically. He’d put the words to memory, but his presentation was about as lively as a fish that’d gone belly-up.
“I’m fifteen years old, and I have had a public hero’s permit since I was eleven years old. My birthday is April twenty-fifth. My father is John Wright, and my mother was Gloria Wright.”
June had a sudden flashback to her elementary school days. At every nice, new school she’d tried to fit into, she had to introduce herself in front of the class and reluctantly assume the title of The New Girl. When she’d worried about making good impressions, her self-summary had sounded like Ernest’s— a bare-bones collection of facts that were impossible to cast an opinion on. Offering more than the essentials invited criticism. He was playing it safe.
“My— ” Looking down at her, he frowned. “Why are you smiling? It’s not s’posed to be funny. What’d I say wrong?”
It was a wry smile, unselfconscious. She hadn’t realized that she’d been smirking at him.
“Is the whole thing like this?”
“I don’t know if I get what you mean,” he said, clearly puzzled.
“What grade did you get on this paper?”
“Uh, an eighty-nine out of one hundred.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“No?” He asked, sounding alarmed and quizzical in equal parts.
“Huh. You must turn it around after that first bit, because so far, you’ve delivered the worst opening paragraph in the history of posthumanity.”
He hung his head. “Is it really that bad?”
“A little bit,” she said, patting his shoulder. “But I’ll bet that as soon as you switch over to talking about the things you believe in, like heroing and crap, your essay morphs into an inspirational speech. The kind of speech where people want to give you a standing ovation at the end, and maybe follow you to the ends of the earth while they’re at it.”
Ernest avoided her eyes. His sad slouch was making it difficult to get an accurate read. June dragged a chair over and stood on it. It was the only way that she could get his collar measurement.
“Hey, we went over your origin in class, remember? And you made me believe in this heroing thing,” June said, tipping his chin up with her free hand. He straightened, but he still looked at everything but her. “You will never fully understand what a big accomplishment that is. But when you attempt to talk about yourself, you...”
Was there a nice way of saying that he sounded like a timid kindergartener when he tried to talk about himself? June took his shoulder-to-shoulder measurement while she tried to think of a way to soften the analogy.
“I don’t like talking about me,” Ernest admitted, finishing the thought for her.
“Why not?”
“Everyone already knows who I am. I’d hate to sound like I’m bragging.”
Before him, she hadn’t believed that it was possible to be too nice to function. Now, June was a believer. He was so nice, he didn’t grasp how nice he actually was.
“If there’s anyone I know that has a right to brag a little, it’s you.”
“That’s just it!” Ernest burst out, exasperated. When he got loud, he got loud. June narrowly avoided falling off of her chair. She had to grab his shoulder to keep her balance. “I don’t have any right to brag! I’m not my dad. He’s— he’s the Commander, y’know? I’m not him. I dunno if I’ll ever be like him.”
He’d worked himself up. He was legitimately upset, and June suddenly wished that she was better at being com
forting. She didn’t have a lot of time logged as a shoulder to cry upon. She could cut an egomaniac down to size in twenty words or less, but when someone needed soothed, she didn’t know where to start.
“So? You’re only fifteen.” He was blinking rapidly, and she was nowhere near equipped to handle him if he started crying on her. She had a feeling it’d get messy. “Do you want to know the best thing about being a minor? Kids are supposed to suck. When you’re a kid, nobody expects you to get anything right on your first try. You’re allowed to screw up once in a while.” She rubbed his back awkwardly. “Yes, Ernie. Even you.”
“It doesn’t work like that. When I screw up, there’s a good chance that someone’ll end up hurt. Or dead, even. So I can’t blow off my responsibilities. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I made a mistake that cost someone their loved ones. I just...I don’t know if I could handle it. I’d have to handle it, but just the thought scares me.” The confession had bubbled up out of nowhere, words rapid with guilt. He only stopped talking when he had to take a breath. He seamlessly switched over to his default— apology mode. “I’m sorry. You were trying to cheer me up. I can be kind of a Debbie Downer sometimes, huh?”
Ernest didn’t get to postpone his responsibilities until the distant future, when he woke up one day as a card-carrying adult. June was starting to get the feeling that a person had to cash in any childhood they might have had, or would have in the future, in order to become a sidekick. She wondered if Ernest had ever used the But I’m Just A Kid defense. Had there been a time in his life when it’d even been applicable? Did the children of public heroes ever get to be ‘just’ kids?
The Posterchildren: Origins Page 20