Rivals

by David Wellington

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Research materials,” he told her. He pulled a plastic bag out of the closet and threw it to her. She caught it easily.

  She opened the bag and spilled out a couple dozen comic books with bright, lurid covers. They all showed men in various muscular poses, most of them punching something or about to be punched by somebody else. They wore elaborate costumes, some with masks, some with capes.

  He picked one up and stared at it. “I haven’t looked at these in years. I used to really love these but then after a while they seemed kind of dumb. Look, I remember this one. It’s about a guy who got bitten by a radioactive aardvark, right?”

  “Um, let me see—no, that’s the one whose experimental airplane crashed on this totally deserted island, right, and he found a cave, and inside the cave were all the gods of world mythology, and it turned out, right, he could summon any of them to help him out if he just said the right word.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Brent said. “Is this what I am now? Am I going to have to start beating people up?”

  “Hopefully only the ones who deserve it,” she told him. “You know, criminals, and dangerous types, and—and oh my God, you could fight supervillains, that would be so cool, except there aren’t any, are there? Because you’re the only one who—hey, I just thought of something, your sister, did she? I mean, I assume you both—but—but—”

  He rolled the comic book into a tube in his hands, rolled it tighter and tighter because he didn’t know what else to do. It was only after he’d rolled it as thin as a pencil that she noticed and stopped talking.

  “Brent!” Lucy said. “Stop! Those are highly collectable!”

  “It is kind of old,” he said. “Do you think it might be valuable?”

  Lucy stared at it in numb horror. “Not anymore,” she said.

  “Oh my God, that was stupid,” Brent said, smoothing it out as best he could. He put it down on his desk.

  “This isn’t just about superpowers, is it?” she asked him. “You have something else on your mind. I mean, if I had superpowers, that would be the only thing I could think about. I’d be concerned with finding out what my limitations were, and whether I had a fatal weakness to something, like, my powers didn’t work against the color blue, or if there was some special kind of radioactive rock that could hurt me, or—” She stopped. “There is something else. I can see it on your face.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it’s big. It’s bigger than the existence of superpowers.” Her eyes went wide. “Bigger than that?”

  “Yeah.”

  When he said nothing more she made a rolling motion with one hand, to suggest that he get on with it. She looked like she was dying to hear his big news.

  “There’s one more thing else I have to tell you. Except I don’t want to.”

  “But—”

  “But I have to. Because I have to tell somebody. And of all the people in the entire world, you’re the one I can trust the most.”

  Lucy pressed her lips together. She knelt on the bed and folded her hands in her lap. Then she nodded, to indicate she was ready to hear it.

  “I think I killed my dad,” he told her.

  Chapter 7.

  Maggie turned on her iTunes and sank down into the chair in front of her makeup table. The music throbbed through the room like fingers massaging her neck, but that just made her jumpier, like someone kept touching her on the shoulder telling her to turn around and look when she knew there was nothing there. She couldn’t seem to relax, couldn’t seem to think straight.

  She stared in the mirror and grabbed a mascara and started doing her lashes. She’d read an article in Cosmo about how to give yourself a smoky eye and she’d been wanting to try it out. Applying makeup was still a relatively new thing for Maggie. She’d been a tomboy and a jock for most of high school, and it was only when she started her senior year that she started really taking care of her appearance. It was right after Mom died, in fact. She’d figured out that it took total concentration to do your makeup effectively, and that while you were busy applying just the right amount of blush and eyeliner, you couldn’t think about—

  I killed Dad.

  —anything else. Well. That didn’t work. She threw the mascara down in disgust and started crying into her hands, big noisy sobs that no one would hear over the music.

  I could have gone back, like Brent wanted.

  Maybe Dad was still alive.

  “I didn’t know that we were okay!” she told the mirror. “I thought Brent was still on fire. I thought we had to get to a doctor ourselves. I thought—”

  She rubbed away her tears with the balls of her thumbs and grabbed for a tissue. When she looked back in the mirror she got a shock. She had managed to rub mascara all over her cheeks and temples and up onto her forehead. It was like she had taken a paintbrush full of black paint and swiped it just right across her face at eye level. It looked…

  Well, it looked like she was wearing a mask.

  She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry so she did both and she must have made a lot of noise because eventually there was a knock on her door and then Grandma came in. “I didn’t give you permission to enter my room,” Maggie said, rubbing at her face with the tissue. Where was the cold cream? She couldn’t let Grandma see her like that. The old biddy would think she was playing dress-up or something.

  “Young lady, turn off this music right now,” Grandma said, loud enough to be heard.

  Maggie reached over to her computer and turned it up, slightly.

  “You’re certainly your father’s daughter,” Grandma said. “Wild.”

  “Dad was a good man,” Maggie insisted.

  “He was a hellion. Never worked an honest day in his life. All he wanted to do was traipse about in the desert all the time, probably half-naked like a little boy!”

  Maggie spun around in her chair. She couldn’t believe this. “He was an engineer! He worked harder than you ever did.”

  “He ruined my little girl. Your mother. Made her crazy, too. Neither of them ever understood what family really means. Well, I’m not going to let that happen to you. Now you and I have had our differences over the years—”

  Maggie snorted.

  “—but that ends now. You kids need a parent around here. The Lord knows I’m too old for the job. And He also knows I don’t want it. But I am going to keep you on the straight and narrow. Something happened out there in the desert and now you’ve got the papers calling, and the government watching you. That is not acceptable. Not at a time when you need to focus on your studies. I am going to make sure that you both get off to college, where you’ll study nice, respectable subjects. And if I have to tan both of your hides to get you there, I will.”

  Maggie rolled her eyes. “Why are you always such a hardass, huh? My father just died. I just got out of the hospital. Be nice to me!”

  “Nice,” Grandma said. She brought her hands up where Maggie could see them. She showed her the engagement ring on her finger, with its tiny little diamond. That ring was one of her favorite threats. Always, when she slapped Maggie, she turned the diamond around so that it was inside her palm, and then she would hit Maggie with the back of her hand. She had threatened many times to hit her with an open palm—which would rake that diamond across Maggie’s cheek and cut her, maybe even leave a scar.

  “Before she died, your mother told me about you,” Grandma said, when they were both clear that niceness was not going to be part of their relationship. “She told me about your little problem. About your sticky fingers.”

  Maggie blushed despite herself. “She didn’t. Mom would never do that.”

  “She told me how worried she was about you. She told me you had stolen a bag full of makeup from a store downtown. Or at least, that you tried. She told me she had to go down there and talk your way out of the store, had to grovel in front of a security guard to keep the store from pressing charges. Do you know what I told her?”
/>
  “No,” Maggie said. “I’m not psychic.”

  Grandma leaned forward. Her eyes were very large and very bright behind her glasses. “I told her she should have let you rot in jail. But since that’s not an option this time, I need to make sure nothing like that every happens again. I came in here to lay down some ground rules. First off, no boys.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Grandma scowled at Maggie. Nobody could scowl like Grandma. “I called the school and I know what kind of grades you’re getting. You can go to one movie with a boy of your choice the day they tell me you’re working on straight As. Rule two is, no friends.”

  “What?”

  “I know what kind of friends a girl like you is likely to have. Smokers. Giggling little no-brains. Probably a couple of drug users. That ends now. After school, you’ll come straight home and do your chores and your homework. Then you and I are going to watch television every night from eight until nine thirty.”

  Maggie’s lips pressed together. “What happens at nine thirty?” she asked.

  “Bedtime,” Grandma said.

  Rule three was no allowance. What would Maggie need money for, anyway, since she wasn’t going to be hanging out with her friends and would have all her meals at home?

  Rule four was no talking back.

  It went on from there for a while. Maggie stopped listening. She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them there. She closed her eyes and just let the words wash over her, mixing with the music until it all just felt like wind in her hair.

  “Which brings us to rule seventeen,” Grandma said.

  Chapter 8.

  “No, no, no, you didn’t,” Lucy said, cradling Brent’s head against her chest. She ran one hand over his hair, over and over. “You couldn’t possibly have.”

  He was crying openly now. The events of the last week had totally undercut any idea he ever had about being a tough guy. “He said it wasn’t safe, that we should probably just leave. And it was so weird in there—I could barely hear his voice. It was the last thing he ever said to me! And then I found that well or—or whatever it was. It was closed off, there was a lid on top. But it looked kind of loose, and I thought I wanted to see if there was anything inside. I don’t know what I expected to find. But when the lid came off there was something green and glowing down there and it was getting bigger—like it was coming up from a long way down, coming up really fast.”

  Lucy kissed him on the top of his head. Which was a little weird but he didn’t mind. It felt kind of good.

  “Dad came rushing up behind me. He was shouting but there was no sound at all, everything was perfectly silent. He looked down into the well and then he grabbed the lid and tried to put it back on but—but it was too late. It was just too late. He was on fire, he was…”

  “You didn’t do anything.”

  “Yes, exactly! I didn’t stop him! I didn’t even try!”

  “No, no, no, no,” Lucy said again, and pressed her lips against his forehead. There was so much comfort in that kiss. It was amazing how good it felt just to have a friend right then. “You didn’t know. You couldn’t possibly know.”

  “Oh my God, Luce, it was so horrible. He—he melted while I watched. I would have stayed there and just watched and probably got killed myself if Maggie hadn’t come along. She saved me. If I’d been as smart as her, or as fast, maybe I could have—I could have done something for Dad.”

  “No, no, no, no,” Lucy repeated. “It wasn’t your fault.” She sat down next to him, so close their thighs were touching, and wrapped her arms around him. She held him tight while he shook and cried and got it out of his system.

  “Now he’s gone,” Brent said. “I don’t know what to do. Everything is different—I can’t talk to Grandma about this stuff. I keep thinking about what Dad would want me to do with these new powers. He would want me to do good things, I think. If I do good things, if I help people, maybe that’ll make up a little for killing him. Do you think so?”

  “Shh,” she said. “You didn’t kill him. And I think he’d be proud of you whatever you do. I heard him say that like, a million times.”

  When his sobbing had slowed down a little, when he wasn’t sucking in breath that he couldn’t seem to swallow, he turned slightly in her arms and looked up at her. She was smiling bravely. Like she wanted to show him she didn’t think he was a bad person. It meant so much, to see her smile like that, her face just a few inches away from his. Her mouth so close to his. He leaned in just a little closer, and she did, too.

  “You rock, Lucy,” he breathed.

  “Thanks,” she said. One of her hands tangled in the hair on the back of his head and she started pulling him even closer. Their lips grazed each other and he felt her braces underneath.

  He pulled back hurriedly. He had just almost kissed her! That wasn’t cool. Desperately, he tried to think of something to say that would smooth over what had just happened. “Best friends forever, that’s what the girls say, right? BFFs?” he asked her.

  He didn’t understand the look in her eyes. It was hopeful and terrified and lost and disappointed and burning with triumph all at the same time. He had no idea what she was thinking, or feeling.

  Then she lifted her arms away from him and reached for her leg braces. “I have to go home,” she said. “I forgot that I have to get dinner ready tonight, Mom is working late and if I don’t get the pork chops started right now my Dad isn’t going to have anything to eat, and he’ll just laugh, and then he’ll say forget the pork chops let’s order a pizza, which would normally be cool, except his cholesterol is up again and the doctor says he can’t have any cheese, and anyway I can’t eat pizza because it makes me break out but I want you to know, I’m totally your BFF, and I will always be here for you if you want to, to, to talk, yes, to talk, or you know, just hang out. Chill. Be cool, together, just two friends hanging, we don’t even have to talk, we can just be quiet sometime and see how long that lasts which, you know perfectly well, for me is not going to be that long. But we could try that.”

  “Thanks,” he told her, as she hobbled out the door. She didn’t reply or even look back. He really hoped he hadn’t screwed things up by nearly kissing her. It wasn’t like they’d ever thought of each other that way before but she was a girl and he was a teenage boy and sometimes you couldn’t help yourself, and—

  “Oh God,” he thought. “What if I made her feel so uncomfortable she won’t be my friend anymore?”

  A scratching sound on his window scared him half to death. He jumped up and ran to the window, throwing it open to see what was outside. It was Maggie, crouched on the roof looking in at him. She had a lot of eye makeup on and it made her eyes look huge.

  “You’re not the smartest brother anyone ever had, are you?” Maggie asked. “And you don’t understand other people at all.”

  “If you wanted to insult me you could have just come to my door,” Brent told her. He climbed through the window and into the chilly night air. You could see half the neighborhood from up there, rows of two-story houses curling in on themselves on meandering dead-end roads. In the distance the mall was a smudge of light on the dark blue horizon. “When was the last time we were up here?” he asked, feeling like the roof had gotten steeper or maybe his center of gravity had changed. It didn’t feel nearly as stable as it used to. “Before Mom died, I know, but how old were we?”

  “When I was your age.” Maggie skipped easily up the slope of the roof to stand on the very top of the house. “That’s probably how long it’s been since we did anything together without complaining about it.”

  “Without you complaining about it,” he corrected her. He wished she would come down from there. He didn’t want her to fall. He didn’t want to lose another family member for some stupid reason that didn’t make any sense. “Why did we stop hanging out together, anyway?”

  She shrugged. Then she stood up slowly on the toes of one foot, balancing herself by stretching out her arms. “
I guess we didn’t have anything in common. But now we do again.” Then she dropped to a crouch, pumped her legs—and sailed out across the darkness towards the roof of the house across the street. He could just hear her call back, “You’re it!”

  Chapter 9.

  Brent ran across the roof and jumped after his sister, still convinced somehow that it wouldn’t work, that he would fall crashing to the street below and shatter every bone in his body. But the muscles in his legs seemed to wake up as he moved, pumping harder and faster than he’d ever gone before. He pushed hard with his left foot and suddenly he was up in the air, hanging there it seemed—weightless, almost flying. Then he started to come back down and he saw the other rooftop beneath him. His feet pedaled in the air and then came down hard on the shingles, knocking a few of them free. He looked down to watch them spiral toward the gutter and nearly lost his balance. He threw his arms out and they wheeled through the air and he actually felt like he was going to take off, that he could flap his arms like wings and fly. He settled down and looked at his feet and saw the two dark holes he’d made when he landed. “Oh, crap,” he said. “I think I broke their roof.”

  “Please, don’t be such a drama queen! It was just a couple of shingles.”

  “Are you sure this is okay?” Brent asked. “We’re not supposed to use our powers. Weathers said—”

  “Who cares? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life pretending you’re still just like everybody else? Come on! If somebody can throw a baseball faster and harder than everybody else, they give him a multi-million dollar contract. Now we can do all kinds of things—and all the FBI wants to do is threaten us. Don’t you want to know what we can do? Haven’t you been thinking about it all day? Well, here’s our chance. Nobody will see us. How far do you think I can jump?” Maggie laughed and ran away from him, jumping to the next roof. He followed and barely touched down before he was aloft again, flinging himself out into the darkness. This is so easy, he thought—he could jump fifty feet without even really trying. He wondered, just like she’d said, how far he could go if he pushed himself and as Maggie leapt to the next roof in the row he dug down hard with his feet and pushed with everything he had. He flew right past the roof she’d landed on and kept going, crossed the shadowy gap between that house and the next, and as he started to come down he saw the chimney of the next house come up to meet him like a brick wall.