by Matt Carter
I want to say that this isn’t the Bystander I remember, but I can’t.
When she was a kid, she got picked on a lot for her non-human appearance and powers, and for all the charm she had, this had grown her a mean streak a mile wide.
I remember a time once when the three of us were ditching school, hanging out in a pool hall Padre Peligro took over, playing video games and bumming smokes off some of the older kids who hung out there. We felt like real-life goddamn supervillains.
This was around the time that she started to fill out and receive the attention of the older boys. One of them, Ricardo, always found excuses to get close and touch her and was always pestering her to transform into his favorite hot celebrities. One time, he had her nearly pinned to the wall while Marco and I were playing video games, which worried me but also didn’t worry me because both Ricardo and Bystander were smiling while he whispered in her ear. When he was done saying whatever he had to say, he walked the other way and smacked her on the ass.
Her smile was gone as fast as he was. When she rejoined us, she was trembling, her hands balled so tightly into fists that they bled, and none of our usual teasing about him could get her to tease back.
When we met up with her at the pool hall the next day, she was in a much better mood, which I thought was just because Ricardo wasn’t there.
As it turned out, she was the reason Ricardo wasn’t there. She proudly shared with us how she’d shifted into Ricardo’s form and, over the course of three hours, set fire to his parents’ place, beat up his girlfriend, stabbed two of his drug-dealer friends in the stomach, robbed a convenience store and, for good measure, hurled a brick through the windshield of a police car. The last she saw, Ricardo was being hauled away by the cops and had at least one gang out for his blood.
She never told us what Ricardo said to her that made her do this, but she told the story with the same casual pride she’d normally have while telling us about learning a new skateboard trick. I think even she knew she went a little over the top with it, but said it was what needed to be done so people knew not to mess with her ever again.
If this were just a story, this would be the part where I’d say how right she was, and that nobody ever fucked with her again.
But this isn’t a story, at least, not that kind of story.
No one messed with her, for a while, but people’s memories are short, and the truly cruel and vicious will fuck with those they think are weaker just because it’s in their nature.
Not even two weeks later there was another older boy working the same line as Ricardo. The same easy smile, the same threatening-yet-not-entirely-threatening posture, the same innuendos and whispered comments in her ear.
I’d never seen a person so crushed as she was that day.
I can’t agree with what she’s doing now, but I can’t say I don’t understand it, either.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“For what? You’re not responsible for how fucked up the world is.”
“I meant losing touch.”
She shakes her head. “We were both in the system, we couldn’t help it.”
“But we could’ve tried. I could’ve tried.”
She slides closer to me on the couch. “Well, we’re here now. We can make up for lost time.”
I don’t need another invitation, leaning in and kissing her. She kisses me back fiercely.
I want this to be real. I need this to be real. I want Bystander to be here because she wants to be, not because Milgram sent her to bait me onto his side.
No one makes me do what I don’t wanna do. Ever.
That was what she always used to tell us, and for as long as I’ve known her, it’s always been true.
Not even Milgram could change that.
So I allow myself to get lost and just be here, now, with Bystander.
I close my eyes for a moment, and when I open them, I’m kissing Ruby Herron.
I push her away.
“What? I thought you liked this form,” she teases. “Would you prefer something more familiar?”
In quick succession, she becomes Fadia, Petting Zoo, and her.
“Stop it,” I say.
“Why? Isn’t that the fantasy? To have any woman you could ever want? I can be all of them, and more.”
I grab Bystander (Kimberly) by the arms and pull her to me.
“I don’t want them. I want you.”
Slowly, Bystander transforms back to her natural form.
“You want this? You honestly want this?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” she asks, pushing me away.
“What kind of question is that?”
“Oh, please, you think I haven’t heard this one before? ‘Oh, let me see your true form, that’s how you’re really beautiful!’ ‘Oh, let me call you Anya instead of Bystander, isn’t it so much better to go by your true name?’ The nice guy lie gets old fast.”
Her voice is full of a bitterness beyond what I knew she was capable of.
Mine isn’t. “Did I ever claim to be a nice guy?”
“No.”
“Then give me the benefit of the doubt, take the fucking lead, and play this how you want to instead of how some parade of assholes who aren’t here wanted.”
”Fine,” she says.
Then she’s on top of me, straddling me, and I lean forward to kiss her with a ferocity that matches her own. Her fingers tear through my shirt like it’s made of tissue paper. She unzips my jeans, fumbles past my underwear, pulls me out forcefully, and places me against her.
“This is the me you want?”
“So long as it’s you, it’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
Surprisingly calm, given the intense look on her face, she slides me inside of her.
We’re past fighting now, long past fighting, as we’ve got much better things to be putting our passions toward.
It’s three hours later, and for the life of me I couldn’t say all of what just happened, or how we made it to the bedroom, or where my pants are for that matter, but I know that it sure as hell felt right what we did. I watch her as she gets dressed in the corner of my room, and I can’t keep the grin from my face.
“So, better or worse than you were expecting?” she says, rubbing a hand over her bald head.
“Not bad,” I joke.
“Not bad?”
“Yeah.”
“I think it was sure as shit better than ‘not bad.’”
“Thanks for letting my neighbors know that, by the way,” I say, glad that I don’t like my neighbors much.
“You’re welcome. We really should’ve done that ages ago,” she says.
“Well, don’t run out on me so soon and I think I can go round three,” I say.
“I wish, but I can’t.”
“Milgram?”
“The one and only.” She finishes pulling on her leotard. “And I’m pretty fucking late as is.”
I watch her as she dresses, torn between how happy I am she’s back in my life and how scared I am of the company she keeps.
I want to tell her both of these things, so of course I tell her neither.
“This wasn’t weird for you, was it?” I ask.
“No. Maybe. Sort of, I think? It’s been so long since we saw each other, and we were kids then, so, definitely strange. And …”
“And?”
She purses her lips, looking uncertain of what she’s going to say next. “Look, I’ve been with a lot of guys.”
“So?”
“And I’m pretty good at observing and judging people’s behavior. You have to be to take their shape convincingly. I know when someone, especially a man, is telling the truth or not, and … and I couldn’t believe it, but you’re the first man who ever told me he preferred me like this and meant it.”
“So I was your first?”
She rolls her eyes. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
“It’s kind of hard not to.”
This is prec
isely the worst time for my phone to start ringing, so of course it does. It buzzes almost off my bedside table.
“You should get that. I’ll see myself out,” she says, leaning across the bed and kissing me again.
“Can I see you again?”
“Count on it. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
She leaves the room and I pick up my phone, cursing my arm as I feel the pills wearing off.
The number isn’t one I know. I can let it go to voicemail, deal with it tomorrow while I try and figure out just where the hell my life’s taking me.
But it could also be a client, so I pick it up.
“Finders Keepers Investigations,” I say, hearing the front door close behind Bystander.
“Eddie Enriquez?” a raspy, quiet voice asks.
“Speaking.”
“I’m one of the guys that killed Quentin Julian. I need your help.”
And I thought today was already full of surprises.
CHAPTER 12: THE SUPERHERO
Leah: Gonna disappear soon. Dinner smells like it’s almost done.
My stomach growls at the reminder of dinnertime at Juniors Ranch, and I try to quiet it with another petal of this deep fried onion appetizer that’s the closest thing the Silver Cowl has to a non-liquid specialty.
Ace kicked me out of his VIP room, and it wasn’t as if I really felt like sitting there watching him try to flirt with the servers anyway, so I’m keeping watch from outside the door, sitting on the stairs, watching Jackie and her three man security detail at the bar down below.
Kimberly: What are you guys having?
I ask this half to torment myself with the answer, half to stall Leah from logging out of messenger and leaving me alone.
Leah: Cory’s making tofu lasagna.
Kimberly: Ha, nice try.
Cory’s tofu lasagna is my favorite, and Leah knows it, but I could barely even get the meat-eating other members of the team to let him make it for my birthday. No way is he making it on a random Friday night without me there.
Leah: No, for real.
My phone is still for a moment, and then the next message carries a pic of Cory holding the gooey, cheesy pan with a guilty-nervous look on his face.
Leah: He’s all sweaty about impressing this new girl. She’s veggie too.
Kimberly: You guys replaced me already? :p
Emojis are the only cure for how not joking I am.
Leah: Relax. She’s a musician, not a superhero. Wait, I didn’t say that. She’s completely moving in on your turf and you should be jealous. Very jealous. Want to come kick her out of your room?
Kimberly: Now THAT’S a nice try :)
I hide behind armies of smiley emojis.
I knew the team would survive me, theoretically, but knowing is different from suddenly finding out that there’s a new chapter to the twisting, turning soap of Cory’s love life that nobody thought to fill me in on until now.
Kimberly: Is
I erase the message and retype it five times before hitting send.
Kimberly: Is Mason seeing anyone new?
It takes Leah a moment to respond, no longer than it takes me to inventory all the reasons she might need that moment. Is she laughing at me? Deciding how to break bad news gently? Has she already disappeared into a plateful of tofu lasagna, not to be heard from again until morning?
Leah: Bad Kimmy. You’re not shoveling any more coal into that train wreck.
That’s not an answer.
Kimberly: Of course not. Just curious.
Pause.
Leah: Fine, you twisted my arm. I’ll tell Mason you’ll only come home if he’s waiting on your bed in ten minutes in that tight pair of jeans you like and nothing else. But you’ll owe me.
Kimberly: Talk him into a kilt if you want, it still won’t make me move back.
It takes me longer than it should to press send.
God, I’m homesick. I miss Cory’s cooking, and the way half the appliances are always disassembled at any given time from Derek’s constant tinkering, and I miss talking to Leah from inside the same room, sharing a bag of peanut butter pretzels.
I even miss Mason, and not only because he looks unreasonably good in skinny jeans and even better out of them, or because he can actually be a pretty good friend sometimes when push comes to shove, or because I’ve been kinda in love with him on and off since I was sixteen …
Mostly, I miss him because even when he’s being a total ass, there’s a reliable ceiling on it.
I miss imagining that jerking me around with a little go-away-come-back was the ceiling of asses.
Leah: Whipped cream mankini. That’s my final offer.
Kimberly: Make it happen, then we’ll talk.
Then, because I’ve learned never to underestimate what Leah can make happen,
Kimberly: Totally kidding, by the way.
I could be there in a matter of seconds, in time for dinner, in time to meet Cory’s new girlfriend or crush or whatever, and maybe we could even pretend I’d never been gone.
Tomorrow’s headline: “First Female Solar Flare Resigns in First Month, Cites Unexpected Job Pressures.”
Yeah, no thanks.
Leah: Going once … Going twice …
Kimberly: Just tell me what happened with Bowerbird yesterday.
Leah spends a while typing.
Leah: Oh yeah, we caught him, got the kid home safe and sound. Turned out birdbrain didn’t even mean to kidnap him. He thought the baby carriage was empty when he stole it. You should have seen the rest of his stash though. Mostly a warehouse full of straw and garbage, but the whole missing lapis lazuli display from that traveling gem exhibit was in there. He never even tried to fence it.
And this is the part I miss most, the real reason I’ve been keeping Leah on the phone longer and longer the last few evenings. I’ve been shamelessly pumping her for my vicarious heroing fix.
Trouble is, she’s catching on.
Leah: So, what did YOU do yesterday?
I don’t even remember the last time I did something good. Was it the Seaside Shopping District mission?
Has it been that long?
Kimberly: Don’t ask.
Leah: Uh-huh. Hey, Mason! Come over here a sec!
Kimberly: You’re typing. That doesn’t even make sense.
Leah: You don’t know that. Maybe I’m using speech-to-text.
Kimberly: Punctuation’s too good.
Leah: Damn my impeccable grammatical skills!
“Hey, Miss Flare?”
I look up reluctantly at the bouncer trying to attract my attention, probably to tell me I’m not supposed to be sitting on the stairs.
“Sorry, Winters, I’ll move.” I pick up my fried onion from its spot next to me.
“You come here with the owner’s personal staff, right?” He points down the hallway to Ace’s VIP room.
“… Sort of?”
“He’s blocked the door with something,” says Winters. “I know he likes his privacy, but I’ve got a fire code inspector downstairs, and I can only stall for so long. I thought he might listen to you.”
“Not likely,” I say. “But don’t worry, I’ll get it open.”
Kimberly: G2G.
Sergei stands outside Ace’s room, making no move to either help or interfere with me.
I wait for Winters to go about his business, just so I don’t have to explain to Mayor Card tomorrow how I allowed his son to get busted for drugs or whatever else he’s doing in there, and then I bang on the door hard enough to rattle it in its frame.
“Ace! Open up!”
“Fuck off!” he shouts back drunkenly.
Like clockwork, Jacob comes sprinting down the hallway, wiping powder off his nose.
He’s carrying his close-quarters handheld camera, presently off, and motions me to be quiet.
“Ace finally got Anna to accept a drink with him!” he whispers excitedly, motioning to his camera, which presumably captured the earlie
r phases of this proposition. “Who knows what we’ll get from him in the morning? Tearful confessional about his betrayal of Jessica? Glowing discovery of a new love?”
I have no idea who Anna is, and I really don’t care.
“Either we open this room, or the fire department does,” I say.
“We can’t get in the way of this storyline,” says Jacob.
“Yeah, well, when have you ever let what really happened do that?”
I enter the code to unlock the door, feel for the spot where Ace has braced some piece of furniture against it, compensate for the slight extra resistance of Jacob’s hand trying to hold me back, and push in a smooth, firm motion to open the door without breaking anything.
When I see him, I drop the fried onion half that’s still in my hand, and the half in my stomach makes a reappearance in my mouth.
One of our regular servers is keeled over the armrest of a couch, the skirt of her knockoff supersuit hiked up her hips. Her mask is off, showing the smattering of gene bomb scales across her face. She’s drooling unconsciously into the cushions, and her breath comes in the whimpering gasps of a nightmare that’s not just a nightmare.
Ace doesn’t even bother to pull out of her when he glares at me. “Unless you wanna join in, get the fuck out, and shut the door behind you!”
I hit him with a firework blast that knocks him backward into the wall.
“You can’t do that!” he slurs from the ground. “You’re fired!”
“Sit in the corner,” I tell him. He starts crawling back toward her, his ankles tangled in his own jeans, and I hit him with another blast, trying to keep it small, keep it measured.
I’m too angry to yell, too angry to fight. If I start now, or if I have to look at his repulsive face for another moment, I might kill him. Actually kill him. And I don’t do that. Justice Juniors don’t do that. Maybe Pinnacle City Guardians do, when they have to, but not me.
“Sit. In. The. Corner.”
“God! Why can’t you just leave me alone?” he sulks.
“Face the wall.”
He snorts in disbelief.
