Rivals

by David Wellington

  His face smashed across the bricks of the chimney, his arms flapping out to wrap around it. His chest made contact and bright pain flashed through his body, even as he felt the bricks crumbling, felt them shift and start to fall apart beneath him. He reeled back and gasped as the chimney fell, bricks bouncing off the roof and clanging off the gutters.

  Maggie dropped out of the air beside him. “Oh my God, Brent! Are you okay? You just hit that thing face first!”

  “I’m… okay,” he said. He shook his head as if to clear it, but honestly, he felt fine. “I think we’re tougher than we look, now.”

  “Didn’t it hurt?” Maggie asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah, it did,” he admitted. “But only for a second. Then my body just kind of… shook it off.” He turned to look at Maggie with a huge smile on his face. “We’re like, indestructible!”

  “Yeah, okay,” Maggie said. “Let’s not get carried away.” But the look on her face suggested she believed him.

  “Oh, there is one thing, though,” he told her.

  “What?” she asked, concerned.

  “You’re it!” And then he laughed out loud and jumped for the next roof.

  He jumped from roof to roof barely feeling the shingles under his feet. He stopped for a half a second to pull his shoes off—it was easier to grip the uneven surfaces with his toes. It was an amazing feeling to be up in the air, for those few seconds when gravity couldn’t touch him, when he might as well have been up in space, and then exhilarating to watch the next roof come up toward him, unable to change his course, looking for the best place to grab on with his feet.

  Maggie chased him around the mall and up toward the west side of town. He could hear her laughing behind him, calling out mock threats: “I’m going to get you! You’re mine now!” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard her laugh.

  She tagged him in mid-air, grabbing his foot as she streaked past him to land ahead of him on the flat top of a hardware store. Flat roofs were almost harder to land on, because you tended to slide, and after she grabbed his foot she pulled upwards, giving him a wicked spin. He tumbled down onto the hardware store roof and did a face plant right into a metal ventilation hood that crumpled up under the weight of his impact. He was a little bummed to see that it didn’t mold to the shape of his face. Instead it just bent in half and the fan inside clanged to a stop. Brent climbed back up to his feet and looked around for Maggie but he couldn’t see her. They were closer to the downtown section now, and there were plenty of streetlights, so even the darkness shouldn’t have hid her, but no matter what direction he turned he couldn’t her anywhere.

  “Over here,” she called, leaping toward him from across a parking lot that had to be a hundred yards wide. Surely it was too far to jump, he thought. But then he’d been wrong every time he thought he knew their limits before. “Are you blind as well as stupid?” she mocked, rising high up in the night air.

  Brent rushed forward, intending to catch her as she came down, but then he saw in horror that she was descending too fast. It had been too far—she was never going to make the rooftop. “Mags!” he shouted, “look out!” But there was nothing he could do but watch. She came in fast and too low and instead of landing on top of the hardware store she hit the side of it, her whole body smashing against the side wall and then sliding down three stories, bouncing off signs, window casings, satellite dishes and clotheslines on the way down. He saw her head smack against a brick windowsill and flop around on her neck as if she were a rag doll.

  “Mags,” he said, taking a step back from the edge of the roof. “Oh, no. Mags. Mags—”

  She popped up over the edge of the roof and landed right in front of him. Her skirt was torn a little at the hem and there was a greasy stain on her t-shirt. Her hair was a little messed up. Otherwise she looked perfectly fine. “I guess we know one thing about our powers now,” she said.

  “What’s that?” Brent asked.

  “We can’t fly.” Then she tagged him on the shoulder and jumped across the street, bouncing off the row of buildings there like a stone skipped off the surface of a lake.

  Chapter 10.

  They jumped to the far side of town and they weren’t even tired. Maggie lead Brent over to a junkyard on the far side of a quarry and for a while they tried out their new strength by picking up old rusted-out cars and playing catch with them. Brent would run backward, his feet stamping down on broken glass and old orange sharp pieces of metal, feeling as if he were running on a pebbly beach, and then as the car came flying at him out of the night he would hold up his arms and catch it with both hands, grabbing at exposed engine parts or axles or the edges of windows that had lost their glass long before. Then he would wind up, swinging from the waist, and throw the car back. That lasted until Maggie missed a catch and the car Brent had thrown landed on a pile of old washing machines and a couple broken-down carnival rides, which exploded in a cloud of rust and flying springs and cogwheels and dryer doors that went spinning up into the air and then came down hard, digging long furrows in the dirt. The noise was immense, deafening, and Brent wasn’t surprised when he heard a dog barking and saw someone with a flashlight come running toward them.

  “Whoops,” Maggie said. She ran up to the top of a stack of long pipes and gestured for him to follow as she jumped back into the air and away. The flashlight speared upwards after them but they were already gone, half a block away and accelerating.

  Brent was still “it”, jumping from the top of the elementary school to the complicated roof of the local industrial bakery when he noticed Maggie wasn’t chasing him anymore. He skidded to a stop before he fell through a bunch of skylights and then looked back. This time he could see her just fine. She was perched like a bird on the edge of a roof, two or three blocks back, looking down. She wasn’t laughing anymore.

  Brent jumped back the way he’d come and found her staring down into the street at a line of very small houses across the way. The houses had unkempt yards and a chain-link fence running around each little plot of land. In most of the windows he could see the flickering blue light of television sets. Some of them were dark.

  The house that Maggie was staring at had a yellow light in one window. Brent could see a man sitting at a kitchen table inside, hunched over some papers. He looked like he was doing his taxes or something, and having trouble.

  “Mags?” he asked, coming up behind her. “What are you looking at?”

  “Dad took me out here, once,” she said, very quietly. “He didn’t want to. He didn’t think it was appropriate but I asked and asked until he gave in and said yes. I wanted to meet him,” she said, nodding at the man in the window. “I wanted to ask him some questions. I thought you should come, too, but Dad said you were too young. I’ll never forget this house. We drove up and parked over here, and then Dad and I stood in the street just looking at the house for the longest time. It scared me. It scared me so much I couldn’t move. I memorized every detail of what it looked like while I was trying to muster the courage to go up and press the door bell. Dad wouldn’t do it for me, he said. If I really wanted it I had to do it myself.”

  Brent was afraid he knew who the man was, now. He didn’t want to say it out loud, though. “Did you ring it?” he asked.

  Maggie wrapped her arms around her knees. “No. I chickened out. I just wanted to ask him why, you know? I wanted to ask him why he killed Mom.”

  “We know why,” Brent insisted. “The lawyer said. He was drunk, and he lost control of the car. It was just an accident. Sometimes people make bad choices, and other people get hurt.” It was not something Brent understood very well, himself. He had never seen why anyone would get in a car if they knew they were drunk. Dad had suggested that when you drank, sometimes you couldn’t tell how drunk you were, and sometimes it seemed you were fine when you really weren’t. Brent, who had never so much as tasted alcohol, didn’t know.

  He started to say something more when Maggie stood up straight as a knife a
nd dropped into the street. She landed effortlessly and walked across to the fence around the man’s house. Brent started to follow but he didn’t know what she was going to do. Maggie tore open the man’s trash cans and then threw the lids back on with a clattering noise. Then she grabbed the blue recycling bin and held it up so Brent could see.

  Brent looked up and saw the man looking out of his yellow window. His face was scared, Brent thought. Really scared. He didn’t know what Maggie was going to do next, either. But he recognized her. Brent could see it in his face. The man knew exactly who Maggie was.

  “Vodka,” Maggie said, picking a bottle out of the bin. She hurled it at the house and it shattered against the wall with a tinkling rattle. “Gin,” she said, and threw another bottle. This one was plastic and it just bounced off with a clunk. “Beer. Plenty of beer.” The bottles crashed on the side of the house like machine gun bullets. “You’re still drinking!” she yelled. “How can you still be drinking!”

  Eventually, Brent managed to pull her away before she could do anything worse. They headed home, jumping back the way they’d come but it wasn’t a game anymore. When they made it back to their house and climbed back in through Brent’s window, Maggie was shaking. She stood in the door of his room and looked down at her fingernails.

  “I wanted to kill him,” she said.

  “I know,” Brent told her.

  “After all this time I haven’t forgiven or forgotten anything. I don’t think I can. I think there’s something wrong with me.”

  “No,” Brent told her. “That’s not true.”

  “I could kill people, now, pretty easily,” she said. “With these new powers? I could have punched him a couple of times and that would have been all it took. I could have picked him up, jumped to the top of the bank building downtown, and dropped him over the side. I could have—”

  “But you didn’t,” Brent told her.

  She went back to her room without saying more.

  Chapter 11.

  In the morning Weathers was waiting for them when they came downstairs.

  Brent and Maggie were already dressed, already had their backpacks on. Maggie had been working her Sidekick hard all morning, texting with one thumb while she brushed her teeth—making contact with her friends whom she hadn’t seen since before Dad died, figuring out who she would eat lunch with at school. Brent had already started worrying about how far behind he was going to be in Algebra, having missed more than a week of classes. Both of them were in a hurry to get to school.

  School was just going to have to wait.

  Grandma had made a pot of tea, and set out a simple breakfast. Toast and jelly and a platter of scrambled eggs. Weathers was sitting at their kitchen table dabbing at the corners of his mouth with a napkin.

  “You two have fun last night?” he asked, as they came into the kitchen.

  Maggie took off her backpack and set it by the door. She knew what that tone of voice meant. Dad had never been much of a disciplinarian but he was a parent and he could always let you know when you were in trouble with a single look or a few softly-spoken words. This felt exactly the same as that.

  “Oh, come on!” she said. “We were just getting some exercise. There was a whole presentation at school last year about how the President wants us to get more exercise outdoors. Don’t you work for the President?”

  Even Brent couldn’t help but smirk at that. He quickly pulled himself together, though.

  “There are damaged roofs all over town. One house lost its chimney last night,” Weathers said. “The owner said it sounded like a bomb hit his house. The owner of the Gilbert Brothers Junkyard tells me he doesn’t know what happened, but it’s going to cost him good money to repair all the damage.”

  “What?” Brent said. “That’s not fair! That was all broken down junk we were playing with. We couldn’t possibly have damaged it any more than it was already.”

  “So you admit you were there last night? I wasn’t sure, I was just hoping you might have some information,” Weathers said.

  Maggie’s heart sank in her chest. Smooth move, bro.

  “We don’t admit to anything,” she said, before Brent could get them in any more trouble. “If you have any questions for us, we want a lawyer here before we say anything else.”

  Weathers sighed and took another bite of eggs. He chewed very slowly and then took a newspaper out of the inside pocket of his jacket. He unrolled it and threw it on the table where they could both see it. The front page was taken up almost entirely by a grainy black and white picture of Maggie holding a broken-down car over her head while Brent raced backwards to catch it. The headline read simply WHO ARE THEY?

  “The picture was taken with a cell phone camera in poor lighting conditions. There’s not enough detail for the local police to identify either of you,” he said, reaching for a tea cup. “I kept your names out of it. But that’s just delaying the inevitable. Sooner or later—probably in the next twenty-four hours—someone is going to come forward and say they recognize the clothes you’re wearing in that shot. Or maybe somebody else saw you two last night jumping around like monkeys. I won’t be able to stop them all. And then the world is going to want to talk to you, all at once. You’ll have no privacy after that. The media will hound you constantly. And that’s just the start of it.”

  “I don’t suppose the FBI runs a Secret Identity program,” Maggie tried.

  “No, we do not. We do, on the other hand, enforce the law. The owner of that junkyard—or that chimney—may press charges and then I’ll have to arrest you. I don’t want that. I think there are other things we can do with you two.”

  “What, like dissect us in a lab somewhere?” Maggie asked.

  “Margaret Reynolds Gill!” Grandma said. “You will not take that tone in the presence of company.”

  Company, Maggie thought. Yesterday at the hospital you told him to get out. Now he’s your best friend. As usual Grandma’s behavior made no sense to her.

  Weathers finished his breakfast and left. Grandma wrote Brent a note so he could get into school late and then sent him off. Before Maggie could go, however, she had one more thing to say.

  “You made a mess of things, young lady, and there’s consequences for that. When you get home from school today your hi-fi will be gone from your room.”

  “My… hi-fi?” Maggie asked. “What’s a hi-fi?”

  “That overly loud music system you were listening to yesterday! I don’t know where you hide the record player,” she said, and Maggie’s eyes went wide—apparently Grandma had never heard of iTunes, “but I’ll find it and confiscate that, too. No music as long as you continue to act like this!”

  “Don’t you dare,” Maggie said. The music was the one thing that could calm her down. Without it she thought she would go crazy. “And what are you going to do to punish Brent?”

  “Nothing. I know that last night’s rumpus was your idea,” she said to Maggie. “You leave your brother alone. It may be too late to save you, but he’s a good boy and I won’t have him corrupted.”

  “That’s not fair!” Maggie whined. “Always when Dad punished us he punished us both equally. He made sure we both knew what we did wrong.”

  “I am not your father,” Grandma said.

  Which was just painfully obvious. Maggie grabbed her backpack and stormed out of the house, not even waiting to get her note. If the vice principal at the school gave her trouble about coming in tardy, she would—well—there were lots of things she could do.

  Chapter 12.

  For Brent that first day back at school was… interesting. It became clear very early in the day that everyone had seen the paper—and that they knew exactly who was shown in that photo. His teachers all made a point of acting like nothing had happened. In English class Miss Holman didn’t even look up when he slipped in and took his seat. For every class after that it was much the same. The teachers barely acknowledged his existence. When he held up his hand they called on somebo
dy else. When class ended, they bent quickly over their desks and made a show of working on papers. The teachers knew something had changed but they didn’t want to acknowledge it.

  The students, however, reacted differently.

  In every class—in every hallway—in the lunchroom—he was the center of attention. At lunch he got his macaroni and cheese and his chocolate milk like everyone else and went to sit down. Normally, because your popularity was determined by who you sat with and what table you had, it was next to impossible to find a good seat. That day when Brent looked around for a place to sit, an entire table opened up. It wasn’t that kids got up to make room for him. Everyone just seemed to slide down a space or two and suddenly there was a whole table that wasn’t being used.

  He sat down and unwrapped his plastic knife and fork. He bumped his tray and it made a clinking noise as the plate jumped. The cafeteria fell silent.

  Which was weird. Normally you couldn’t hear yourself think in there. A couple hundred kids who had been quiet all morning in class suddenly had a chance to talk to each other and the resulting noise was, well, loud.

  Now you could hear every time somebody shifted in their seat and their clothes rustled.

  Brent looked up and around at the people sitting near him. A lot of them were looking down at their own trays. A lot of them were looking at each other. Which was how it should be. But then—a sizeable minority of them were looking right at him. Staring at him.