by A. E. Clarke
I shushed her. It slipped out when I realized she could wake up the neighbours while talking about her electric superpowers.
“And instead, I blew up the bus.”
I looked up, and she was crying again, which might not have been odd if it had been anyone else, but Holly had stopped crying six years ago, the moment she was told she was the oldest living person in the family. Now, in the span of three days, I’d seen her cry twice, and it was as unnerving the second time as the first.
“And then, superhero that I am—that I was,” she corrected herself, pausing to swallow. “I tried to show off my awesome superpowers and—hey, look! You’re still alive, I guess, but barely. And only because—”
“Because you made a mistake and then you fixed it.”
“How the hell did you manage to make that sound okay in your head, Jesse?” She gave that bitter laugh again. “Obviously, you’re one whole hell of a lot better at controlling your powers than I was.”
“Holly, don’t—” She slid open the glass door and disappeared inside the house. I followed her, and since I was faster than she was, I caught hold of her shoulder and spun her around to face me. Her cheeks were still wet, but she seemed to have completely steeled herself against the flow of tears.
“I know you don’t want to use your powers anymore, but that doesn’t mean they’re evil or that you’ll never be able to control them. If I can do it, so can you.”
“You can’t know that! Maybe it’s like…it’s like an art, or something.”
I raised an eyebrow. “How d’you figure?”
“Well, it’s like when you’re playing the sax. You kind of furrow your brow—this is the only time I’ve seen you with that same expression on your face.”
“Even still, there are people with no musical talent who are amazing musicians, and they get by on simple hard work.”
She shook his head. “Put it this way. The one opportunity I had to act like an actual superhero, I killed a half dozen people. You really think any superhero in any of your comic books has that sort of background?”
“Actually, there are a number of them who have things like that in their backstories. It makes them more like normal human beings.” I realized, a couple words from the end of the sentence, that Holly was trying not to laugh. Well, at least it broke that tension. “Okay, that was a bit nerdy, even for me.”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.”
“You didn’t hear me earlier, playing with my fire powers,” I said, blushing and lighting the flames on my hands to cover up my embarrassment.
“I don’t want to know,” Holly said.
“Probably not.” For a second, we were just two siblings, as normal as we ever were. Then she looked down at my hands.
“I don’t think you should use them, but it’s up to you, dude.” She shook his head and walked towards the kitchen. “I need to make food and then head off to work.”
“And I should probably go to bed, eh?”
“Yeah.” She paused and turned back. “Tell me something.”
“Okay?”
“Why can…” She stopped, breathed deeply, and let it out. She looked up, and I lit my hand again so I could see her face properly. “Why can you use them and control them, and I…I can’t? Why can you be a superhero, and I’m only—”
“A sidekick?”
She jerked backwards, blinking. “Dude, I am so not your sidekick.”
“You make a better sidekick than a supervillain. Dude.” I held up my hand and rolled my eyes, hoping she was able to see the gesture.
“But why?”
“You’ll get there. This is, I guess, the silver lining of my anger management classes.”
She looked at me for a moment, like she was studying my face, trying to figure out how I could do what I did. I clenched my fist, and the flames went out. “Anyway,” I said, “neither of us should be wasting time standing around here, should we?”
“Probably not.”
I headed for the stairs, putting my hand on her shoulder as I passed by. “Have a good day at work, okay?”
She nodded and offered a small smile. “I’ll do my best.”
Chapter Thirty-Three: Holly
I walked in the front door that evening and heard noises coming from the basement. Frowning, I opened the door but stayed at the top of the stairs to see if I could pinpoint what, exactly, my brother was doing down there.
It took a moment to register the sound of something being torn away and a hammer hitting wood.
What could he be building?
“Jesse?” No response.
Cautiously, I headed downstairs, wishing I’d thought to grab a knife. Jesse did some weird things from time to time, but he’d never suddenly started building something in the basement before.
Rounding the corner into the main basement room, I felt the blood drain from my face as Jesse took the claw end of the hammer to the wall and ripped away another chunk of wood panelling.
“What the hell are you doing?!”
He whipped around, the hammer falling from his grasp.
“Jesus, Holly! Don’t scare me like that.”
“You’re—you—what are you doing to the wall?” I stammered, gesturing at the large section of wall that was now bare concrete. He’d ripped out almost the entire wall already.
“Well, we’d been talking about getting rid of this shitty panelling anyway, and I need somewhere to train that isn’t the backyard.” He bent over to grab the hammer again.
“You’re going to train down here?” I couldn’t take my eyes off the large portion of ruined wall. He was right: we had been talking about taking this down, but I’d assumed he’d meant for professionals to do it.
“Why not? I don’t want to worry about something in the backyard catching fire, and I can control the space down here much more easily. Only metal and stone—metal chairs, concrete wall, and a painted target.”
“A target?” I was intrigued, despite myself.
“So that you can learn how to aim, duh! We’ll have to figure out a way to distinguish scorch marks.” He wasn’t even looking at me, just speaking at the wall between hammer strikes and pulling at the panel.
“I’m not using my powers, Jesse.”
That got his attention. Hammer raised, he hesitated for a moment and then let his arms drop to his sides as he turned to face me.
“You can’t let a couple mistakes get in the way of—”
“Of what, Jesse? Of isolating myself from my friends because I have no idea how anyone will react to this? Of being scared of myself more than I am of anyone else—more than I could possibly be of anyone else because I can literally kill people with my mind?”
Just talking about how terrifying my powers were, I could feel them fighting to the surface as my heartbeat quickened and I became more emotional. I closed my eyes, forcing myself to calm down.
“See? You’re using the training to calm down, which means you can control your powers if or when you need to.”
I kept my eyes firmly closed. I was pretty sure he’d taken a step towards me, but I didn’t want to see it.
“Anyway, my main goal here is to make sure this place is fully fireproofed. Wanna give me a hand?”
I opened my eyes to find him holding out a second hammer.
I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t stop a giggle from bubbling up as I grabbed the hammer.
About an hour later, I was sitting in a metal chair pilfered from the backyard as Jesse stood on one side of the newly fireproofed room, facing the concrete wall.
“What are we going to do about the target?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“You said you wanted a target to aim at.”
“Oh.” Jesse rolled up his sleeves and tied them in place. “Right—it was mostly for your benefit anyway. We’ll figure that out when I can convince you to start training again.”
I sighed, and he held up his hand.
“I’m not trying to start
that argument again, Holly. Don’t worry. It’ll happen eventually. You gonna watch me train?”
I shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
He spread his feet and bent his knees slightly, balling his hands into fists at his sides, and with a quiet foomp! they were both engulfed in flames. I jumped and nearly fell off the chair. I had no idea he could start his powers so quickly.
I realized he was grinning at me—he’d been waiting for my reaction—and flipped him the bird, and we both laughed.
“Yeah, mine seems a little bit more dramatic than yours,” he said. Without giving me a chance to process and respond, he punched towards the wall, and a blast of fire shot at it. I braced, expecting it to explode or crackle or something, but it burned up and the flame petered out before it hit the wall. Jesse swore.
“How does that even work?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Your power doesn’t exactly fit with what we know about the world, either, Holly.”
“True—and all the more reason to keep it hidden. Can you imagine what the government would do if they found out about us?”
“I dunno. They couldn’t really do anything. We’re not breaking any laws.”
I laughed. “Yes, because they totally wouldn’t make something up to bring us in.”
He punched out again, grunting. This time, the flame looked a lot more like a fireball, with the flames licking backwards as it shot through the air, and it hit the wall, flattening before disappearing with a puff of smoke and a scorch mark.
“That’s better,” I said.
“I’d like to see you get that far from here,” he mumbled defensively, and I almost got up off my chair to join him.
If I were honest with myself, I really wanted to be learning to properly use these powers. I desperately wanted to be the heroine I’d convinced myself I could be before I’d blown up the bus and proved I was only capable of destruction.
There were a few minutes of silence save for the soft swoosh of flames shooting through the air, rippling slightly, and then lapping against the concrete as Jesse punched with his left fist, re-adjusted himself, then punched with his right. It was always very clearly thought out and calculated, with the fire going to exactly the same spot every time, leaving a scorch mark only a few inches in diameter. After the first attempt, he had clearly gotten into a groove; none of his fireballs flickered out before hitting his target.
Without stopping the routine he’d established, he said, “So, I take it you never got around to telling Alex?”
I did my best not to react, although he wasn’t looking at me. I already felt guilty enough about how I’d handled that situation.
“Not exactly, no.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not exactly, no.”
There was a longer pause, but he fell back into the groove in silence for another half dozen fireballs. Beyond a slight sheen of sweat on his face which could just as easily have been from the fire, he didn’t appear to be getting tired. “Are you sure? I’m worried about you.”
I forced myself to laugh. “Why are you worried?”
“There’s no way you’d sit there watching me shoot fireballs at a wall for twenty minutes without speaking unless there’s something huge on your mind,” he said matter-of-factly, not even bothering to look at me.
The silence resumed, and he continued shooting at the wall.
“I tried to talk to him about it,” I said, staring at the scorch mark.
No response; just the same steady rhythm. Foomp…foomp…foomp…foomp—
“That was actually what that big fight was about. The one you and Brent came home in the middle of.”
Foomp…foomp… “I was wondering if that was it. It got out of hand and the TV went boom?”
I raised my eyebrows. “‘Went boom’? Is that the technical term?”
“Yep, pretty sure it is.” He was still focused on the scorch mark, steadily hitting it, though he was starting to breathe a bit heavier, and the scorch mark widened as his aim gradually got less accurate.
“Then yeah, it ‘went boom.’ Alex freaked out, accused me of trying to scare him, and left. Didn’t wait for an explanation, didn’t give me any sort of benefit of the doubt, nothing.”
The “nothing” hung in the air for a moment as Jesse hesitated between fireballs. Then he started up again.
“Alex is an asshole half the time anyway,” he said. “Him being a jackass this time doesn’t really surprise me or prove anything.”
He said it so calmly and bluntly, it took me a second to properly process and another to figure out a response.
“I guess, yeah.” I sighed. “He’s usually a lot better to me, though. My powers must have really freaked him out.”
“I didn’t flip out on you when your powers freaked me out.”
“Yeah, but you’re a superhero nerd. This must be a dream come true for you.” And for me, it’s been a living nightmare.
“It’s pretty awesome, but I have the benefit of knowing how to rein in my emotions,” he said, lowering his arms. The flames around his hands went out noiselessly. “Which is something you can learn. Keep doing the meditation, keep working on it. Even if you don’t want to actually ever use it, you should still learn to control it so you don’t accidentally blow up another bus.”
He was looking me right in the eye as he said it, and I felt it as physically as if he’d punched me in the gut. I turned away, pinching the bridge of my nose to avoid crying.
He let me process that in silence for a moment, and then put a hand on my shoulder. I flinched, but I resisted the urge to shove him away, with or without electricity.
“Look, I’m sorry. I could have said that a lot nicer, but my point stands. You have these powers, and you should be able to use them.”
The doorbell rang, and I startled again. I didn’t know why I was so on edge.
“And that would be Brent!” Jesse took his hand off my shoulder, and I felt the tone in the room shift. Where just a second ago it had been tense, Brent’s arrival had completely smoothed it over.
Jesse took a couple big steps towards the stairs, then turned back to look at me. “It’s okay that he’s gonna be staying over again tonight, right? We’ll be mostly in my room or down here.”
“Down here?”
The doorbell rang again.
He grinned. “Hey, he gets to watch me practice too, even if he doesn’t have a superpower he needs to find the motivation to use.” He stuck out his tongue at me, turned on his heel, and bounded up the stairs, leaving me alone in the basement.
Chapter Thirty-Four: Jesse
Brent and I were snuggling in my bed, about to go to sleep, when I saw a flash of light in my backyard, bright enough for me to know what was going on.
“Okay, babe, I’ve gotta get myself untangled here,” I said, trying to extricate myself from his limbs—Brent was a lot larger than I was, and it took a bit of effort when he was refusing to cooperate.
“But we’re comfy. What’s up?”
“I think Holly’s outside.” I nodded towards the window.
Brent sighed and let go of me so he could look out the window and see the flashes, which were accompanied by small pop! noises. That really isn’t something you can practice stealthily. I shook my head. Hopefully, the neighbours would think we were watching TV.
I looked at the clock next to my bed and swore at the numbers that told me it was after three in the morning. Brent’s arm snaked over my chest again, but I stopped it and sat up. “I should really go talk to her, hon.”
Brent groaned, his eyes shut tightly. “Want me to come too?”
He was obviously hoping I’d say no—I was almost tempted to say yes just for the reaction, but instead, I leaned over to kiss him. “Nah, it’s probably best I go alone. You can get some extra sleep, and she’s probably going to be too weirded out by having you there anyway. Hell, she might be too weirded out having me there.”
He smiled, but it faded fast. It looked l
ike he was asleep almost instantly, like the only thing that had been keeping him awake was waiting for me to tell him he was allowed to go back to sleep. I shook my head—Lord knew most nights I wished I had the ability to fall asleep instantly—and pulled on my pyjamas to go outside.
I stopped at the bottom of the stairs to watch Holly for a moment. She was facing away from me, and from what I could tell, she was trying her best to make a permanent scorch mark on the railing. Her bolts were getting more consistent, and she was hitting her target almost every time. Most importantly, she had a bucket of water sitting underneath where she was aiming.
I opened the door just after she’d shot off a bolt, hoping to catch her at a point where she wouldn’t freak out and accidentally shock me.
“Jesse!” She jumped but refrained from throwing a bolt in my face.
“Hey, I saw you from my bedroom.”
“Oh.” She scowled. “Shit.”
“Why are you even up?”
She shrugged. “I woke up to go to the bathroom and figured I may as well stay up. And then…this happened. She gestured and smiled meekly.
“And then this happened, indeed.” I raised an eyebrow, struggling not to laugh at how nonchalantly she’d said it. “I thought you were adamant we shouldn’t use our powers anymore.”
“I am! Was. Still sort of am. I dunno, I’m confused now, okay?”
I snickered, and she grinned back. This was more like the sister I knew and usually loved.
“Well, I’m not confused, and it looked to me like you’re getting a lot better.”
The colour drained from her face. “You were watching?”
I nodded and then shrugged. “Not for long. Wanted to see how you were doing. I was worried about you.”
She sighed, but the colour was starting to creep back into her cheeks. “Fair enough. I guess I invited that, didn’t I?”
I laughed. “Just a bit.”
She stuck out her tongue at me and turned back towards the railing. “Well, most of the time I can do this—” She jabbed forward, and a bolt of electricity shot out, hitting the black spot on the railing at the far end of the porch. There was also a collection of scorch marks around it where she’d missed.