Rivals

by David Wellington

  “How could he know that?” Lucy asked.

  Brent shook his head. “Back when we first came out of the desert—the first time I met him—he had us tell him everything that had happened before Dad died, made us repeat every word either of us said. God! I should never have trusted him. You know what? I should start rebelling. I mean, I’ve got plenty to rebel against right now. You know what I should do? I should walk into the convenience store over there and take a pack of gum. And not pay for it. Just refuse to pay for it no matter what happens.”

  Lucy laughed. “I have some gum right here if you want it,” she told him.

  “That’s not the point! The point is to show the world that I’m not perfect. That they can’t expect these things from me all the time.”

  “Brent, Brent, Brent—if you tried that, you know what might happen? The owner of the store might just give you the gum. He would probably assume you needed it for some totally good reason, like, there was a dam somewhere and it was going to burst, right, and you needed the gum to seal up the crack.”

  “I could tell him otherwise. I could explain what I was doing.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Lucy said. “How about you just take a day off? Blow off a little steam. There’s a really good old movie on TV tonight, it’s called Omega Man, have you seen it? It stars that guy who ran the NRA, and it’s about the future when—well, I won’t spoil it, but we could make some popcorn and you and I could turn off our phones, and just kick back, and not worry about Maggie, or Matt Perkins or Ryan Digby or Weathers or your grandma or your dad or—”

  “Um.”

  She turned and looked at him. “What?” she asked.

  “I kind of… can’t. I have a date.”

  “A date?”

  Lucy walked over to the curb and sat down. Her leg braces clanked on the concrete.

  “A date,” she said. “With Dana Kravitz?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Brent said.

  Lucy put her face in her hands. He wasn’t sure but he thought she was crying.

  “Hey! Hey, Luce, it’s okay,” he said, trying to put an arm around her. She shrugged him off. “Look, I know, I know—she’s friends with Jill Hennessey, who’s a total ass, she’s part of the popular clique and I know we’ve never gotten along with them, but—but Dana actually seems kind of nice, when you get to know her. I mean, she just wanted to thank me, see, for saving her the other day. It’s nothing serious. Just dinner, at her family’s house. That’s all.”

  She dropped her hands into her lap and looked up at him. He’d seen the look on her face before. That night in his bedroom when he’d almost kissed her, she had that same look of despair and confusion. He had no idea what she was thinking, and he was afraid to ask.

  She dried her eyes and just breathed for a while. Then she asked, “What shirt are you going to wear?”

  Chapter 35.

  He showed up at the Kravitz house ten minutes early, because his mom had always taught him you shouldn’t keep people waiting. He didn’t want to look too eager, though, so he walked around the block a couple of times before ringing the bell. Then it occurred to him that someone in the house might have seen him wandering around and wondered what he was doing.

  He was nervous. Brent wasn’t sure why, exactly, but something about this—this date—had him all worked up. He was even sweating a little. He pressed the doorbell again and heard it ring inside the house, but still nobody answered.

  Which just made him more nervous. What was going on? Maybe something had come up, and Dana couldn’t have dinner with him tonight, he thought, which would be okay, honestly. He took out his cell phone and started to dial her number but had barely got into his phone book when the door opened.

  “Hi,” Dana said.

  Brent had no idea what to say in response.

  She was beautiful. She was always beautiful, even in the casual clothes most kids wore at school. But now she was wearing a dress, a short black dress with a scoop neck, and she had just a little makeup on, and her hair was—wow. Her hair was almost glowing. It fell in dark waves across her cheeks and it swung from side to side as she turned to look up the street.

  “There’s a van following you,” she said.

  Brent spun around and saw a newsvan creeping up the street toward him. A camera man was leaning out of the passenger side window, focusing on him.

  “You’d better come inside,” Dana told him.

  She lead him into a foyer full of dark wood furniture. All of it was polished and the glass and mirrors and brass was shining. He thought of Mandy Hunt’s house, which was immaculately clean and tastefully decorated but in the end just felt sterile and unlived-in. This was something else. He felt like he’d stepped back a century into a more elegant age. Dana’s family had money, he knew that. Brent’s family didn’t—at the moment, he and Grandma were just scraping by on money from Dad’s life insurance policy. It was hard not to feel like he’d come to the wrong house.

  “Come on through. We’re going to eat in the kitchen, if that’s alright. The dining room’s just not cozy enough.” She turned and smiled at him over her shoulder. “I hope you’ll like what I made.”

  I’m sure I will, he thought. And then realized he hadn’t said anything yet.

  “You look gorgeous,” he said, which sounded stupid when it came out of his mouth. She gave him another smile, though, and it was warm enough that he felt like he might get a suntan just from the light coming off her perfect teeth.

  She lead him into the kitchen, which was bigger than he’d expected but at least the furniture didn’t look like it cost more than his college fund. There was a simple table with straight-backed chairs. Two plates were already laid out with silverware and cloth napkins. Too much silverware, it looked like. There were three forks—what did you need three forks for?

  “Aren’t your parents going to eat with us?” Brent asked, when he’d processed the fact there were only two plates.

  “Oh, no,” she said, and her eyes were very wide. “You didn’t think—” She recovered herself. “Brent,” she said, “this is a date. They were kind enough to go out for the evening so we could be alone.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  He sat down and she served him a salad—that was what the first fork was for. The salad was delicately dressed and full of fresh vegetables. It was at that point he realized that he wasn’t hungry at all.

  “This is really nice,” he said, and pushed a forkful of microgreens and chopped mushrooms in his mouth. He chewed with determination. “You really didn’t need to go to all this trouble, though.”

  “It was no trouble, believe me,” she told him, waving her fork in the air. “We have a cook who comes in. I gave her an extra twenty dollars this week and she whipped all this up. Anyway, I really did want to thank you for saving me. When I was in your arms—”

  “I don’t think,” he said, interrupting her, “that you were in any danger. Really. I just didn’t want to take the chance.”

  She took a drink of water and studied him across the table. “You would have done it for anyone, is that how it works? Anybody in trouble? Why is that? What makes you want to save people? It’s not like they’d do the same for you.” She shrugged an apology. “Sorry, that’s a weird question, I guess.”

  “No,” he said. “No.” She got up and removed his salad plate—and his fork—and replaced it with his main course, a salmon filet in a creamy dill sauce. “It’s just… complicated. I have these powers and I guess I feel I have a responsibility to use them for… well. For good. My dad, you see—”

  —who I killed—

  “—he would have wanted me to help people. He believed that if you have the ability to help people, if you’re lucky enough to have something when other people don’t, then you always should.” I could have put that better, he thought.

  “I can understand that,” she told him. “My mom is really into charity. She’s always throwing parties to raise money for cancer research, or to h
elp homeless people, or whatever. Of course, what she spends on the parties is sometime more than she collects for the charities, but I think her heart’s in the right place.” She smirked. “Parents, huh? They try their best. But you can’t spend your whole life doing what your parents want.”

  “You can’t?” he asked. He took a bite of the salmon. It really was delicious, he thought, but in his mouth it felt like indigestible plastic. He’d barely touched the salad but it was filling up his stomach as if it had expanded in there, making him dread finding out what the third fork was for.

  “No way! My dad wants me to become a systems analyst. Just like him. Whenever my computer goes down he says I have to fix it myself, because I need to learn how. But that’s what techies are for, right? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking at page after page of code. I want to travel and see the world. I thought maybe I should be an airline hostess. They can travel for free, did you know that?”

  “No,” he said. He put his fork down on his plate. Dana moved quickly to remove the plate and replace it with dessert—cheesecake with real strawberries on top. He picked up the third fork and studied it. It was shorter than the others, and one of its tines had a sort of claw on the end. He’d never seen anything like it before in his life.

  “I think you should go to Hollywood,” she told him, her eyes shining. “You could be in the movies. You’re cute enough, in a scruffy kind of way. If we just fixed your hair you’d be a knockout.”

  He blushed. “I guess I could do my own stunts.”

  “Oh my God, yeah!” she laughed. “This is really fun, isn’t it? Look, I don’t want this dessert. It’s just empty calories and who needs those, right? Let’s go in the living room. Do you want to watch a DVD?”

  He stood up and started picking up the dishes. “I’ll wash if you dry,” he told her.

  Dana stared at him for a second. Then she shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. We have somebody for that, too. Come on!”

  She took him into a living room full of green leather couches and the biggest plasma TV he’d ever seen—it filled up half of one wall. She started gathering up remote controls and pointed, indicating he should sit on one of the couches. He sat down but before he could get comfortable she was on top of him, shoving in next to him so there shoulders and thighs touched and her head was lying on his shoulder.

  “Do you drink?” she asked.

  “Not really,” he told her.

  “That’s so good to hear. My last boyfriend was a total alcoholic. He never saw a keg he didn’t like. I think you and I are going to get along a lot better. Kiss me.”

  Alarm bells went off in Brent’s head. He felt a drop of sweat roll down the inside of his shirt collar. “What?”

  “It’s going to happen eventually,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “Why not now? Kiss me. Please?”

  “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with—”

  “Brent! It only feels awkward because you’re not doing what you’re supposed to. Kiss me, and if it still feels weird, then I promise I’ll let you go home, okay? But first we have to find out. We need to know if we have chemistry.”

  She was—she was right there. She smelled great. She was a beautiful girl. Brent was a fifteen year-old boy. He spent all day, every day, thinking about how great it would be to kiss a beautiful girl. Well, kissing wasn’t the only thing he thought about doing with girls, but it was a good place to start. He leaned his head down, just slightly, and let his lips meet hers. They were ridiculously soft. He pressed a little harder and felt her lips open a little bit beneath his.

  “There,” she told him. “That feels right, doesn’t it? It feels exactly right.”

  He kissed her again.

  It felt good. It made his head spin, in a good way. It made his whole body tense up, in an amazing way. Whether it felt right or not suddenly felt less important than it had before.

  Chapter 36.

  On the other side of town Maggie stopped with her finger over a doorbell and wondered if she should even announce her presence. Maybe it would be more effective to just tear the door off its hinges and storm inside.

  No, she thought. That might attract attention. By the look of the houses on either side, with their dying lawns hemmed in by chain link fences, she doubted any of the neighbors would want to get involved. But they might call the cops. So she leaned on the doorbell until she could hear it buzzing inside, and didn’t let up until he opened his front door.

  It was almost worth coming all this way in the middle of the night just for the look on his face. The color went out of his cheeks and his eyeballs quivered in their sockets. His jaw fell open, as if he wanted to say something but was too scared to breathe and form the words.

  “Just let me in,” she told him.

  He recognized her. He knew her all too well. From the day she and Dad had driven out here, when she’d been so intent on confronting him, on demanding answers. And from the night she and Brent had stood outside and she threw the empty liquor bottles at his wall. The guy who killed Mom knew exactly who she was, and what she could do to him. He probably thought he knew why she was there, too.

  Maybe he was right.

  He stepped back and flattened his back against a wall. She closed the door behind her, then walked into his living room. There wasn’t much furniture, just a patched corduroy couch and a tiny little television set with a cable box on top. She flopped down on the couch as if she owned the place and just stared at him for a while.

  “Are you going to kill me?” he asked, in a small voice.

  Maggie was a bad girl. Maggie was a villain. It turned out there wasn’t a lot to be said for villain as a career choice. But you did get to hurt people, even people who deserved it. It was expected of you to get revenge. She could kill this guy, and it would be easy. It would probably feel a lot better than when she hurt the policeman. Or even when she broke Grandma’s arm.

  “I want to talk, right now,” she told him.

  “Talk to me?” he asked.

  “Duh.” She stared at her nails. The paint on them had mostly chipped away but they were smooth and round. They didn’t seem to get any longer than they were when she got her powers. That was weird. Thinking about stuff like that was safer than thinking about what she was actually doing in the guy’s house. Sighing, she said, “Look, if you’re honest with me, if you answer my questions and you don’t lie, I promise I won’t actually kill you. That’s the best offer you’re going to get tonight, so I think you should take it.”

  He nodded readily.

  “You live alone?” she asked. He nodded. “Anybody coming over tonight?” He shook his head. “That’s a good start. You killed my mom.”

  He paused, then, as if thinking of the best way to answer her question. Finally, he sat down on the floor next to the television set and said, “Yes.”

  He wasn’t a big guy. He didn’t look like he was all that smart, either. What had his life been like, she wondered? Since the accident. “You went to jail for a while, on a felony charge. I guess it’s tough to come back from that. Hard to find a job.”

  “It’s been difficult,” he admitted. “Plus, you get a parole officer who comes around at random times. Checks up on you, makes sure you aren’t breaking any laws. It can get pretty intrusive. Look, Margaret, I regret what I—”

  “Don’t say my name,” Maggie told him. “Especially that name. Only my grandmother calls me that name anymore. Do you remember what my Mom looked like?”

  “Yes,” he told her. He put a hand over his mouth, then took it away again. “I only saw her the one time, of course. After the—the accident. I went over to her car to see if she was hurt, and, well, she was. But she was beautiful, just like you. Even with the blood and the steering wheel jammed into her—”

  “I didn’t ask for gory details.” There was no way Maggie wanted to know what that had looked like. “How can you remember what she looked like? That was over a year ago. And you only saw her for a min
ute, right?”

  “I’ll never forget. You don’t.”

  Was this what Maggie had come for? To find out what it felt like to have killed somebody? But she already knew that, didn’t she? She’d killed Dad. Just as certainly as this guy had killed Mom.

  “You keep thinking that maybe, today, it’ll be better,” he told her. “You wake up in the morning and for a second, just a second, you’re a normal person. A good person. Then you remember what you did, and that the woman you killed had two kids. You think long and hard about why you lived through that accident and she didn’t. You wonder if maybe there was some reason for it, but you know there wasn’t. It was just stupidity, your stupidity, and a dark corner of a road that was a little too narrow. You go over the accident in your head, every little detail, all the ways you could have avoided what happened, you obsess over those chances, as if you still had them, as if you still could stop it from happening if you just imagine it hard enough. But you can’t.”

  “No,” Maggie agreed.

  “It’s like glass. Time is like glass. Once it’s broken, you can’t put it back together. It’s always going to be broken. You get stuck, reliving the same moment for the rest of your life, and you can’t ever fix it.”

  “No.”

  “Is that—what you wanted to know?” he asked her. “Why you came?”

  “Maybe,” she told him. She was still having trouble identifying her motivation herself. Unless—unless she’d come to see if there was any hope. Hope for herself, hope that things could get better again.

  Or maybe she’d just wanted to talk to the one guy in town who might actually know how she felt. The one who understood that for her it was too late, that she’d crossed some dark boundary and now she was a bad guy, and there wasn’t anything she could do to change that. Turning herself in wouldn’t make the cop better, or heal Grandma’s arm. Going to jail wouldn’t do anything, except ruin her own life.