Grayscale

by A. E. Clarke

  “Actually,” I said to the barista, “make that in takeout cups, not mugs, please.” I handed over my Starbucks card. The barista knew we were together, and she was looking back and forth between us, trying to divine what was wrong.

  Lady, if you guess “my sister killed me with her superpowers and then I ended up with superpowers too,” you deserve a radio talk show or something.

  I nodded in answer to Brent’s question but kept my mouth drawn tightly, still unsure how I was going to tell him what had transpired since I sent him the video. I waited with him for his drink, leaning my head on his shoulder—when I wasn’t taking sips of my coffee and praying it woke me up enough to figure out what to say.

  We left the Starbucks hand in hand again and turned towards our subdivision. Once we’d turned into the maze of cross streets, Brent squeezed my hand. “So?”

  Okay, here goes.

  “So…” I said.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

  “Why do you—”

  “Don’t even try it, Jesse. You know I can see right through your bullshit.”

  I raised my eyebrows, surprised that he was swearing. He sighed and stopped walking. I half-expected some vague repeat of when I’d told him about Holly.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry.” We set off again. “Just tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Well…” This time, it was me who stopped walking. “Holly and I were training—I mean, I was helping her train…”

  “Train?”

  “Try to get better control over her powers.”

  “Ah.” He frowned.

  “You…you do believe me now—because of the video, right?”

  “I’m still having a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around it, if you know what I mean?”

  “Oh, definitely.”

  “But I do believe you.”

  I squeezed his hand. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure I’d believe me, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Thank you.”

  “So, the two of you were training, and…?”

  “Well, you saw the video.”

  “When the camera got shut off?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What…” He looked at me strangely. “What happened? I’m guessing that the camera didn’t shut off?”

  “Not exactly.” I drew in a deep breath, determined to let it all out at once and get it over with.

  I’d decided when Brent and I started to go out—once we’d talked it over after our first kiss and decided that we were, in fact, an item—that I wasn’t going to keep secrets from him if I could help it. I trusted he was doing the same, but I was worried about what could feasibly happen if we were to break up.

  “I told her to let it grow, and she’s always been kind of a show-off, so she let it grow big—too big—bigger than she could control, and then she said, ‘Hey Jesse, watch this,’ and I was thinking to myself…there’s no way for this to end other than badly. She opened her hand, and the energy shot out in a bolt and hit me and—” I was gasping for air.

  Brent drew me into his chest. “Are you okay?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “I… She says I died. That she shocked my heart into beating again.” I felt Brent’s grip tense around me; the muscles rippling down his arms tightened and trembled. The silence was horrible. He was crying.

  When he spoke, it was tentative. He sounded unlike I’d ever heard him before, way too deep to be my Brent. “You…died?”

  I was trying not to cry myself, my face buried in his neck. Fuck, we should have had this conversation inside. “Yeah.”

  I looked at his face, trying to see what he was feeling, how he was reacting, and had to consciously stop myself from taking a step back or letting go of his hand.

  His eyes looked almost dead, but at the same time, I envisioned flames lighting them from the inside. “I’m going to kill her,” he said, turning towards my house. “I am going to rip her limb from limb.”

  I grabbed his arm and twisted him around. Weight advantage be damned, he wasn’t going anywhere. “Brent, she didn’t do it on purpose—I’m not even sure she did it at all! And even if she did, there isn’t any lasting damage. There’s no mark, and she fixed her mistake.”

  I pulled him into a hug. He was still incredibly tense, but gradually, he melted into me. “She already feels bad enough about it. I haven’t seen her cry since our parents died, but she was bawling when I woke up.”

  “How could there be no burn?” he asked, though it wasn’t phrased like a question, and he was looking into the distance above my right shoulder.

  This is probably a good sign, I thought and tugged on his arm to bring him back to the present. “So, if we go back to my house, you won’t be killing my sister?”

  He bit his lip, something I couldn’t remember him ever doing out of worry, especially since he was adamant it was my worst habit. “I guess I can’t really…I can’t really get angry at her when I put that video online.”

  His eyes widened, and he clapped one hand over his O-shaped mouth, the other over his heart. “Oh my God, I put…the film where you…”

  He looked about to cry again, so I started walking, pulling him along so he would need to focus on not falling over.

  “Don’t worry about it.” I gave him as wide a smile as I could muster. “I wasn’t on camera, even if it did happen. Come on—I want to get home already. I think Holly and Alex are out for dinner, so we should theoretically have the place to ourselves.” I ran my fingers over his wrist—one of the two or three areas where I’d discovered he was quite ticklish.

  He smiled, though I could still see the worry in his eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Holly

  I stared at the carpet, at the shards of glass. There were a couple larger ones, but it was mostly as if there was a light dusting of snow on the ground. I felt cold looking at it, although I was sitting there in a T-shirt, cradling myself as I tried to come to terms with everything I’d done, so maybe I was actually cold.

  These powers are not what I wanted them to be. My vision swam with tears. I blinked them away, letting them drip down onto the powdered glass.

  I needed to sweep up. That would probably give Alex enough time in the bathroom to at least tell me he wanted to break up with me face-to-face, instead of with him…well, running into the bathroom to get away from me.

  When I had first gotten the powers, I had looked at them like a gift. They could have been such a good thing in my life, if I only…

  “If I only knew how to use them properly.”

  I saw something drip down onto the ground, but it wasn’t the tears still dangling from the tip of my nose; it had fallen from my outstretched pinky, and it was red.

  I took my hands off my head and looked at my arm. The cut had been a bit deeper than I’d thought.

  There was a lot of blood, although I was hardly trying to staunch the flow at all. I didn’t really care, except that there would be a permanent stain on the light grey carpet, and both Jesse and I would look at it and be reminded of how large a fuck-up I was when life handed me the ability to do something amazing—something no one else in history could do.

  I’d used that amazing ability to blow up a bus and kill my little brother and then proceeded to ruin my relationship—the only good thing still in my life except for Jesse.

  I sighed and let myself fall onto my side across the couch. It was a little easier to cry now, to be honest, because the tears could flow a bit easier.

  My powers have done nothing but evil. I have done nothing but evil with my powers. I’m not a superhero. I’m a supervillain.

  I gulped, crying silently without any coherent thoughts for a moment until one properly formed in my head. Now that everyone—my brother, my boyfriend—had finally left me, it was clear: I was the problem.

  If I were a superhero—if I could actually control what I can do—then they would want to be around me,
and it would be safe for them. I’ve killed enough people to be labelled a serial killer.

  I shook my head to try to clear it of the images of the college student on the bus. I swear I could smell the scent of his too-strong deodorant mixed with the faint smell of the puke stain on his shirt.

  I need to figure out a way to not be a supervillain. I can’t do good with my powers, I can’t…

  I was struggling to see beyond polar opposites, a good versus evil sort of situation. There was next to nothing in the world that was purely one or the other.

  “I can’t make the world a better place by doing this. For anyone.” I held up my hand—the electricity was still crackling on the outside—and made a fist, forcing the energy back inside, trying to draw it as close to the centre of my being as I could.

  When it got to the point where it didn’t feel like it was crawling on the underside of my skin, I unclenched my fist. It was…disappointing. Lonely. Like I’d been wrapped in a warm, cozy blanket and then taken it off.

  I sighed, tapping my forehead with my fist a couple times, letting my eyes close and the tears flow freely. I ran my hand through my hair. It was an absolute mess, which fit with how I was feeling.

  I can’t make the world a better place with my powers, and using them is making everything worse. I need to stop using my powers. My tears slowed at that thought, and as it cemented itself in my mind, I marvelled at how simple it seemed.

  I’d only had the power for a few days at most, and with it shoved this far down, into the very core of my soul, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to feel it at all from day to day.

  Who knew, maybe in a week, I would forget what it felt like to have it on the outside of my skin. In a month, I might not remember how to summon the energy to the surface.

  In a year, I could completely forget about it.

  “I can never use my powers again.” I said it aloud, trying to focus on each syllable, as if saying it—hearing it—would make it more real, make it more final, and it did seem to work a bit. That was what finally made the tears stop.

  “I can never use my powers again,” I said again. It was almost like a magic spell. When I said it aloud, all the tension in my body suddenly vanished, letting me finally relax.

  I sat up, a couple tears still running down my cheeks. Suddenly, though, I could feel the scratches on my arm, leg, and face from the shards of glass I had rubbed into my right side without caring about the pain.

  I stood up, wincing when one of the larger pieces snapped loudly beneath my foot.

  It was simple, really. I would never use my powers again, and life would slowly but surely revert to normal.

  I’d give it a couple days and talk to Alex again, give him time to recover from the shock, and we’d pretend it was a joke that went horribly wrong—whether it was more important to prove it to him or to myself, I had no idea.

  I could tell him it would never happen again, that I had learned my lesson. I would never tell him about having killed Jesse. The image of Jesse’s body falling replayed in my mind, and I shook my head to clear it again.

  I would never tell Alex what had happened on the bus or why it had unexpectedly exploded.

  I would…never do it again.

  “I’m not a superhero,” I said, sounding a lot calmer than I had expected. “I need to accept that and move on.”

  I walked down the front hallway to the bathroom and knocked on the door.

  “Alex?”

  Chapter Thirty: Jesse

  I opened the front door and almost hit Holly, who was sitting outside the front hall’s bathroom—clue number one that something was wrong.

  Clue number two was that Holly’s entire right side was covered in flecks of blood, like something—or someone?!—had exploded nearby and showered her with droplets.

  “Oh my God, Holly! What happened?” I sat next to her and attempted to wipe away the blood, but as soon as I touched her face, she yelped, and I felt a sharp stinging pain in my hand. When I pulled it away to look at it, I realized why.

  I bit my lip—to help me concentrate—as I pulled out the large splinter of glass.

  “What was that for?” She sounded calm, and that would be clue number three. Holly wasn’t the most fiery personality—I guess that would be me, now—but she was very rarely calm under pressure.

  If something had happened—and unless Holly had decided to pepper her skin with tiny shards of glass for kicks, something had happened—she was more likely to be either screaming at everything and extremely animated or sitting in the middle of the commotion, panicking and struggling not to cry. Or, at least, those were her usual reactions to stress and pressure.

  I grabbed her shoulders—carefully avoiding the large cut on her arm—and shook her gently, trying to bring her back to the surface. “Holly, come on, lemme know what happened.”

  “Jesse?”

  I looked back over my shoulder at Brent, still standing in the doorway.

  Wow. There were very few things that could distract me from spending alone time with my boyfriend. Yeah, this is exactly what I wanted to bring you home to.

  “Um. Gimme a minute. I want to make sure she’s okay.”

  “Your first-aid kit is on your fridge, right?”

  “Okay, I’m an idiot. Yeah, our kit’s on the fridge. There’s some more stuff in the upstairs bathroom if that’s missing anything.”

  He nodded, let his backpack slip from his shoulder so it landed next to mine—hastily discarded by the front door—and walked calmly, purposefully, towards the kitchen.

  I watched him walk through the commotion. I’d heard people described as the “rock” in a relationship, and he was definitely mine.

  I looked back to Holly, who was staring into space, completely fixated on the bathroom door across the hall.

  “Jesse?” Brent called from the living room doorway. “You need to come see this.”

  I stood carefully, trying not to startle Holly, but she didn’t react at all to my movement.

  Brent met me partway, at the base of the stairs. “I’ll deal with Holly. You’re gonna need either a broom and dustbin or a vacuum, I think.” His face was grim.

  “What happened?”

  “It’s pretty obvious once you get in there, I think. I opened a window as well.”

  Opened a window?

  He leaned over, kissed me once on the cheek, and ran a hand through his hair, which flopped back onto his forehead haphazardly. “I’ll go make sure that cut of hers isn’t as bad as it looks—if it is, she might need to go get stitches.”

  I nodded and met his gaze. What the hell happened? This sucked, but neither of us was the type to leave the situation that was interrupting our alone time.

  This would be one of those times when I cursed my conscience.

  I walked into the living room and whistled. “Okay, so that’s what the hell happened.”

  The TV was still smoking a bit, which explained the open windows, and what used to be the screen was now a sheer coating of fine glass dust on the floor, except for a few larger pieces, a couple of which had blood on their points. Sighing, I walked into the kitchen to get the broom out of the pantry.

  I’d only managed to cover about half of the room before I heard the bathroom door open, followed by Holly nearly screaming Alex’s name joyfully, and Brent calling mine, though he sounded worried, not joyful.

  I jogged the twenty feet or so to join the people in the front hall and was met by Holly hugging Alex, who seemed unsure as to how to respond, arms wide out at his sides. Holly was crying, and Brent looked extremely uncomfortable.

  I closed my eyes, gathering my thoughts before I said, in as final a tone as I could muster at that moment, “Okay.”

  All three of them looked at me.

  “Holly, you and Alex are going to work out whatever the hell’s going on with you two, and then you’re going to sweep up the living room. Vacuum will probably help. Alex, you can help or not or whatever. I feel kind of weir
d ordering you around, and I don’t know what just happened. Brent—” I grabbed his wrist, pulling him behind Holly to stand beside me. “We’re going up to my room to have the alone time we planned.”

  Without waiting for a response, I turned on my heel and started walking, all but dragging Brent along for the first couple steps. Once we hit the inside of my room, I wheeled around on my foot and pushed the door closed.

  “Seeing you do things like that always amazes me,” Brent said.

  I straightened up, and shrugged, suddenly a little self-conscious, despite him having seen me in much more intimate situations and circumstances.

  “No, really,” he said. “You can do some amazing things.”

  Oh. Right, that was what I was going to tell him.

  “What did you think of?” he asked.

  I blinked a few times, looking at him. “How…how did you know?”

  “Well, your eyes sort of…lit up. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the entire room got a couple degrees hotter.” He scratched the back of his head. “Um. Pretend I said that in a less clichéd way, okay?”

  I laughed and grabbed his hand. He yelped and pulled away.

  “You’re…” He touched my forehead, like he was checking for a fever, and yelped again, shaking his hand.

  It’s not that hot… I smirked. This was definitely the most amusing way to tell him about my powers, and I figured—or, at least, I hoped—he’d appreciate the humour in it.

  And, y’know, it’ll help him come to terms with it faster, since I still want him to sleep over tonight.

  “You’re burning up, hon, we’ve gotta get you…” He trailed off. “You’re…you’re not sick, are you?”

  “Nope!” It came out a great deal higher in pitch than I’d meant for it to, and I clapped a hand over my mouth. “Well, that made me sound like I was about twelve,” I mumbled through my palm.

  “Okay, what’s…what’s going on?”

  “I have a feeling you’re guessing, so…”

  “No.”

  I raised an eyebrow. He rarely sounded quite that final.

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t want to guess, I mean. I want you to tell me what’s up, okay?” He reached for my hands again, presumably having forgotten how hot they were, so I focused on cooling them off and then grabbed his hands. He looked down at them, then back up at my face. “They’re normal again.”