Rivals

by David Wellington

  But in the end talking to the drunk didn’t help her feel better. Because he still had one thing she didn’t. He could remember what her mom looked like. Maggie couldn’t.

  It was tearing her up inside. She couldn’t remember what Mom’s voice sounded like, or what her birthday was, or what clothes she used to wear. All those memories had drained right out of her. She could see Dad’s face just fine. It was like the drunk had said—she would never forget Dad’s face. But Mom was a hole where memories used to be.

  There were pictures she could look at, back at the house, but she couldn’t go there. Her memories of Mom were broken, just like her innocence, and the pieces didn’t fit together anymore.

  She got up off the couch. She didn’t want to be there anymore.

  “What do you do for fun?” she asked the drunk. “You have a girlfriend, or any friends you hang out with?”

  “No,” he told her. “Mostly I just come home from work and watch TV. It helps, kind of, watching TV—your mind stops working, and you just focus on the pictures in front of you. You can forget, for a little while.”

  “Hmm.” She strode across the room and put her foot through the glass screen of his TV set. He threw his hands over his head as glass and bits of wiring crashed all over his carpet. “That’s for my family,” she said.

  She left through the back door.

  Chapter 37.

  When Lucy came over the next day after school, Brent was getting Grandma’s dinner ready: minestrone soup and chicken salad just the way she liked it, with plenty of mayonnaise. Normally he didn’t like cooking but he was bubbling with excitement and when Lucy came into the kitchen he grabbed her up in his arms and swung her around the room, her leg braces clanging off the legs of the table and the chairs.

  “You’re in a good mood,” Lucy said, laughing along with him. “Which is very good, I wanted to give this to you when you were feeling good about things, because you might take it the wrong way if you were feeling down, and—”

  “What are you talking about?” Brent asked. Then he noticed that she had brought a cardboard box with her. It was tied up with green ribbon. “A present? For me?”

  She nodded bashfully but couldn’t keep from laughing again.

  “Hold on, let me just turn this down. It needs to simmer a while anyway.” He left the soup bubbling gently on the stove and headed up to his room, pulling her along by the hand.

  “What’s got you so happy?” she asked, as he pulled the door almost closed behind him. He was careful to leave it open a full foot, as per Grandma’s rules. “The last time I saw you, you looked like you were going to start an emo band.”

  “Huh?”

  “You looked like you felt pretty sorry for yourself,” she explained.

  He picked up the box and shook it. It made a soft rustling noise. He had no idea what was inside. He wanted very much to open it but first he had to tell Lucy what had happened. “I think I have a girlfriend,” he told her. “I wasn’t really sure, at first, but when I kissed her, it all kind of came together and—”

  “You kissed Dana?” Lucy asked. Her face was expressionless, as if she was unsure exactly what he’d meant and was waiting for confirmation before she started to react.

  He bit his lip. Maybe this was something he should keep to himself—you weren’t supposed to kiss and tell, after all—but he really wanted to talk about it and Lucy was his confidante. “Yes,” he said. “I kissed Dana.”

  “Oh. That’s—”

  A laugh bubbled out of him. He paced around the room, not in agitation but just because he had so much energy. “Several times.”

  “Okay, well, the details probably aren’t—”

  “With tongues.” He went to the window and glanced outside, looking for newsvans or reporters, then pulled down the shade. “And then she let me touch her… well… her…” He turned around. He couldn’t see Lucy anywhere.

  He looked at the door but it was still open the mandatory one foot. She hadn’t gone out that way. He opened up his closet but it was so full of stuff even Lucy couldn’t have squeezed inside. Finally he looked in the space between his bed and the wall. She was there, curled up with her knees tight against her chest. She wasn’t looking at him. He squatted down in front of her and smiled at her but she just looked away.

  “Too much information,” she told him. “Okay? I don’t want to hear the grotesque details.”

  “I thought you’d be happy for me,” he told her.

  “You thought that, huh?”

  Brent stood up and went over to his desk where he’d set down the box. He couldn’t understand what the problem was. They had talked about sex often enough before—both of them had been surprised to realize the other one thought about it so much, they’d wondered together what it was like, and they’d even confessed all to each other, pooling what little experience they had on the subject. She’d even told him once about the boy she’d fooled around with at camp the summer before he met her, and the details then had been more graphic than anything he could have said about Dana.

  “Okay, change of subject,” he said, figuring if she was suddenly going to get squeamish he could at least be sensitive about it. “Let’s see what this is, shall we? It’s not even my birthday!”

  “Maybe now’s not the time,” she said, but without much force behind the words.

  “Nonsense! There’s never been a better time.” He pulled open the box and pushed back a piece of tissue paper that hid its contents. Underneath was a carefully folded suit of clothing. It was sage green. He pulled it out, thinking it was a shirt, but more and more of it kept unfolding and he realized it was a kind of jumpsuit. It zipped down the back and had a high, stiff collar of a much darker green cut in a pattern of flames that ran down the shoulders and part of the way down the chest. Underneath the jumpsuit, inside the box, was a pair of gloves of the same darker green color, ending in more of the spiky flames, and a pair of soft boots to match.

  “Holy cow,” he said, holding the jumpsuit up against his body. The fabric was soft but felt very strong. This was why she’d been taking his measurements, he realized.

  She’d made him a costume.

  “You can’t be a, a,” she said, waving her hands in the air, “superhero, right, without dressing the part. Can you?”

  He picked up one of the gloves and pulled it on over his left hand. It fit perfectly. He made a fist and it just looked right, like a superhero’s fist.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “This is amazing. It’s—it’s green flames. Green flame, like the flame that gave me my power.”

  Lucy glanced up at his eyes, then looked away again. “I thought you could call yourself the Green Flame. Except there’s two problems. One is, you might not want to constantly be reminded that the green flame also killed your dad, and the other, is that it would be kind of easy for mean kids to call you the Green Flamer, so maybe we need to work on the name. But I really liked the way it came out.”

  “You made this?”

  “My mom helped some. Well, a lot. But I designed it. It’s not a big deal.”

  “Not a—Luce! This is unbelievable! This is way, way beyond the call of duty. I have got the single best friend anybody ever wanted,” he said, truly blown away.

  “Well,” she said, and she started to smile, even though she still wasn’t looking at him. “I figured, every time you save somebody you end up ripping your shirt or getting blood all over yourself or whatever, so maybe this would be—”

  “Dana is going to flip when she sees me in this,” he said.

  He might as well have dropped a live grenade on the floor.

  Suddenly a hundred pounds of Lucy Benez was leaping through the air at him, leg braces and all. Her small fists bounced again and again off his chest and her face was contorted in rage. She was hitting him, he realized, punching him like crazy. He tried to grab her arms but she just yanked them away from him and fell over onto the bed.

  “You stupid, you dumbass, you je
rk!” she shrieked. “You freaking assface! You piece of—”

  “Lucy! What are you doing?” he asked, trying to grab her again. She writhed like a snake on the bed.

  “I worked for weeks on this! I had to save up every cent of my allowance to buy the fabric! I drew maybe a hundred sketches for what it should look like, I bought special color pens so I could show the ladies at the fabric store so it would be the perfect colors, I must have jabbed myself with needles and pins a million times because it had to be perfect, and yes, I did it myself because, whether you believe it, or not, I have, talent, I have so much, talent!” She was sobbing and gasping for breath at the same time. “I have some, some brains, in my head, unlike your, poor little, rich girl, brain-dead, girlfriend, who thinks she, can just, buy everybody, thinks, she can buy you, but she will never, love you, a millionth as much, as I’ve loved you every day, since I met you!”

  She rolled off the bed and hit the floor hard, her leg braces clanking against each other. He reached for her again but she waved a hand like a claw at his face and then she pulled herself up to her feet and hobbled out of his room, hobbled down the stairs, out the front door.

  He started to chase her—he could catch her easily—but Grandma was already there at the door with her plaster-wrapped arm held up to stop him.

  “Did you hear what she said?” he asked.

  “Half the neighborhood did, for my money,” Grandma told him.

  “I have to go after her!”

  “If you do,” she said, “it will be the biggest mistake of your life.”

  “But—but—”

  “More importantly, I believe that my soup is burning. Go turn it down, dear. That’s a good boy.”

  Chapter 38.

  “Come on in,” the stoner said, holding the door open. He kept scratching at the sparse goatee on his chin. “We were just watching a movie on cable,” he told her.

  Maggie stepped inside an apartment that stank of old stale pot smoke. It was one of the cheap student apartments down by the local community college, a place where you were always likely to find somebody sitting outside on the lawn playing an acoustic guitar, but unlikely to find anybody playing one well. There were guys in the park playing hackey-sack and girls two years older than Maggie wearing no make-up and ponchos. Every time she’d been to this part of town, Maggie had wondered what they knew that she didn’t. What secrets she was going to learn, when she got to college.

  It looked like she would never find out.

  Whatever, she told herself. Buy the car. Get moving. Get out of town.

  “So how old are you?” the stoner asked. “You look kind of young.”

  “I’m eighteen,” she lied. She’d gotten his name out of the local free paper, out of the want ads. He was selling a car for twelve hundred dollars and the ad suggested he needed to sell it as soon as possible. It seemed like her best chance. Maggie had wasted a lot of time going to used car lots. Places like that wanted to see some ID up front, and they had not been impressed when she started laying out twenties to smooth things along. One place had even called the cops on her, while the salesman tried to convince her that whatever her parents had done, it couldn’t be so bad that she needed to run away. Rather than telling him the truth she’d just run.

  “Listen, can I see the car? I’m kind of in a hurry.”

  The stoner was watching the TV on the other side of the room. Three other guys, all of whom had beards and the dull, glazed eyes of stoners, were sitting around the TV in various states of consciousness. “Yeah, hold on a sec.” The advertisement on the TV ended and a newscast came on. “You know about the super kids? The brother and sister who keep fighting, right, but they’ve got super powers and—”

  “I’ve heard about them,” Maggie said.

  “Well check this out. The brother snapped and totally attacked a reporter last night.”

  “What?” Maggie stepped over toward the couch, intent on seeing the television. “Turn it up for a second,” she said.

  The guy with the remote had laid his head back on the top of the couch and was looking up at her with a huge smile. He wasn’t blinking. She grabbed the remote out of his hand and turned it up herself.

  “—unprovoked outburst, leaving one vehicle badly damaged and this reporter scared for her life. We met up with Brent Gill at around seven last night as he was coming out of his suburban home. He looked agitated, but when we asked him what was making him upset his reaction was like nothing we’d seen before.”

  The reporter’s face cut to a video shot of Brent walking straight toward the camera. His eyes were wild. Maggie had never seem him so angry. The reporter asked him a couple of questions Maggie couldn’t really hear—something about his girlfriend, which surprised her (what else had he been up to that she didn’t know about?) and he said, “No comment. No comment, okay? I don’t want to talk to you right now!” The reporter said something else that Maggie couldn’t make out at all. Then Brent came right up to the camera until his face filled the entire screen. “Leave me alone. All of you. Just leave me alone. Leave me alone, and leave Dana alone.” (Dana Kravitz! Maggie thought—so Jill Hennessey is behind all this!) His nostrils flared. Then he said, “I’m not asking anymore.”

  The camera pulled back as if the cameraman was running backwards to get away from Brent. The scene widened out and Maggie saw Brent standing in a circle of reporters, some of them backing up themselves, some pressing in closer with microphones or tape recorders or just notebooks and pencils. There was a news van very close to Brent, its headlights painting broad yellow stripes across his shirt and pants.

  He punched it.

  Just swung around and hit it with his fist. It jumped up off the ground and then fell back on its tires, bouncing a little. One of the headlights shattered and steam shot out of the broken grille on its nose. Its passenger-side door popped open and a cameraman fell out, then quickly got up and ran off. Brent punched the van again, darkening its other headlight. And again. And again.

  The camera cut back to the studio where the same reporter as before said, “Channel Seven news is still debating whether or not to press charges against the boy who, until very recently, we were calling a hero. More on this story as—”

  There were other stories on the news but she didn’t listen to them. It’s finally happened, she thought. The world in all its suckiness has finally caught up with the golden boy. She wasn’t sure how that made her feel, actually. Maggie switched off the TV. Suddenly four stoners were looking at her. None of them recognized her, though. Her disguise worked, as usual. “Now I’d like to see that car,” she said.

  “Um, sure. It’s just downstairs.”

  Chapter 39.

  As Maggie had expected, the stoner college boy was easily distracted. When she handed over the money he just asked her if she didn’t want to test drive the car first, but he didn’t press the issue—he was too busy counting the twenties to pay her any real attention. He muttered something about title transfers and needing to change the car’s registration, but when she said she was in a hurry and they could take care of all that later, he just handed over the keys. She told him her name was Greta Garbo and he didn’t even shrug. He wanted a phone number for her but it was easy to make one up.

  Five minutes later she was on the road in her brand new broken down much used, oft-repaired Honda. It was gray, sort of, where it wasn’t rust colored. The interior stank of pot smoke but if she rolled down all the windows she could breathe enough to drive. She got on the road and headed toward the highway. There was nothing to hold her anymore. Nothing to stop her from making a clean getaway.

  Except…

  Except there was one thing she wanted to get first. She would leave all her clothes, leave all her things at the house rather than face Grandma again. But in her locker, at school, there was one thing she couldn’t just leave behind.

  Taped on the inside of her locker door was a picture of her mom.

  If she could just see it, one
more time. If she could take it with her, and look at it every time she started forgetting what Mom looked like—it would help a lot. It would make her feel like she wasn’t going crazy. That the guilt she felt for the things she’d one wasn’t going to take her whole life away, just like she’d taken the drunk’s TV set.

  It was a mistake, she knew. Going to the school would put her at risk. Her disguise probably wouldn’t fool any of the kids there who knew her. And most likely Brent would be there. But if she was quick, if she didn’t take any unnecessary chances, then… maybe. Maybe it would be alright.

  The school was barely two miles away. It was an easy drive, and when she was done she could get right back on the highway from the school’s feeder road. She could be halfway across the state by lunch time.

  “Let’s do it,” she told herself, and threw the car in gear.

  There were plenty of available spaces in the school’s parking lot. Theoretically if you didn’t have the correct permit you could be towed for parking there, but she didn’t plan on sticking around long enough for that to happen. She got out of the car and headed for the main doors of the school, the doors she’d passed through every weekday for the last three school years. There was no one around—classes were in session and the hallways would be empty. That was good.

  She passed right underneath a security camera on her way in. She considered grabbing it and tearing it off the wall, but the damage was already done—she had already been taped going into the school. Whatever. By the time the police saw the tape she would be long gone.

  She didn’t see anyone until she was passing the Home Ec rooms. There was a girl, a freshman Maggie didn’t know, using the drinking fountain to wash off her retainer. When she saw Maggie the girl pressed herself up against the wall and stared in terror.

  “Grr,” Maggie said, and scratched at the air like a cat.