Before Ernest could kick in his two very essential cents, the front door opened. He froze, glancing around the living room like he was seriously debating hiding behind the couch.
The Commander was home early.
“You might want to get that,” June reminded him, miming at her own face by tapping on her lower lip. He hadn’t realized that he still had traces of secondhand lipstick on his mouth, and she had a feeling that he’d die more than a little bit if his father took notice.
The half of Ernest’s face visible under the mask went pale, then red, then pale again. He vigorously scrubbed at his mouth.
“What’s the good news, kids?”
“We’re having a fashion show,” Maks called back. When June shot him a look for blowing their position, he gave her a helpless shrug.
The Commander popped his head into the living room, then stopped dead in his tracks. He rubbed a hand over his mouth, shook his head, and then laughed. It wasn’t a laughing-at-you kind of laugh, though. He sounded delighted.
“Well, I’ll be. Aren’t you two boys shaping up to be a strapping pair of heroes!”
“Aren’t I just,” Maks grinned, fully accepting the accusation with all one hundred pounds of his strapping and manly self.
When he looked at Ernest, it was like Mr. Wright was incapable of wiping the broad grin off his face. If it were possible to actually burst with pride, he would have been on the verge of it.
“When’d you get so big, kiddo?” Ernest’s dad said, wrapping him in a hug that would have crushed the life out of a less durable son. “Can’t really call you my li’l anything anymore, can I? Good God Almighty, I can hardly even call you my little man.” He pulled back again, still holding onto his upper-arm. “Just look at you.”
“You can still call me that if you want to,” Ernest said, rubbing at his mouth with the back of his gloved hand. Someone was paranoid about lipstick evidence, June noted with a private grin.
“I’m assuming that this is your handiwork Ms. H,” he said, managing to tear himself away from beaming at his son for a few seconds.“But did you do everything yourself?”
“I’m a woman of many talents. It’s a self-generating air of mystery,” June said, hands on her hips. Ah, there was nothing warmer than the glow of richly deserved praise. “Really goes a long way in keeping things fresh.”
“You’ve done some damn fine work here. If you don’t go into the field after graduation, I guarantee that you’re gonna take the costuming world by storm,” the Commander said with a booming laugh. “Count yourself lucky, boys. If a few years’ time, you might get to brag about having owned a Ms. H original.”
“If you can survive the fitting process, it’s totally worth it,” Maks said, doing a few standing jumps and flips to test his suit’s elasticity.
Sometimes, his acrobatics annoyed her an irrational amount. He just made it look so easy. She had to stifle the urge to shove him over when he wasn’t expecting it or something— just to prove that yes, gravity still applied to him. But she’d seen what it was like to deal with a Maks that didn’t act like the human equivalent of a cross between a slinky and a glow-in-the dark crazy straw, and she had not been a fan.
June had a zinger primed and aimed at Maks’ face, but she was interrupted by a piercing ringtone.
Unclipping a communicator from his belt and turning off the signal, the Commander heaved a sigh that even June recognized. It was time for another trip, and he’d barely even stepped in the door.
“Looks like I’ve gotta hit the road. I’m needed up north.” The Commander rested a big hand on Ernest’s shoulder. His eyes were suspiciously shiny-bright. “You look like a million bucks and then some, Champ. It’s times like these that I— god, I— I just wish your mother could see what a fine young man she gave me.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Ernest more croaked than said. “Come back home safe, okay?”
“I’ll do my best, son,” the Commander said, shrugging on his leather jacket and heading out the door. “I always do.”
All three of them stood there for a second after Mr. Wright left. Ernest’s struggle to keep himself held together was unacceptably sad. June’s hand brushed Maks’ arm when she put it around Ernest’s waist. He’d already staked a spot on his other side, so the Champ was getting bookended with awkward-but-well-meaning pats.
“So. Hey,” June said, leaning her head against his shoulder. “You never answered me. Do you like it?”
Ernest just nodded, rubbing at his domino with the heels of both hands. There was a good chance that he was getting swamped by the tears sealed inside his mask.
“Good,” June said, patting his back. “Blubbering mansterics was exactly what I was shooting for.”
ISSUE #7
Ernest had specifically asked June not to confront Ida Mae. He knew how she got when she was angry— or he thought he did, at least— and neither he nor Maks wanted her to get into trouble. Ernest was under the false-but-sweet impression that yelling and swearing was his Beta at her worst.
When June got mad, she got even. It wasn’t something that she was proud of, but Maks needed someone aggressive on his side of the field. Ernest was reactionary. June liked to think of herself as proactive.
She preferred the direct approach, but she’d promised Ernest that she wouldn’t go and pick a fight with Ida Mae. Therefore, June had to make Ida Mae come to her instead. It worked out better that way, anyway, since Ms. Mayhem’s posterpower essentially prevented sneak attacks. It was the only reason such a limited power could get an Alpha rating.
That, and the fact that since it was an unconscious ability, it allowed her to hit any moving target without even thinking about it. She could predict where someone would be and which direction they would move in next, so Ida Mae was not someone to challenge to fisticuffs.
June wasn’t a big fan of physical violence to begin with. She bruised too easily for fighting with fists, so she’d learned to fashion equally devastating shivs out of her words. Emotional annihilation was her game, and she was a major player in that arena. She wasn’t a precog, but she knew a thing or two about predicting a target’s moves, too.
This was not a caper that she could do on her own, so June had to enlist the help of her roommate. Jenny’s moniker, Vault, came from her weirdly gross-but-fascinating ability to create a portal between any surface she could visualize, and her abdomen. Her costume— which June had helped her with, earning herself Good Roommate Brownie Points— was a form-fitting, midriff-baring catsuit. The dark fabric had a faint gold glitter to it, matching the way the black skin of her flat stomach sparked when her powers were active.
Shockingly, Jenny’s skimpy outfit was practical. No matter where Jenny placed the end of her portal, the beginning always manifested over her abdomen. She could reach through the glittering black portal in her stomach and pull through anything she touched on the other side. The pulling-a-rabbit-out-of-her-hat/stomach trick took getting used to, but it was an extremely useful ability in practice.
After June had explained that this little side dish of vengeance was meant to get back at Ida Mae for abandoning Maks like a litter of unwanted puppies, Jenny had been on board. Not unsurprisingly, Ida Mae didn’t have many fans among her peers. With Jenny’s help, June got her hands on something that was surefire Mae bait: a gorgeous antique hair comb. It wasn’t a piece of gold-plated costume jewelry— the comb was old, elegant gilt metal flowers and leaves crusted with tiny baroque seed pearls. It was too intricate and expensive to be easily replaced, too unique to be mistaken as anything but hers.
On the last day before finals, June baited the hook. She piled her hair up in a bun, secured it with the comb, and waited for Mayhem to catch up with her.
It only took two class periods. June was on her way to lunch from AP environmental science when someone grabbed a fistful of her hair from behind and pulled, hard. The pain brought instant tears to June’s eyes. Over the course of the year, she’d picked up a few things from E
rnest. Most of them were nice things— traits that sloughed off what was left of Old June and let the New June shine through— but some of them were practical skills. His right hook, for example, came in handy when another girl was actively trying to pull her hair out, roots and all.
Ida Mae ducked, of course, but she let go and gave her some distance. She’d probably assumed that June wouldn’t be able to put up any kind of physical fight, so the punch she’d thrown made her pause.
“You stole that!” Ida Mae shrieked, pointing at her half-mauled bun. “You took that from me!”
“What? This? Oh, no, I found this.” Twisting her hair back up into a neat knot, she speared it with the comb. Her scalp throbbed in time with her heartbeat. “You have a bad habit of losing track of your nice things. And after you lose track of them, bad things tend to happen to them. So maybe I better just, you know, keep this one. Just until you can prove you can take care of the nice things you have,” June said, giving her a smile that just dared her to try to take it again. “You heinous bitch.”
“What the hell are you— ” Ida Mae’s upper lip curled. She was a little bit quicker on the uptake than her boyfriend. “Oh, I get it. This is about Freakshow, isn’t it?”
“Hey, you might not have picked this up in the year you’ve been his partner, but calling him that is not okay. That’s his family’s heritage. Plus, I don’t think that you fully appreciate the irony of a poster calling anyone else a freak.”
“If you have such a hard-on for him, I’ll trade with you,” she said, tossing her long blonde hair over her shoulder. “I’m sure that the Champ and I have a ton in common. I know that he’s used to carrying around dead weight. A lot of dead weight.”
June put a hand to her cheek, gasping in mock horror.
“Oh my, was that a fat joke? I’ve never heard one of those before.” She snorted. “Look, you’re going to have to do better than that if you want to get under my skin. You can try to shame me all you want, but at the end of the day only one of us is happily enjoying a second brownie.”
“Is that what you tell yourself so you don’t have to think about dying alone, Whalemaster?”
The attempt at cleverness was every bit as painful as the hair-pulling had been.
“Pretty much, yeah,” June agreed gamely. “So, here’s the deal. You don’t even pretend to tolerate Maks. Your charred meathead of a boyfriend trying to pound Maks’ face in on the first day kind of set a tone, y’know? Am I supposed to think that it’s just a coincidence that he got the crap beaten out of him the second we weren’t being monitored on the campus grounds? Because I don’t. I think you were in on it. I think that you assumed that they’d give you a new partner if this one got too broken.”
The blood in Ida Mae’s cheeks spread. As puckered with anger as she was, it made her entire face look like a partially squashed tomato. It wasn’t very flattering.
“It’s not my fault he can’t defend himself.”
June’s smile probably looked like she wanted to rip Ida Mae’s throat out with her teeth. She didn’t see any reason to pretend anything to the contrary.
“The funny thing is, that’s what this whole partnership jazz is all about. You’re supposed to help him. So until you do, I’m keeping this comb. I’m keeping this, and if I see you being an unrepentant ass to your partner, I’m going to wear it. So if you see me rocking your precious great-grandmother’s hair comb, take it as a reminder that you’re not going to get it back until you start treating Maks decently. PS: if you try to steal it, you’ll be saying hello to my fiery little friends.”
Her face was almost purple with rage. Her nostrils flared as she took rapid, hard little breaths.
“You’re just jealous!” Ida Mae said, shrilly. “Do you really think that a cow like you is going to end up in the capstone class? You’re kidding yourself!”
“Oh, Mae. Mae, Mae, Mae,” June said with a breezy sigh. “I wish I could gather up all of my feelings for you and weave them into a sonnet. Something that, like my feelings for you, will continue to stand the test of time. But as much as I would love to take an afternoon to figure out exactly how many things rhyme with go fuck yourself in iambic pentameter, finals are coming up, so I’m booked solid.”
“I hate you,” she spat. “You nosy, fat bitch.”
“And I welcome that hate, because the feeling is wildly mutual. But seriously, though— ”
“Juniper!”
Turning at the sound of a clear, faintly accented woman’s voice calling her name, June felt her stomach kick up into her throat. There was a woman coming up the trail toward them, and there was no mistaking who it was, even at a distance. There was only one hijabi on the Academy staff, and she was the last person that June wanted to catch her administering some social adjustments.
“I was hoping to run into you before you left for vacation,” the Queen said as she approached, inclining her head in a short nod of greeting. “Walk with me, would you? I’d like to speak with you.”
“Sure, Professor,” June said sweetly, mouthing your ass is grass to Ida Mae before she turned to follow her.
She appreciated what a snazzy dresser the Queen was. Amira bint Balqis owned more amazing purple scarves than June had thought existed in the universe. To be honest, her exclusively purple spectrum of scarves had been June’s favorite part of second term forensic psychology. Generally, she liked Amira— she liked her a lot. But she also knew that the degrees on her wall were far from being just for show.
As they turned toward what June usually thought of as the way to the Wrights’ place, she realized that the Queen was taking her to her house. This was not an office visit. This was something else entirely.
There was no need to panic.
“That is a lovely comb in your hair,” said Amira. “Is it new?”
On second thought, panicking could be an appropriate and valid reaction. Until she knew for sure how much she’d either overheard or seen, she had to play her hand carefully.
“Something like that, yeah,” June said, keeping her voice light.
Amira smiled placidly. She opened the door, gesturing for June to go inside.
The Queen’s décor was as classy and understated as she was, June thought. She nodded approvingly at the interior of her home, taking in the airy windows and fine details.
“Please, make yourself comfortable while I put the kettle on,” she said, with a gracious wave toward the living room. “Would you like tea or coffee, Juniper?”
“I’m more of a coffee girl, but I’m up for swapping my beans for leaves in the name of trying new things,” June said, getting comfortable on the cushions next to the low table. “And I prefer June, if you don’t mind.”
“Well, then. Tea it is.” Disappearing further into the kitchen, she called, “Why not Juniper, if I might ask?”
June was a little bit of a snoop by nature. She couldn’t help but investigate— especially when there was a mahogany box with a fancy clasp sitting on the table.
“Because my mom, Marcy, worships at the altar of High Art, she christened me after Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginerva de Benci,” she said, opening the latch and peering into the box. It was a chess set. A Staunton set— and not a knock-off with stained pieces, either. “Which is dumb, because it’s a girl named Juniper in front of a juniper bush. The fact that it’s obscure as hell just compounds the artsy factor, but I like June better. It’s kind of— I don’t know. Kind of inspirational for me.”
“Is that so?”
June plucked the queen out of its green billiard cloth boudoir. It was surprisingly heavy, a solid piece of ebony so dark and highly polished, it was like it sucked in the light around it. Amira certainly had a cultured taste for fine, bold things. The Staunton set had to have set her back a pretty penny.
“There was this rad burlesque queen at the turn of the century named Gypsy Rose Lee. The lady was a renaissance woman, and she knew how to command a crowd. She did vaudeville, striptease, acting, singing, and
dancing. If she wanted to do something, she did it. I mean, she even wrote mystery novels.” June mapped out the smooth contours of the piece with her fingertips. “Before she took her stage name, she went by June Hovick. I always thought that it was cool that my name was close to hers. And the way I look at it, it’s my name. I have to live with it. Shouldn’t it be something that I want to be called?”
There was an A engraved on the bottom of the piece. That didn’t seem like a personalized detail that Amira would have done herself, so she had to assume that the set had been a gift. A special one. June carefully put the queen back to rest with her fellow chessmen.
“I understand, I believe,” the Queen said, carrying in an elegant silver tea service on a tray. “I never took my husband’s name when I married him, nor did I choose to keep my father’s name. My mother used to call me the daughter of Balqis, the Queen of Sheba. It is where I drew the inspiration for my moniker. When I immigrated, I used the opportunity to change my name.”
The Queen, June decided, was a delightful posthuman being. It was a shame that her son had ended up such a hot mess.
“In my experience,” she continued, pouring two cups of tea. “Inspiration is a rare thing. We should draw it from whatever makes us feel strong. We shape our identities, our worlds, through our naming of things. Embrace the words that give you courage.”
“So not to sound ungrateful for the tea and all, but did you have a particular reason for bringing me in?” June asked, trying to force herself to drink the tea. It smelled good, but stressing over whether or not the jig was up was giving her killer heartburn. “Am I in trouble? Because if I’m in trouble, I’d rather you just be direct and tell me so.”
“Well…” The Queen took a bite of her scone, catching the crumbs with a napkin. Swallowing, she brushed off her fingers. “I have noticed some...patterns in your behavior which merit discussion.”
And just like that, June had to take it all back. She could see exactly where Mal got his Mal-ness from.
The Posterchildren: Origins Page 33