by Sarah Cross
Afterward I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, cold sweat drying on my skin, a silver-and-white business card held loosely in my hand. My powers have made me this whole other person. My dreams are different, my needs are different—but I can only be myself 10 percent of the time. Maybe less. And even so, I’m still hiding.
Lying in the dark, I wonder what it would be like if I lived somewhere where this was life, all the time. Where everyone was like me.
I don’t even know the reality of living with Cherchette. I mean, hell, there’s the problem of Jacques being there, and freezing all the time—that’s a pretty big negative. It’s ridiculous to even contemplate it.
But . . .
What if it isn’t?
In the morning it starts all over again. Until Darla makes good on her “I’ve got awesome plans for us” promise, and Friday nights get a whole lot more intense.
On Friday night, our secret identities are three masquerade masks (two silver, one pink) and one black knit ski mask.
“Take your pick,” Sophie says. “Except for the pink one—that’s mine.”
We’re gathered just off the park’s beaten path, five amateur crime fighters suiting up in the moonlight, ready to catch the mugger who’s made this park his personal purse-snatching ground. Nicholas dives for the ski mask so I’m stuck with silver, making me costume twins with Jacques—who’s here, despite Darla’s attempts to keep him out of this. He’s dressed for a night of fine dining followed by the opera or something, and looks more like a disgruntled matador than a superhero.
“I’m good,” Darla says. “Got my mugger-bait costume right here.” She pulls a hot pink velvet tracksuit on over her clothes. The butt says RICH BITCH in gold embroidery. All the price tags are still attached and she quickly tucks them inside the waistband, then finishes her disguise with an enormous Louis Vuitton purse—it’s almost big enough to be a suitcase.
I give her my best mind-boggled look. “What do you carry in there, a tiny horse?”
“Temptation!” She gives the purse a hearty shake so it jingles. “All the change I could find in my house. It’s noisier than dollar bills.”
“And really not suspicious at all,” Nicholas says.
“The mugger will fall for it. Trust me,” Darla says. “If he was smart he’d be an investment banker—he wouldn’t be robbing joggers in the park.”
Sophie nods in agreement, buckling her utility belt over her snug figure-skater-esque costume, and double-checking her row of boomerangs to make sure they’re all in place. She has a new sparkly pink-and-red one that gets extra-special attention. She must be eager to try it out.
“Everybody ready?” Darla says.
We fan out and head for our positions. Nicholas hangs back, camouflaged by the shadows. He and Darla got into an argument in Jacques’s car, about how his power isn’t good for anything so she shouldn’t try to invent good uses for it, etc., and Darla came up with this “last resort” plan: if the mugger has a gun and it looks like he’s going to use it before we can disarm him, Nicholas will get his vortex going and absorb it.
No offense to Darla and her genius intellect, but that’s idiotic. We all know Nicholas can’t direct his power with any accuracy, and panicking him with the idea that he might have to use it is only going to make things worse. I pulled him aside when we arrived and told him not to worry—if there was a gun, I’d handle it. I have armed-bad-guy-takedown experience.
Riiight. We all know how that went.
Sophie and I are stationed in trees at different points along the jogging path, equipped with binoculars and miniature communicators (comprised of a plug-in earpiece and a tiny microphone that attaches to your mouth like a fake lip ring). “Anything?” I whisper.
There’s a soft crackling in my ear. “Not yet.”
I push the leaves out of my way, watching for Darla to round the bend. The jingling precedes her: a bunch of coins clanging together and then thumping en masse like a fist against the bottom. I bite my knuckle to keep from laughing.
Darla hums as she jogs. She pops her bling-encrusted thumb up as she passes my tree. The jingling grows faint and then louder again as Darla rounds the half-mile path for the second time, face flushed but her smile intact. By the third lap, there’s still no sign of the mugger. Darla’s flagging. That purse looks as heavy as her steps, and she’s not exactly a track star.
“Pace yourself,” I murmur into the mike. “It doesn’t have to look like you’re into it; just that you’re here. This could take a while.”
“Or forever,” Nicholas says. “Maybe this is his day off. I’m ready to go if you guys are.”
“No way.” Darla’s rough breathing breaks her sentences into pieces. “I calculated. This is. An ideal time for. Him to strike again. We’re not leaving.”
She’s probably right. Hell, there’s a Jag in the parking lot; if the mugger’s here, he knows he’s got a rich victim on his hands. Hmm. Unless . . .
“Unless he’s stealing Jacques’s car,” I say.
I think I detect an exotic curse in my earpiece. First word I’ve heard from him all night.
“My bet is on both,” Sophie says. “Much easier to get the keys from the owner than to break in, if—whoop!”
My earpiece hums with a weird, staticky shuffling. A crash. Then—
“Sophie?” I rattle my speaker around, which just makes it fall out. As I’m struggling to get the bee-size device back in place, I see Darla careen around the bend, hauling ass like she’s twenty feet from the finish line and there’s a rampaging grizzly behind her.
A black-clad guy—dressed kind of like me, actually—is tearing after her in sneakers and Adidas pants, rapidly closing the distance. I leap from my perch, soles making contact just as a slick of ice shoots across the path. The mugger’s feet fly out from under him and he slams onto his back, hard.
Sophie’s charging toward him from the opposite direction, hand on her utility belt, her eyes on the prize. She’s closer, but I’m faster—and I’m not taking any chances. The mugger could have a weapon.
I dive at him, pinning his arms. We both go sliding—BOOM!—right into the wake of a glitter-and-pepper-spray explosion. Sophie’s shiny pink-and-red boomerang lies next to us, devoid of its irritating contents. It’s the last thing I see before my eyes tear up and start to burn like a thousand skunks peed in them. I’m coughing, my spit thick and disgusting, struggling not to claw at my throat, wipe my eyes—or even try to move—because I know I’ll just slip on the ice, and I need to keep this guy stationary.
“Ohmygod, Avery!”
I take that as an apology.
There’s enough glitter on my body to keep Big Dawg’s arts-and-crafts class happy for a year. I’m hacking up gobs of bitter, sparkle-filled saliva. Ptoo!
“We’ve got it under control!” Darla says. “Just a few more seconds.”
While the team waits for the pepper cloud to clear, I keep the mugger on the ground. He’s fighting me, cursing between bouts of wheezing, but he’s no match for my strength or three years’ worth of wrestling skills. Then his body starts to get cold—and my temperature plummets, too.
“What the hell is Jacques doing?” I grunt.
Ice boy deigns to speak to me for the first time all night. “Lowering his body temperature so he’ll stop struggling.”
“Great idea!” Sophie chirps. No “Nice takedown, Avery,” I notice.
I grind my face against my sleeve, try to wipe some of the mess away so I can see what’s going on. Sophie and Darla are binding the mugger with rope, securing the trap with an elaborate knot. Red and pink glitter specks freckle their faces: a Valentine and chili-pepper supernova. Nicholas is standing clear of the chaos, shaking his head at us, baffled or amused or both.
Now that the mugger can breathe again, he’s suddenly inspired to utter more than four-letter words. “F-freaking maniacs!” he says, shivering in his rope straitjacket. “Who does this shit?”
“You would’ve gotte
n away with it if it wasn’t for us meddling kids,” Darla says.
Once the mugger’s pretty much hog-tied, I carry him to one of the park benches and we tie him to that, too—then call the police from an ancient pay phone. Jacques pulls the Jaguar out of the lot and takes it to a preplanned meeting place to wait for us, and Darla, Sophie, Nicholas, and I watch from a distance while police apprehend the mugger. His face matches the sketch Darla saw in the newspaper (give or take a hundred pounds of glitter), so they know they’ve got their guy. Although how they got him remains a mystery.
“Sorry I pepper-sprayed you,” Sophie says, after we’re done trading high fives, now trooping down a side street on our way to rendezvous with Jacques. “It was an accident. I launched that boomerang before I even saw you.”
“Don’t worry. He’s used to it,” Darla says. “We’re helping him develop an immunity.”
Unreal. I give Nicholas my what-the-crap look and he shrugs.
“You can’t argue with genius. I mean, if Einstein said that, you’d just take his word for it, right?”
Darla jabs him with a glitter-flecked elbow. “Wiseass. Anyway, I’m proud of us. We did an awesome job.”
“We really worked together,” Sophie says. “Even Jacques. You have to admit he was the MVP tonight.”
Um, whatever. I try to keep my grimaces to a minimum, for Sophie’s sake. Yeah, maybe he was sort of useful—if you think freezing your own teammate is ethical, which I don’t.
Luckily Darla has even less self-restraint than I do.
“Sure,” she says. “He lulls us into a state of complacency, posing as a helpful member of the team—only to betray us in the end. I know how this stuff works. If anything, tonight has only served to show me how dangerous he is.”
“You’re impossible,” Sophie grumbles.
“The real lesson is this,” Darla says. “You guys don’t need anyone to teach you about your powers. You can learn in the field, through action. We can set up training scenarios, too—I’m already working on some ’bots, I’m just short on parts right now—but imagine all the kick-ass stuff we could accomplish! It’s like, you learn best through doing, and what better way to create an environment ripe for innovation than for you guys to put yourselves in positions where people need you? Where your powers can do actual good?”
Nicholas has been quiet the whole time she’s been talking. Now he snaps like she’s hit a nerve. “What good am I supposed to do? Hurt people? Kill them?”
“No,” Darla says. “No! See, that’s what I’m saying—you might not even know what you can do until someone needs you, and your body responds.”
“My body’s a hell of a lot more responsive to outside influences than anyone else’s,” Nicholas says. “That time at Sophie’s house, when you guys were arguing and I had a flare-up—what was that? Was my body going to end the conflict by destroying one of you? Is that how it works?”
“No!” Darla’s getting frustrated; words are failing her, but it’s like she’s determined to prove Nicholas wrong. “I mean if someone really needed you—”
“You think there’s a difference? It’s still a reaction. What, my body knows best sometimes and other times it’s chaotic? One day it’s a savior, the next it destroys someone?”
“Don’t get excited,” Sophie murmurs, rubbing his back. “Come on, you don’t want to get angry and then—”
“You’re failing at your own logic game, Darla.” Nicholas’s forehead is damp; his eyes spark with light. He runs his hand across his brow, takes stock of what’s happening. “I have to get out of here.”
He hurries across the street, leaving the three of us behind. Shocked. It’s almost eleven; we don’t exactly have the most reliable bus system, and it took us at least twenty minutes to drive here.
“How are you going to get home?” Darla calls after him.
“I’ll figure something out!” he shouts, cutting across an empty mini-mall parking lot. Litter flutters in his wake.
“Avery, you have to go after him,” Sophie says, once he’s out of sight.
“I will. Just let me walk you guys to the car.”
Darla’s eyes are scrunched and unhappy. She’s soldiering on with her fists clenched, like she wants to punch something. “What was I supposed to tell him? That he’s a lost cause? No! I don’t believe that!”
“Nicholas just . . .” Sophie bites her lip. “He needs more time. He’ll realize . . .”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“He will. We’ll put our heads together, all right? We don’t just give up.”
“I know.” Darla sighs, her whole face pulling down, distressed. “I just feel like Nicholas and I keep having the same fight, and it’s getting worse.”
“I’ll talk to him,” I say. I’m walking faster now, hoping Sophie and Darla will follow my example and pick up the pace. I want to get them off the street and into the relative safety of the Jaguar before too much time passes and I lose track of Nicholas altogether.
When we get to the dark and deserted scenic overlook, Jacques unlocks the car doors and gets out. “Where’s your friend Nicholas?”
Sophie lets out a long sigh, blowing glitter off the tip of her nose. “He ran off. We were talking and . . . he got upset.”
Jacques is convincing—you have to give him that. His icy model face thaws a little, so that he’s wearing a concerned expression. Almost like he genuinely cares. “Do you want me to drive around and look for him?”
“We don’t need your help,” Darla growls, flinging herself into the backseat, her body an angry tangle of hot-pink velvet tracksuit. “He’d be fine if your mom wasn’t filling his head with lies and making him stupid promises.”
“Stop it!” Sophie hisses. “Jacques didn’t do anything!”
“Yet!” Darla hisses back.
“Um, I’ve got it covered,” I say, almost—but not quite—feeling bad for Jacques. “I saw where he went. I’ll take a look for him and see if I can get him home.”
Jacques nods and slides into the driver’s seat, like he’s relieved to not have to deal with us anymore tonight. Sophie squeezes my hand.
“Good luck, Avery. I know you can do this. I have faith in you.” Then she pops up on one foot and kisses my cheek, totally out of nowhere. It’s odd—it’s the opposite cheek from the one Cherchette kissed the night I met her, but my face burns with almost the same intensity: fire instead of ice.
“Thanks,” I say.
The Jaguar peels away, and I swear it comes this close to running over my foot.
Not that I would feel it. I’m in a daze for a sec—then I snap out of it. My body goes on autopilot: I have a mission.
I have to find Nicholas.
· D. CARMINE · FILE #00373 Nicholas Brighter: ORIGIN STORY
* SECURITY LEVEL: Top Secret
* CATEGORY: Autobiographical Account
NOTE: The following account was written by Nicholas Brighter approximately three and a half months after his power manifested, and delivered to Darla Carmine in the interest of furthering her research.—D.C.
Itry not to put down roots when we settle into a new town, because I know before long we’ll have to move again—but I can’t help it. People and places stick with me; I close my eyes and I can picture them perfectly, with this weird sort of longing for the lives I never got to finish.
I remember playing war with my best friend in Florida, trampling the cilantro in my mom’s garden while we shot each other with my older brothers’ paintball guns—and I can still see the movie theater where I got my first kiss like it’s painted on the back of my eyelids. I get nostalgic for the house on the cul-de-sac in Virginia, when Brock and Jake still lived at home, and alternated torturing me with being the best brothers you could ever have. When they weren’t tying me up in a sleeping bag and leaving me hanging from a tree in the backyard (true story), they’d take me to the beach or to get ice cream, and they’d let me ride in the back of the truck with my dog.
; Back then, I was free to explore and build forts and play my guitar (badly). If I wanted to roam the woods for hours with my dog, Boots, looking for goblins or orcs behind trees . . . no one really minded. My dad was so busy obsessing over my brothers—their grades, how much time they spent benched or on the field, and whether they’d be admitted to the Academy—that I barely entered his radar.
Sometimes I wish I could go back, return to a place where I was just myself, not an inferior successor to Brock and Jake. I wish my family could’ve settled somewhere, instead of moving to a new state just as high school was starting, when all the cliques are preformed and airtight and if you’re new and you’re a little unusual, there’s no room to squeeze in.
“So make room,” my dad would say—like it’s that easy. I don’t have the commanding personality he has; or Brock’s physique, girls falling all over him and guys giving him respect; or Jake’s charisma, always making everyone laugh, fitting in wherever he goes. When you have someplace to disappear to (for me it’s music), it’s easy to just do it. To not make that extra effort so people notice you, so they want to get to know you.
The only reason I even met Darla is because my dad knows her dad through work. We clicked; she was willing to try things I was interested in, and she was full of life and craziness, always ambitious: scheming, inventing, creating. I taught her the rules for Warhammer, this tabletop strategy game I like, and we’d go to war in my basement for hours.
My dad hated it; still does. “Why do you have to coop yourself up like a vampire?” “Go outside; throw the ball around.” “You hang around girls all the time, you’re gonna turn into one.” Jake and Brock were away by then; Jake in the Academy, Brock serving in the U. S. Navy. And married! My oldest brother’s life was set up perfectly, exactly what my dad wanted. Only he couldn’t be satisfied—because he wanted that for all of us.
With no other guy in the house to micromanage, he turned to me. It started to irritate him that I was a “loner,” didn’t want to watch the game with him, and so on. I’d play my guitar, and he’d make fun of me for wanting to be a “rock star”—almost like if he picked at me enough, I’d lose interest and just live his life instead.
