Heroine's Journey

by Sarah Kuhn

  “Oh, no!” Leah said, her face twisting in regret. “That was a wrong thing to say, I can tell. No need to explain why it was a wrong thing to say—let’s save that for later in our friendship.”

  “How do you know we’re going to have a friendship?”

  “I can just tell.” She held her fingertips to her temple and narrowed her eyes. “I think we have some kind of Hapa telepathic connection going on. No words need to be spoken, we just understand each other instinctively.”

  “Ah, the understanding that comes from being asked ‘what are you?’ by supposedly well-meaning people across the board,” I said, cocking an eyebrow.

  “Indeed.” She held up her sketchbook, so I could see what she was drawing. “I’m trying to create this fierce Blasian mermaid heroine—Black and Korean, like me. I figure when people give me the ‘what are you?’ spiel, I can hand this to them and it’ll explain everything.”

  “She’s incredible,” I said, marveling at the bold lines, the mermaid’s arresting stare. “You’re an amazing artist. Do you think you could give her a Japanese-Irish mermaid friend to hang out with?” I gestured to myself.

  “But of course,” she said, laughing.

  “Did you do the window display, too?” I asked.

  “I did!” she said, grinning proudly. “And let me tell you, getting those cotton ball marshmallows just right was a bear.”

  We’d ended up talking for three hours, and she’d sold me the window copy of the dragon-shifter lady book. The next day, Leah had recommended me for a job at the store—which I’d enthusiastically accepted. It had seemed like a good way to have my own thing, away from Team Tanaka/Jupiter, while I prepared for my eventual superheroing career—particularly since Evie and I were at such odds. Soon, I was picking up more and more hours at the store and spending way less time at home. I quit doing all the grunt work and assistant-type tasks I’d been assigned at Jupiter/Tanaka, Inc. I even stopped helping Nate with all his demonology research stuff. I’d always truly enjoyed that part of it, but I felt like I had to draw a firm boundary with Evie and Co.—if they were ever going to see me as anything but a convenient add-on to the team, if I was ever going to forge a superhero identity that was mine and mine alone.

  This meant Leah and I spent every waking hour together, and that meant I was constantly impressed by her huge, open heart, by the way she put so much love into the world without knowing if she was going to get it back.

  I really wanted her to get it back. That’s why I was so determined to find her a love match. And since I’d accomplished another one of my ultimate goals in getting promoted to superhero . . . maybe I could make it two for two?

  I glanced at the cute girl in Paranormal Romance again and focused, concentrating on a feeling of desire. Desire to approach this front counter. Openness to conversation. To making a new friend. A really cute new friend with wild curly hair and a gigantic heart. Then I sent it spinning in the girl’s direction.

  I set it at a gentle pulse—firm, but not too over the top. The girl looked up from the book she was perusing and cocked her head to the side, like she’d just heard a particularly interesting song. I kept the pulse going.

  Come on, come on . . .

  The girl turned and started walking toward us and I did a tiny internal fist-pump.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling brightly as she strolled up to the counter. “My name is Reshma and I, uh . . .”

  Leah looked up from her sketch. Pancake raised his head and regarded Reshma suspiciously. Ugh, don’t fuck up my matchmaking, Pancake.

  “You want to buy that?” Leah said, gesturing to the book in Reshma’s hand.

  Reshma glanced at the book and her brow crinkled, like she’d forgotten she was holding it.

  “Uh, yes?” she said.

  “You sure about that?” Leah said, chuckling and holding out her hand for the book. Reshma passed it to her, still looking vaguely confused. “Ah,” Leah continued. “This is a good one: it has man-eating fairies. So. Much. Blood.”

  “That sounds cool,” Reshma said, perking up again.

  “Tell you what, if you don’t like it, bring it back and exchange it for something else,” Leah said, ringing her up. “My customer satisfaction guarantee is that you will whole-heartedly love whatever book you choose to spend money on here.”

  “Wow, thanks!” Reshma said. Her expression was still somewhere between bright smile and confusion. She gave Leah a final nod as she took the book and headed out.

  “She was cute,” I said, examining my nails.

  “Bebe.” Leah shook her head at me in exasperation. “Stop trying to set me up.”

  “What!” I tried for an indignant face. “I would never—”

  “You do,” she said, laughing. “Every freaking week. You compel some poor guy or girl to come up to the register and they have no idea why they’re here.”

  “I just want you to have the fabulous romance you deserve,” I said. “A romance worthy of all the tomes you love in this bookstore. Something to make our favorite dragon-shifter lady proud.” Pancake sniffed in agreement.

  “I want to get with someone who likes me for me, no mental manipulation required,” Leah said, arching an eyebrow.

  “They would like you for you,” I protested. “All I’m doing is encouraging them to come up to the counter and be, like, open to friendship. I can’t make them like you if they’re truly not into it. And even if I could do that, I wouldn’t. Because, gross. Also totally against my code. But anyone who’s around you for more than two seconds should like you. ’Cause you’re awesome.”

  She tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress a smile. “Why don’t you focus on your own love life?”

  “I don’t have one,” I said. “Unless you count ‘string of fun, sexy encounters with people who can never hold my interest for more than two seconds as a love life.”

  “Everyone’s on their own journey,” she said, shaking her head at me. “As long as that’s what you want, I’m totally for it. We all deserve our dragon-shifter lady happy ending.”

  I grinned at her. I liked to think I was already living my dragon-shifter lady happy ending, at least when it came to romance. I had been so shut down and grieving in my teen years, I’d never opened up to any kind of hormonal adolescent explorations. There simply hadn’t been room for it in my landscape of pure pain. But once I’d started the gig at It’s Lit, I’d suddenly found myself meeting so many attractive people, and most of them wanted to talk to me about books, which made them even more attractive.

  There’d been Noah, who was soft-spoken and academic and engaged in intense conversations with me about the mechanics of wereporcupine shifter mating rituals. I’d lost my virginity to him in the bookstore’s cramped stockroom on a deliciously sleepy summer afternoon full of hazy sunlight and meandering conversations about all the ways certain kinds of fantastical creatures could be truly stimulated. (After a while, though, it seemed to be all he wanted to talk about, and I had interests beyond yeti erogenous zones.)

  Then there was Jasmin, who was athletic and constantly caffeinated and had a thing for a long-running series of doorstopper novels about ancient covens of witches bending space and time. She always wanted to go on big, outdoorsy adventures—which were fun, but kind of same-y after a while. After her came Preeti, a cute-as-a-button stand-up comedian who liked to party and hated sleep—and who I ultimately had to stop seeing because I love sleep. And then Cade, a ridiculously hot dude model for romance novel covers, who was the strong, silent type—and ended up being a little too silent for my liking.

  And the list went on. I always loved the initial stages of dating and hooking up: the thrill of discovery, the excitement of that little magnet pull of attraction, the delight in figuring out what kind of pleasure you most enjoyed giving each other.

  But after that first fizz wore off, I always found myself bo
red and wishing I was hanging out with Sam and Leah instead of trying to entertain this person I didn’t actually know super well. As I’d bragged to Sam, I had a flawless record of drama-free breakups, though, which meant all of my exes still patronized It’s Lit—no muss, no fuss.

  I’d like to think my favorite dragon-shifter lady would be proud of my ability to have so much pure, no-strings-attached fun.

  “Let’s get back to your cape,” Leah said, turning to her sketches.

  “Are you guys out of scones or what?” Sam strolled up to the register, coffee cup in hand.

  “Where did you come from?” I said. “And did you serve that to yourself? Have you declared the café area a total free-for-all, customers-do-whatever-they-want zone at this point?”

  “I came in the café entrance. And there’s no one actually working in the cafe,” he said, shooting me and Leah a pointed look. “So I had to take matters into my own hands.”

  “We’re doing important stuff over here, Sammy,” Leah said, her tongue poking out between her lips as she focused extra hard on her drawing. “Bebe’s been promoted to full superhero—”

  “Pending a trial period,” I interjected.

  “—and we need to make sure she’s ready and raring to go,” Leah said.

  “Wow,” Sam said, cocking his head to the side, surprise overtaking his face. “So that’s what that picture was about this morning. Congratulations. I know you’ve been wanting that for a while.”

  “I have. And no need to look so shocked, dude. My heroing work in yesterday’s stone monster battle was real A-plus stuff.”

  “Oh, it absolutely was,” he said, some semblance of his usual cocky grin returning. “How was the big celebration last night?”

  “Yeah, you missed some primo katsu action, Bebe,” Leah said. She pressed her fingers to her lips, kissing them in exaggerated fashion. “Mwah.”

  “Oh, it was . . . um. It was great!” I said quickly, my smile becoming a little more forced. I’d forgotten about Team Tanaka/Jupiter’s completely awkward, not-at-all celebratory dinner. Not to mention the dad drama that had come before it. Normally I would have downloaded about the dad stuff to Sam and Leah, but my excitement over being promoted had temporarily displaced my disappointment. Now it came rising back up again, mixing in with the excitement. Extreme emotion stew.

  Replaying the night before also reminded me of something. Before Evie and I had gone to bed, I’d volunteered to trek over to the Oakland swap meet—now known as the Grand Lake Market—to pick up Mom’s mysterious box of belongings from her old friend, Kathy Kooper. Evie had wanted to come with me, but she and Aveda had a personal appearance at Shruti’s boutique that was set to take up most of the afternoon.

  “Sam, I need a ride somewhere,” I said, poking him the arm.

  “What, like, now?” He set his empty coffee cup on the countertop and goggled at me.

  Leah flicked the cup and made a tsk-ing sound. “No food trash by the register.” Pancake snorted in agreement—or maybe he was snoring, I couldn’t tell.

  “Yes, now,” I said, glancing at my watch. “My shift’s over in five minutes and I need to go to the Grand Lake Market.”

  “You need to go all the way to the East Bay?” he said, incredulous. “That is a trek, Beatrice.”

  “I know, we have to cross a whole dang bridge,” I said. “Come on, it’ll be fun. Like a road trip. And they have tons of good food at the Market. We’ll get elephant ears.”

  “I have things to do—”

  “No, you don’t,” I said sweetly. “Your shift on Thursdays is in the morning. Therefore you are done with work. Therefore you have plenty of time to drive me to the East Bay and back.”

  “Sounds like a convincing argument to me,” Leah said, not looking up from her sketch.

  “Thank you!” I said, sashaying toward the bathroom. “I’ll go freshen up and then we can go. Back in a jiff!”

  I was out of earshot before he could protest. I shut myself in the bathroom and scrutinized my eye makeup in the mirror, then ran my fingers through my hair. What would we find in this mysterious collection of Mom’s possessions? The thought provoked a little flutter in my stomach. I had twelve years of memories of Mom, of course (well, twelve-ish, it’s not like I remembered my illustrious newborn era). But they seemed to get more hazy and fragmented as the years went by. I remembered a cascade of wavy dark hair and sparkling green eyes and a voice that sounded like music when she was happy and like iron when she was raging. Evie always liked to teasingly note how much I looked like Mom when I was totally pissed off.

  “You’ve got that Tanaka Glare,” she’d say, mostly admiringly.

  Sometimes I wondered if time altered these scraps of memory, made them larger than life, distorted them as they faded and as we held on to them harder. Maybe whatever was in this box could provide us with something more solid.

  Yeesh. Way to go all philosophical, Bea. It’s probably just a bunch of junk.

  I ran my fingers through my tangled hair one more time, then turned toward the confession wall, idly scanning to see what sentiments had been added today.

  Someone complaining about their mean boss.

  Someone extolling the virtues of acknowledging inner beauty.

  Someone gleefully noting, “I AM NASTY AND I LOVE IT,” accompanied by a doodle of a smiley face with devil horns.

  And over on the far right side, it looked like someone had responded to my manifesto from yesterday—

  I did a double take. I’d been expecting passionate expressions of Hamilton fandom or maybe for someone to write out more lyrics. But there, in small, neat, cursive script was a more thoughtful response. I stepped closer, scrutinizing it. Under my proclamation of, I will be the greatest superhero of all time, Just you wait, someone had written:

  You’re on the right path, my darling—the way you used your mental gifts to take down that awful man yesterday was truly a marvel to behold.

  Well, that was nice, but . . . a shiver crept up my spine. How did this rando know exactly what I’d done? To the casual observer, it should’ve looked like I was placating a difficult customer in a very mundane way—by talking him down. Only Leah, Sam, and Charlotte had known what I was actually doing, and this didn’t sound like any of them. There hadn’t been many casual observers. Sam’s date. Nemesis Nicole. Neither of them were aware of my power. At least as far as I knew. And beyond all that, how had the person responding to me here known I was the one who’d written this “just you wait” manifesto in the first place? Like everything else on the wall, it was unsigned. Anonymous.

  I frowned at the wall, as if I could will the scribbled words to reveal more information. Did I have a stalker? A stalker who wanted to leave me extremely complimentary messages on the bathroom wall? That didn’t seem like stalker behavior—

  “Bea! We need to go!”

  I whipped around to see Sam burst in, looking put out.

  “Hey!” I snapped. “You can’t just barge into the bathroom like that! What if I had been naked?”

  “Why would you be naked?” he said, shaking his head. “Come on. If you want to get to the East Bay and back before rush hour, we need to hurry.”

  “I . . .” I turned back to the wall. My mind was racing, I had no idea what to make of this, and I felt like I was being pulled in a zillion different directions at once.

  “What?” Sam said, sidling up next to me. “You . . . what?”

  I turned to face him. So much had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and I felt like I was drowning in an even more complex stew of emotions, like a tsunami of conflicting feelings was crashing through my entire body. It reminded me a bit of how Evie said she felt before she’d gotten control of her fire, when her stew of feelings had caused her to do stuff like burn down an entire library.

  Well. Unlike her, I’d never been one to bott
le things up.

  “My dad visited last night,” I said abruptly. “Yes, the one I haven’t seen in ten years, and yes, I totally thought maybe he was gonna stay for longer but of course he took off right away, and then Evie and I had a huge fight but we made up and that’s when she said I could officially become a superhero, but also my dad gave us the key to a box of my mom’s stuff that we didn’t know existed, and I have to go to the Grand Lake Market to get it and then . . . I saw that someone had written this in response to a thing I wrote yesterday, and it wasn’t you, was it? Because it’s super weird. And I’m just having a lot of feelings right now. I’m so stoked about being a superhero, but I’m also kinda fucked up about my dad, and then this thing on the wall makes me feel . . . well, weird, like I said. Just weird.”

  I stopped to take a breath. Sam blinked at me, then shifted his gaze to the writing on the wall.

  “I did not write that,” he said slowly. “And it doesn’t sound like Leah or Charlotte, so . . .”

  “So I have a mystery admirer,” I said, trying to make my tone light.

  “Yeah.” He frowned. “Let’s talk in the car, see if we can figure out who it might’ve been. And Bea . . .” He met my eyes. “That’s a lot. With your dad and everything. Do you need . . . a hug?” He held his arms out.

  I just stared at him. And then, improbably, felt a giggle bubbling up in my throat. He looked so serious standing there, arms outstretched, his face settling into a more sober version of the smolder he had in his half-naked calendar shot.

  The giggle escaped—I couldn’t help it. He looked way too ridiculous.

  “Sorry, I’m sorry!” I exclaimed, clapping my hands over my mouth.

  “What the hell,” Sam said, his arms falling to his sides. “I’m trying to be all sensitive and shit, and you are totally ruining it.”