Behind the Mask

by Link, Kelly; Rambo, Cat; Vaughn, Carrie

  “Probably won’t be longer than a few weeks,” the nurse says.

  A few weeks will be the longest she’s taken off from her heroing since they all started—almost two years ago now. Her little brother promises the nurse that he’ll make sure she takes it easy, and then they’re headed back home again. Moses promises he’ll collect her class work and bring it over tomorrow, which means that not even the threat of missing stuff in school can save her from the doctor’s orders.

  Pen is not good at taking it easy. She mumbles her protests to Davie about how boredom isn’t restful, but it’s all for nothing. The minute she gets home, she falls into bed and sleeps for sixteen hours. She wakes up groggy and exhausted and proceeds to spend the next week hardly able to leave her room at all.

  “Must have caught a cold at the hospital,” her mother muses. Pen can’t remember the last time she got sick. Davie keeps looking at her with wide, worried eyes, a look she isn’t used to and quickly grows to hate. By the third day, he’s gotten himself banned from her room. Not that it matters much. He’s not the one grounded from physical activities. He can still spend every day after school with their “study group,” the one that dons masks and costumes and goes out to save the city.

  She’d watch them on TV, but the screen makes her vision swim.

  Still, by the end of the week, she is feeling a lot better. She goes back to school wearing sunglasses like armor. Pen isn’t exactly known for being talkative. If she still can’t get out vowels quite right yet, no one needs to know.

  Faking being okay shouldn’t be this easy, she thinks.

  • • •

  Six months down the line, and still no one has noticed. She’s made sunglasses her thing, doesn’t even get questions about them anymore. If she makes her words frosty and scornful, no one will think their lack of speed is anything but intentional. The team doesn’t even fuss over her when she takes a hit anymore.

  The problem is that the only time she can properly pretend she’s okay is when she’s in her suit. When her mask hides the way her pupils sometimes don’t quite react at the same time. When she leaves the speaking to her chattier teammates. It doesn’t matter that she finds herself forgetting simple words (Warehouse. Fastidious. Sneaky). It doesn’t matter at all.

  Outside her suit, she feels like she is falling. Like the impact she doesn’t remember is still just about to hit. Without the pressure of her helmet, the cracks in her head threaten to rattle apart. This is a problem, because Pen is already a girl of few words. Pen is the one you come to when you need a door kicked in. Even before she went and scrambled her brain, she did not have the vocabulary to talk about feelings or ask for help.

  So she doesn’t.

  “Penny? Are you listening to me at all?”

  “Hmm?” She isn’t, really. Jenny’s been going on about something for almost ten minutes now, and Pen tried to pay attention at first, she really did, but nothing was really making sense anyway. “Sorry, no.”

  Jenny’s face crumples into an expression somewhere between annoyance and hurt. “What is up with you lately? You’re always grumpy. You never wanna talk. Are you fighting with your boyfriend or something?”

  Pen doesn’t have a boyfriend, but people assume things about her and her team leader when they see them out of costume, and she doesn’t correct them because it’s easier for them to fill in the story than for her to tell it.

  Maybe it’s no surprise: her approach to this concussion. She keeps her mouth shut and lets others assume her story, assume she’s okay, assume whatever they want. She has never really cared about what other people thought, has always been secure enough in her own skin that she doesn’t mind what people see when they look at her. She’s too busy saving lives, fighting supervillains.

  She never really cared. But all of a sudden, the thought of pretending to have a boyfriend (the thought of pretending at all) is exhausting.

  “We were never dating.”

  Jenny scoffs. “You’ve been dating for ages; don’t try to pull that. You’re together all the time. Unless you guys were faking it . . . Oh my god, are you coming out to me? Is this what’s happening?”

  Pen has been open about her sexuality since she was seven. It’s just that people look at her long blonde hair and her soft curves and they don’t ask. They don’t get close enough to realize that under every bit of fat is muscle hard as steel. They don’t wonder about the days she paints her nails rainbow. They see what they want to see.

  “I’m going home,” she tells Jenny, and leaves before Jenny can splutter a response.

  • • •

  “Do you think lying runs in our family?”

  Davie is hiding in her room because their parents are having an argument again. It’s not that they’ll do anything to hurt them, it’s just that if their parents spot either of their children lingering around the war zone, they’ll try to pull them into the conversation, ask them what they think of whatever topic they’ve decided to throw down over this time. Some parents fight with raised voices and thrown objects. Their parents fight over the dinner table in low, lofty tones, sometimes with the help of a tablet between them to bring up relevant studies and statistics. Lawyers, even out of their courtroom suits.

  Davie snorts. “How should I know? I’m adopted.”

  “Careful!” She reaches over and slaps a hand over his mouth. “Say that too loud and they’ll decide it’s time to revisit nature vs. nurture.”

  He promptly licks her hand.

  Because she is a veteran superhero with hundreds of hours of training under her belt, she does not shriek.

  But it’s a near thing.

  Jenny pulls Pen aside the next day to tell her not to worry, that she does forgive her. She gets that Pen is under a lot of pressure right now because her grades aren’t as good as they usually are, and besides, Jenny was reading something about how families with adopted kids can sometimes start to struggle when the children all hit puberty.

  Pen doesn’t hit her.

  But that’s a near thing too.

  • • •

  “Okay, here’s a question for you, Pen.” Sandhya, no-you-cannot-call-me-Sandy, has a way of cornering people without ever really getting close. That’s how Pen feels right now. Cornered, even though Sandhya is across the table fiddling with a piece of machinery Davie put together, not even looking at Pen. It’s a game the two like to play: Davie puts little machines together and Sandhya finds the perfect way to make them fall apart. Sometimes they use their powers and sometimes they don’t, but they never seem to get tired of it. Still, it seems rather unfair that Sandhya can do this and interrogate Pen all at the same time.

  “Hit me,” says Pen, and savors how sharp the T is, how the M doesn’t linger. She’s been practicing quick mutterings in front of the bathroom mirror. She feels a little worn thin and can’t remember ever talking so much, even if no one is around to hear it, but the results are starting to show.

  It’s been seven months since her slip, and she’s starting to feel like her lips, tongue, teeth are her own again.

  “Did something happen? You’ve been acting different.”

  “I got a concussion.” The topic sends her right back to soft consonants, vowels tangling together. “Remember?”

  “Oh, that was ages ago.” Sandhya waves a delicately henna’d hand covered in grease dismissively. “I meant like this week.”

  Pen can’t think of anything she’s been doing differently, especially not within sight of her team. She shrugs, but that’s avoiding the question, isn’t it? That’s letting Sandhya make up her own reasons.

  Pen’s really tired of other people telling her story.

  “I’m not getting along with my friends at school,” she says, and Sandhya actually looks up from her project to smile at her, surprised at the straight answer.

  “Good thing you’ve got us, right? Remember, if they’re dragging you down, they’re probably not worth it.”

  Pen lets the words sink
into her, because drag was a word she misplaced the other day, and she wants to remember the way Sandhya smiled at her.

  The next day, Pen sees Jenny and opens her mouth to say hello, but something entirely different spills out.

  “I don’t like the nickname Penny,” she tells Jenny, and she doesn’t stumble. “It was cute that we matched when we were kids, but it doesn’t really fit anymore.”

  Jenny gapes at her, and it takes her a good beat to recover.

  “Um, alright. What should I call you, then?”

  “My study group calls me Pen.”

  “And you prefer Pen?” There’s disbelief in Jenny’s tone. Pen thinks the question might be less about the name and more about the company she prefers.

  “Yes. I do.”

  Pen sits with Moses during math, and the numbers only swim a little.

  • • •

  It’s been ten months since Pen’s concussion, and she’s pinned underneath some concrete. Her helmet and mask are gone—must have been knocked off when the giant lizard thing they were fighting flung her several blocks with its surprisingly quick tail. The sun is at just the wrong angle, or maybe that’s her head, because no matter how she twists, it’s still shining right in her eyes. Her head is already feeling strange, like it isn’t attached to her body quite right, and if Pen could feel pain, she’s pretty sure she’d be hurting right now.

  Well, her body is getting crushed by the remnants of what looks like a wall of the library, so she’d be hurting regardless. That’s beside the point.

  It takes her longer than it should to find her voice, and her chest clenches at the thought of having to start over, of new holes in her vocabulary when she’s just started to patch the old ones. But after a few moments of struggling, a strangled “Help!” leaves her lips, and within the minute, Davie is standing over her.

  “Pen?” He’s shaken enough that he forgets to use her codename. It’s okay. There’s no one around. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of there, okay? Hold on.”

  Whether by accident or design, Davie stands in the light as he works, grabbing gears and other bits of metal from the various pockets hidden in his suit. Pen loves watching technopaths work, and Davie’s the best she’s ever seen. Her panic fades away, leaving her more than a little embarrassed, because this is nowhere she hasn’t been before. Just not since the injury.

  “I didn’t realize it was you at first,” Davie says as he guides his creation to where it will have the best leverage to lift the rubble enough for Pen to get out from under it. “I wasn’t aware that ‘help’ was in your vocabulary.”

  Privately, Pen didn’t think it had been, either. She can’t ever remember saying it out loud before. It doesn’t feel as shameful as she thought it would.

  Out loud, she groans, “Less talking, more lifting, little brother.”

  But her mask is gone, so there’s nothing to hide her proud grin.

  The fight does make her lose a few things. But no more than the sirens and flashing lights did that night she walked home without her shades. It’s predictable: this two steps forward, one step back. Aggravating, but it no longer feels like her world is falling out from under her every time she has a bad day. That’s what progress feels like, right? Like finding balance in a mess. Like finding new words under the rubble.

  Pen stops thinking about “getting things back to normal” and starts thinking about what she can do to feel better, what she can do to be better. Even if better looks different than it used to.

  • • •

  It’s been eleven months since her head hit that ice, and Pen still can’t spell like she used to, but she’s better at remembering to spell-check now. She still keeps shades on her at all times, but she’s finding that she needs them less and less.

  “Maybe it’s because it’s winter now. You’ve got cloud cover.”

  “Could be.”

  She and Sandhya are early for weekend training, sitting on the bench outside of the shut-down school they use as a makeshift base. They don’t technically have a key, because that’s a thing the leader has, and although neither of them would have any trouble breaking in, they let Kieran have this faux victory. Anyway, it’s one of those late-in-the-year days that is just cold enough to make you feel like you’re more awake than usual, and the two of them both want to soak up as much of it as they can. Pen’s mind feels clearer than she can remember it feeling in a long time, and she closes her eyes, wanting to commit the feeling to memory, so she can come back to it when the clouds leave the sky and take up residence in her head instead.

  “It’s good to see you looking so happy.”

  Pen blinks, and opens her eyes. Slowly, because that’s something she does now, giving her eyes time to adjust. “Was I not happy before?”

  “You might have been.” Sandhya shrugs, drawing little symbols into the frost beside her. “You just never told anyone one way or another.”

  “I’m not saying anything now, either.”

  “Yeah, but I can see it, silly.” Sandhya reaches over and tangles a hand in her hair, probably because she knows how long Pen took getting it untangled this morning. Her friends know her better than she ever really gave them credit for. “You let yourself smile, now.”

  Pen can’t think of any response, but that’s okay. Her smile should be enough.

  She’s still barely passing math. She asks Moses to tutor her, and he has the decency to not look too shocked at her request for assistance.

  “Of course, I can,” he says. “But don’t you already go to a study group every day after school?”

  “I can make time for this. Anyway, we’re all more like a group of friends than anything productive.”

  Moses laughs. “Fair enough. It’s good to hear you have some of those, Pen.”

  He must have overheard Davie using the nickname. He’s always had a good eye for details. His way of learning math is completely different than hers, but that’s okay. That’s what she needs. Sometimes, when a tunnel collapses, you’re better off foregoing clearing it out in favor of digging an entirely new one. She thinks of her brain as an ant hill, or a subway network, and writes down everything Moses is telling her. The dirt shifts. The tunnel holds.

  • • •

  “I was really worried, you know,” says Davie, in a surprising moment of sincerity.

  It is almost a year to the day since Pen slipped and cracked her head against the icy pavement. She thinks about looking for her hospital bracelet to find out the exact date but decides she doesn’t care. What she cares about is this: she and her brother are playing some convoluted card game that she’s pretty sure is just a bastardized version of Go Fish, expertly ignoring the world past the bedroom door. At least for the evening.

  “Because you know I’m ruthless when it comes to card games?”

  He rolls his eyes. “In your dreams. No, I mean when you hit your head. You were always quiet, but for a while there, I thought I was going to forget what your voice sounded like altogether.”

  “Oh.” She looks down at the cards in her hands, but the numbers are starting to be unreadable, and she’s much more interested in what is going on across from her. This is a conversation she’s been expecting for months now. She’s honestly shocked Davie lasted this long. She owes him her full attention.

  His over-expressive face looks almost cartoonish in the low light of the candles they’ve been playing by, and Pen takes a moment to take him in. People used to wonder about them, opposites in every way. Davie with his dark skin and tight curls, Pen with her bright blue eyes and pale blonde hair—long even then.

  She’s thinking of cutting it. Sandhya offered to do it for her–she thinks she’s going to take her up on the offer. Pen wants to know if it will make her feel lighter, shedding it all. Wants to see who looks back at her from the mirror.

  It wasn’t just looks that had people talking, either. Davie, despite being the younger by eight months, despite his dramatic origin story (abandoned on a doorstep
like a comic book hero, small enough to barely count as a baby at all, adopted more out of a sense of duty than anything) was talking a full half a year before Pen got around to saying her first word. He spent their shared childhood charming everyone he came across, while Pen hung back. Not shy, like people always guessed, but barely knee-height and already distant. Already weighing each word she said like she only got so many.

  “It’s a good thing she took to school as well as she did,” she remembers overhearing her mother tell one of the other moms. “Otherwise we were going to have to start getting her tested for things.”

  It was her brother who was initially approached by Kieran, too. She was only brought on board because of Davie. Davie who somehow knew he could trust this strange, focused boy at face value when he said he was putting together a team of superheroes. Davie who whispered like a proud secret, “Oh yeah, my sister can’t feel pain and her skin doesn’t break.”

  Pen owes a lot to her little brother. She’s not sure if she’s ever said that out loud before.

  “Sorry for worrying you.” She watches his mouth twist, probably preparing to protest against her apology. She doesn’t let him get there. “And thanks.”

  “You don’t need to apologize. And you don’t need to thank me either, Pen.”

  “No, I do.” She puts her cards down so she doesn’t distract herself with them, then regrets doing it. This would be easier if she had something to fiddle with. “You’re always looking out for me, even though you’re the younger sibling—”

  “Pen, you’ve been protecting me from big bad bullies since we were six.”

  It’s her turn to make a face. “That’s not . . . That’s not what I’m talking about. That’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m trying to thank you for helping me with . . . everything. You’re just talking about how I used to punch people for you.”

  “I don’t think those two things are as radically different as you are implying.”

  “Yes, they are. You’re just trying to derail this now.”