The script hung in the space between them. Mir saw Weldon’s outstretched arm waver a little from the weight of it.
“So you lied? I mean, why?” Mir saw black close in around Weldon, like she was looking at him from the wrong end of a telescope.
“I was trying to impress you,” Weldon sighed.
“By lying to me?”
“I knew who you were, okay?” Weldon said. “I knew your grandfather had created the TomorrowMen with my grandfather. I knew there’d been a legal fight over the rights. I thought … I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that I could prove to you that I wasn’t like the rest of the Warricks.”
He looked up at her, his hair streaked with light from the setting sun. Behind Weldon was nothing but a vast expanse of darkness. Mir took a step backward.
“What am I doing with you?” she said. It came out wet and hurt.
Weldon blinked. He let his hand, still holding the script, fall to his side.
“I screwed up. It was a shitty thing to do. I didn’t mean—”
“I pressured Evan to give you the script,” Mir said. “I made him do it. He didn’t want to. But I made him, because him writing a story, him wanting to do something different, made him a little like me. So I wouldn’t feel so alone in this town full of content people who are so frigging okay with being here.” Mir bowed her head, squeezing her eyes shut. “I’m such a selfish jerk.”
“You’re not,” Weldon said, his tone alarmed. “He’s your friend, I’m sure he’ll forgive you. Blame me. It’s my fault anyway.”
“You lied to me.”
Weldon nodded. His mouth was pressed into a grim line.
“I did. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t get to be sorry!” Mir howled. Her voice broke on the last word. Weldon took a step back, as though she had pushed him.
“I mean, seriously, what am I doing with you?” Mir said. Her hand was pressed to her mouth. Pieces of the last month tumbled in her head. Weldon and Evan in the Emporium of Wonders, Evan glowing with excitement. Stella screaming that her father was too proud to compromise, and that was why the TomorrowMen were no longer his.
“I’m not like this,” Mir whispered. “I’m so practical. I’ve had a savings account since I was ten. I shouldn’t be dating someone whose family wrecked mine.”
“That’s not fair,” Weldon said. “This has nothing to do with anything that happened forty years ago.”
“It has everything to do with that,” Mir said. “It’s about the Warricks screwing over the Kendricks. It’s how this will always play out. Forever and ever.”
“So that’s how this is going to be?” Weldon said. “We fight, and you’re going to bring up what my grandfather did to your grandfather? You’re going to throw something I wasn’t even alive for in my face?”
Mir’s head snapped up. Weldon met her glare, and the anger on his face softened a little.
“Oh,” said Weldon. “That’s why you wanted my dad to buy the script. You want the TomorrowMen back.”
“No,” lied Mir.
She started to walk past him and he reached for her, his fingers brushing her shoulder. Weldon’s face was smooth and calm and smiling. The mask had slid down over his real face, snapping into place.
“Miriam,” he said. “C’mon. Let the TomorrowMen go.” Mir saw the last bit of sunlight reflect off the hair hanging over Weldon’s forehead, a lightning bolt of white shooting through his dark hair. For a moment, Tristan Terrific, not Weldon Warrick, stood in front of her. She recoiled.
“Don’t try to make me feel something I know isn’t real,” she said. “You don’t have that superpower.”
She turned and ran toward her parents’ house. The sound of the slamming door echoed into the black night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Weldon leaned his head against the airplane window and watched San Diego unfurl underneath him. He’d seen the city from the air dozens of times and usually loved the way it looked: palm trees and stucco-roofed houses, mountains jutting up in the distance. In the crowded marina, boats were tied to every available dock, bobbing in the harbor like toys that belonged to some monster child. Weldon closed his eyes and felt the plane dip downward. He was home.
It had been two weeks since the fight with Mir. He’d left her alone afterward, although he hadn’t wanted to. His fingers itched to call her. He still woke up at 5:00 every morning, fumbling around in the dark for the alarm clock before realizing it hadn’t gone off. The first few mornings he’d lain there in the dark, listening to birds chirp and watching the black line between his curtains slowly turn brighter. He’d waited until he heard his aunt and uncle leave for their jobs, then had pulled himself out of bed and eaten a breakfast of cold cereal. He hadn’t felt like running.
His aunt and uncle knew something had happened. His aunt was bustling and concerned. She didn’t say anything, but there were extra servings of his favorite foods at dinner, helpful notes she left him in the kitchen, suggesting things he might like to do in Sandford that week. Things like fun runs, haunted tours of nearby landmarks, and rock climbing at a small outcropping twenty minutes outside town. Weldon drove to the rock-climbing spot but changed his mind at the last minute, spending the next few hours driving aimlessly down country roads. When he’d gotten home, Aunt Kay had asked how he’d enjoyed himself, and he’d lied, feeling guilty for reneging on his promise not to. “It was so much fun, Aunt Kay. I really liked it. I might have to go down there more often.” His aunt had beamed, looking delighted and a little relieved. From the living room, Weldon’s uncle eyed him from behind his iPad.
“Is there something going on with you?” Alex Warrick had asked, cornering Weldon after dinner.
Weldon shrugged.
“I screwed things up with Mir.”
Alex looked sympathetic.
“There’s a lot of history between our families,” he said. “Maybe too much to put on you kids.”
“Yeah,” Weldon said. “I guess so.”
* * *
Weldon opened his eyes. In the clogged heat of San Diego, the plane touched down. Weldon ignored the waiting driver with a WARRICK placard and hopped in a cab outside the airport, giving the driver his mother’s address.
“You here for Comic-Con?” the driver asked.
“Yeah,” said Weldon. “But I used to live here.”
“Not anymore, though, huh?” the driver asked.
“No,” said Weldon. “Now I live in Canada. On the East Coast.”
“Canada? Bummer, man.”
“Yeah. It’s a pit,” said Weldon, thinking of the feeling of Mir’s chin resting on his shoulder.
They sped along the waterfront, banners for Comic-Con hung from every streetlight. The air was heavy with humidity, and it smelled like a storm was coming. Ahead Weldon saw the massive shape of the convention center, crouched patiently beside the waterfront. Then the cab turned toward the city center, and Weldon lost sight of it.
Emma’s house looked the same as it had always looked, small and tidy. Weldon stood outside it for a moment, staring up at the stucco roof, the off-white exterior. His room had been at the very top of the house, one wall slanting with the shape of the roof. There was a small round window at one end of his room, and during the weeks his mother was home, Weldon liked to stare out that round window and watch her as she puttered around in the backyard, fussing with her collection of hardy desert plants. She had gone to a galaxy far away, ruled it as a blue-skinned alien queen, and returned home to him and his father. Because she loved them more than she loved her vast alien empire, her millions of warriors, her thousands of alien starships.
The door was open.
“Mom?” Weldon called as he stepped through. Silence. There was a soft meow from the kitchen and his mother’s very ugly cat, Charlie, wandered toward him. Weldon stared at the cat.
“How are you still alive?” he said wonderingly, bending to stroke the cat’s back as it rubbed against his legs. “She’s had you l
onger than I’ve been around. Are you secretly immortal?” Charlie hissed crankily in reply.
There was the sound of someone thumping down stairs, and Emma Sanders walked into the kitchen, arms full of dusty papers. She started when she saw Weldon, the papers spilling and scattering across the kitchen floor.
“Weldon!”
“Sorry,” Weldon said sheepishly. “I should’ve called ahead.”
“No, it’s okay,” said Emma, smiling. She held out hands covered in grime, then realized how filthy they were and laughed, rubbing her palms against her jeans. “Wait, wait, let me clean up a bit and then I’ll hug you.” She went to the kitchen sink and vigorously began scrubbing at her arms and hands with a wet dishcloth.
“When did you get in?”
“Just now,” Weldon said, looking around the kitchen. It looked the same as it always did. Checkered black-and-white tile on the floor, olive-green stripes painted on the walls. Yellow-and-orange cabinets. An explosion of carefully chosen colors. Emma loved color.
“Didn’t your father send a car for you?”
“Yeah,” said Weldon. “But I felt like seeing you first.”
“You’re sweet,” said Emma, and leaned back against the sink, drying her hands with a towel. She reached her now-clean hands out to him. Weldon remembered her wrapping her arms around him when he was small. He would squirm and complain that he didn’t want to be hugged, he wasn’t a baby anymore. Her hugs had all but vanished as he grew older, and he looked back on his younger self with jealousy. You didn’t know how great you had it, kid, he thought, as his mother slipped her arms around him. For the briefest of moments her cheek was next to his ear, and then she was gone.
“So,” said Emma, “have you seen the convention center yet?”
“No,” said Weldon. “What’s it like this year?”
“Same old. The big thing this year is an HBO show based on a Japanese comic about a serial killer. Prime HBO grimdark stuff is what I’ve heard, very brutal, very bloody. They’ve wrapped the Hyatt next to the con center with fairly inappropriate advertising. There is literally what looks like a giant knife sticking out of the hotel. That’ll be a wonderful thing for the kids to see.”
“Jeez, who brings kids to Comic-Con?”
“We brought you,” Emma said, reaching over to ruffle Weldon’s hair. She was still taller than him, and at this point he knew it would always be this way.
“Yeah, but the con was different back then. It wasn’t a hundred and thirty thousand people crammed into a convention center four blocks long. There weren’t knife fights over seats in Hall H.”
“I think it’s nice,” Emma said, smiling. “I like that parents still bring their kids to the con. They’re trying to raise their wee nerds right.”
Emma bent and began picking up the papers she’d spilled on the kitchen floor. The papers were thick, old and dusty, with unfamiliar drawings on one side.
Weldon crouched next to her.
“What are these?”
“Old stuff from the attic,” his mother said. “I was looking for something. Haven’t found it yet.”
Weldon held up one of the sketches. Thick pencil strokes sketched vague human outlines, men and women jumping, running, fighting. Men and women with bodies sculpted to near perfection, capes trailing behind them as they battled each other effortlessly.
Weldon frowned.
“These are TomorrowMen sketches.”
“Yeah,” said Emma. “From the seventies, I think. They aren’t signed, but I think they’re John Buscema. He did a run on the TomorrowMen at the end of that decade.”
She straightened and piled the drawings on the kitchen table. Weldon gave the paper in his hands one last look before adding it to the pile. Emma waved a hand at him.
“Come help me look. I wanted to find them before you came, but you got here early. I know they’re around here somewhere.”
They climbed the stairs to his old room. Unlike everything else in the house, it wasn’t the way he remembered it. The paint on the walls had faded from primary blue to a pasty baby blue. Boxes were piled everywhere. The small round window Weldon loved to look out of when he was a kid was covered by boxes, stacked to the slant the roof on one side of the room. There were dates on all the boxes, out of order: 1979, 1983, 1971.
“What a mess,” Emma sighed.
“What is all of this?” Weldon asked, staring.
“The archive,” said Emma. “What I could save over the years.”
Emma went to a box dated 1967 and opened it. Weldon peered over her shoulder and saw the box was full of paper. There were drawings on the paper, men and women in capes and helmets, striking superheroic poses.
“Is … is this all comics? It’s original artwork from the TomorrowMen comics, isn’t it?”
Emma nodded and knelt on the floor, folding her legs beneath her. She pulled the 1967 box toward her and began riffling through the papers. She sifted through them methodically, pulling out sheets and staring at them critically, before tucking them away. Her hands were gentle as she examined the artwork. Sometimes the corner of her mouth turned up and her eyes went distant and amused, as though the drawing she was looking at had sparked some fond memory.
“Why do you have all of this?”
“Because someone has to remember them,” Emma said. She frowned and moved the box to the side, still searching. “Most of this stuff is unclaimed and unsigned. Some of it is drawn by artists who died. Some of it, I have no idea. But I didn’t want it to go in the trash. Someone has to remember the people who drew all of this. They deserve better. All artists do.”
Emma pushed a hand through her pale hair and stared at the box in front of her. Weldon was suddenly afraid she was going to go to pieces right there as she had done so often during the last years his parents were together. David Warrick yelled when he was angry, but Emma said nothing, the coldness of her fury freezing them all in a wretched tableau.
“Mom, what is this about?” Weldon said. His mother looked up at him, and he was surprised to see determination on her face.
“I have to move on,” she said. “I feel like I’m living in these boxes, mourning some alternate history where I was a superhero in a movie that never existed. I’ve wasted so much of myself on that movie.”
Weldon crouched beside her, hoping the movement would hide his expression. He felt the familiar slipperiness of the ice around him, but something was different. The cracks were still there, but no longer spider-webbing around him, threatening to splinter the ground he was standing on.
“I started seeing a counselor,” Emma said. “I never thought that would be something I needed, but this summer has been so hard. I suppose it was the TomorrowMen movie finally starting up, all the casting news. That other actress playing Skylark. It was … difficult.” She reached out and lightly touched Weldon’s shoulder, then pulled her hand away.
“And then you needed a place to stay for the summer, and I couldn’t even give you that. I’m your mother. I’m supposed to be able to be there for my kid.”
“You—you were doing the best you could,” Weldon said. It was almost frightening to hear her acknowledge she’d let him down. It was easier to continue to see her as she’d been on the movie screen: untouchable and mysterious, a woman who never admitted to making a mistake.
“I could’ve done better,” Emma said, smiling wryly. “So I’m trying to do better now. Letting all of this go is part of it.” She reached for another box and resumed digging through the artwork inside.
She found what she was looking for in a box dated 1979. A pile of sheets of paper, wrapped carefully in plastic.
“No wonder I couldn’t find them,” she said. “It’s the wrong box. Weldon, here. Be careful.”
She handed him the papers and Weldon unwrapped them gingerly. They were covered in dust, the plastic stiff and brittle. He slid the paper from the plastic, a thin stack of bristol board. He stared at the comic pages. Skylark and Skybound flew across a p
age, hand in hand. They were laughing, their capes streaming out behind them as they flew. The brushstrokes across the page were thick and black, applied quickly and with great skill. Weldon put the page on the floor and stared at the next page. Skylark and Skybound, still together, talking in a café. Skybound was showing Skylark his city, his world. Everything was new to her, the world of men so full of marvels. There were twenty-two pages in the plastic-wrapped packet, all drawn with the same careful pencil line, inked with a skilled brush. Weldon knew immediately the pages were drawn by Micah Kendrick.
“It’s original artwork from the issue when they met,” Weldon said.
Emma nodded.
“Spectacular Space Stories #3,” she said. “Before the TomorrowMen were even a thing. Skylark came from her planet a million light-years away, and everyone on Earth was afraid she meant us harm. But Skybound showed her around his neighborhood, and she saw humans weren’t such a bad lot after all. So she decided to stay and help us. Awfully nice of her.”
Weldon nodded, still staring at the pages.
Emma gestured at the artwork.
“Years ago people didn’t care about original comic book art. It was pulp nonsense. So much of that old art was thrown away. I saved what I could from Warrick Comics, stuff they didn’t want, stuff they didn’t think they could sell. I’m going to donate it. There are a few museums that preserve original comic art, and I think they’ll take most of what I have in these boxes. But these pages—” She tapped the artwork in front of Weldon again. “I want you to have them. I know they’re worth a decent amount of money, especially with the movie coming out next year.”
Weldon looked up at his mother, confused.
“You’re giving them to me? Why not donate them too?”
“I wanted to do something good for you, kiddo,” Emma said. “This is something I can give you, something that’s worth something. You can sell the pages and have a nice little nest egg. Maybe money for a car, or rent on an apartment.” Emma’s eyes flickered downward. “I know you and your dad don’t get along. This might give you some breathing space.”
Comics Will Break Your Heart Page 22
