Heroine Addiction

by Matarese, Jennifer

  The little girl – she murmurs her name, Sierra, not long after latching onto me and refusing to let go – nods off in my lap almost as soon as we cross from dirt road to paved. Her head tucks into the curve of my neck, her tiny body snuggled close. Hazel's gaze connects with mine in the rear view, her eyes occasionally dipping to take in the little girl in my arms.

  When she catches me watching her study Sierra, she flushes a healthy shade of pink behind her freckles and fidgets in the back seat. “You need a bigger car, Nate.”

  “Yeah, well, I don't usually carpool for the Ladies' Auxiliary League. Next time I'll plan ahead.”

  Hazel raises a hand to flip him off, but stops herself with a quick glance at Sierra and lowers her arm back into her lap.

  Nate swerves around another limp body in the road before peering over at the little girl sleeping in my arms. “She okay?”

  My voice is low enough that my scoffing laugh doesn't wake Sierra. “Do you want me to tell you how moronic that question is, or would you rather I just let that dawn on you all on your own?”

  He frowns, his eyes drifting back to the road.

  “Nah, you can leave me to it.”

  Hazel makes a noise in the back seat that might have been a snort of laughter, but I'm too mentally exhausted to call her on that.

  The ride to town threads along a rain-dampened country road littered with the occasional awkwardly slumped corpse. They spot the road like the sudden and inexplicable influx of roadkill they quite literally are, taking up valuable space stiffened possums and squished squirrels should be occupying instead. We maneuver around them without comment. Sierra, in all of her silent slumber, is lucky enough to miss most of it.

  The town itself is no better. We turn the corner off Route 17 onto Main Street to confront the gruesome and depressing sight of my friends and neighbors loading misplaced bodies onto a flatbed truck, disregarding any semblance of respect for the dead. I imagine a fair bit of property damage and life-threatening manhandling is bound to turn anyone off basic manners.

  Boys from the middle school toss abandoned body parts onto the truck before racing around to find more scattered here and there under benches and mailboxes. Mrs. Santamaria sits in a cheap lawn chair she's unfolded on the yellow line in the middle of Main Street next to the slowly rotting corpse of her long-dead husband, fending off all comers with the end of her metal cane.

  Surprisingly, no one appears to be in the cafe. The heavy curtains have been firmly shut, the lights turned off, the “Closed” sign on display. It probably hasn't even opened today, the regular stream of customers understandably turned off by the walking dead clogging the streets. The front windows made it through the invasion intact, thank God. If they're safe, I doubt my apartment's been toyed with either.

  Nate parks the Cooper in front of Tea and Strumpets, the zombie-mangled parking meter out front ignored as we spill out of the car. I doubt the cops in this town will be issuing parking tickets, although it wouldn't be a total shock if they ignored a zombie invasion to bill us two whole dollars for not filling the meter.

  What does shock me is rounding the building to find Troy propped up in a crouch against my front door. His hair frays in an untamed tangle around his head, and his gray T-shirt is torn and smeared with something that looks suspiciously like freshly chewed brain matter. He nervously clicks a spring-loaded ballpoint open and closed, the tick-tick-tick an irritating greeting.

  The three of us stop, the sudden jolt shifting Sierra in my arms, and I blurt out, “Troy?” in a choked voice, snagging his attention.

  “Vera,” he sighs.

  His worried eyes lock on Nate as he scrambles to his feet.

  I can't throw up in this body, but considering the way Troy's gaze sweeps over Nate in my body, I'm sure I can make an admirable effort.

  He almost skids to a stop before reaching Nate, his clenched fists jamming into his pockets before he can reach out and do something he's going to regret in about a minute. “I know you can take care of yourself, especially against something this –“

  “Troy?”

  His head snaps in my direction, and his brow furrows with a distinct lack of recognition. I force a weak smile I don't really feel and say, “Wrong Vera.”

  Troy's gaze darts back to Nate, who smirks before sashaying towards the door to the apartment. He leaves the four of us behind, me with Sierra asleep in my arms, Troy clearly discombobulated from this new information, and Hazel hovering nearby, still debating with herself whether to stay or to go.

  After a moment, Troy stares at me, at the distinctively masculine shell in which I've taken up temporary residence. When he speaks, his voice is tired. “Bodyswapping?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Bummer.”

  I make a face. “You're a true wordsmith, Troy.”

  “I've spent the entire day wrangling zombies,” he says. He rubs a hand over his face, scratching at his beard as he adds, “My capacity for wit and sympathy only goes so far and neither really intersects with the other.”

  “All right, I give. Your vocabulary's more impressive than I thought.”

  Something sparks in his eyes, a glinting light behind the deep blue. I almost expect him to laugh then, to burst out in hysterical giggles of the sort you can't suppress when you think things can't possibly get any stranger or worse. As it stands, the smile that stretches oddly across his face forces a sympathetic cringe out of me. “I'd ask what happened,” he says, “but I'm guessing I won't get an answer.”

  “What, my mental dislocation isn't answer enough?”

  Sierra shifts sleepily, and I move my arms to get a better grip on her.

  “I can take her,” Hazel blurts out.

  She and I share a quick look before I pass the sleepy child to her, unsurprised when she has no trouble supporting the warm limp weight in her wiry arms. She trails after Nate through the open front door of my apartment, leaving Troy and I alone without a single complaint or snarky comment on her end. I almost feel the urge to call after her and congratulate her for not starting an argument or displaying a flare of jealousy. Maybe I should bake her cookies after all of this is over just for behaving.

  Troy and I wait in awkward silence, the deafening absence of words in the air filled instead with someone sobbing and wailing out by the flatbed truck. We both fumble for whatever thread of conversation we're supposed to latch onto and tie around us.

  Instead my frustration boils over, somewhere between Sierra and the zombies and this disastrous reveal. Once I figure out just how long we can stand here being awkward with one another, I stomp past Troy to follow the others into the apartment.

  A moment later, he catches up to me on the stairs.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  I continue clomping up the stairs in Nate's thick-soled boots. “Am I going to be able to stop you without a muzzle?”

  “I can fix this,” he claims, and I slow so abruptly he nearly walks into my back at the top of the stairs. “If you want, I mean.”

  I'm not the only one who turns to gape at Troy like he's just declared he's the new king of the lizard people of Venus. Hazel peeks in from settling Sierra down on the couch to pierce Troy with a confused glare. Nate pauses in the middle of splashing water on his face in the kitchen, grimy hands halfway through a vigorous scrub as he stares over the ragged tips of his fingernails.

  My brow furrows. “You could?”

  “You don't believe me?” he says, offended.

  I resist the instinctive urge to massage away a headache that can't exist in this body from where it might usually be dwelling behind my temples. “Please don't be that person who goes off on the entirely wrong tangent on me when you know full well what I mean. I imagine you're not having any more enjoyable of a day than I am considering you're covered in zombie guts and I have somebody else's penis.”

  A choked sound erupts behind me, but I don't turn around to find out whether the source is Nate or Hazel. I'm not sure
I want to know, quite frankly, and Lord knows it could be either one, but my money's on Hazel. Nate's getting far more amusement out of the whole situation than anything else.

  Troy fidgets in place, rumples already wild hair and scratches at the back of his neck. “Fair enough,” he allows.

  The two of us share a quiet moment, this one much less discomforting than the one that stretched in pained seconds outside the building. But something catches his gaze, and his eyes narrow on something over my shoulder as he asks, “Is he supposed to be reading that?”

  I whirl around in sudden realization, unsurprised to find Nate standing before the wall of notes with his hands resting on his full hips.

  Nate's not stupid. Taking idiotic risks with your life isn't stupid if you've got nothing to lose. No, Nate's more than sharp enough to pick up the important bits out of the tangled jungle of my compact chicken-scratch scrawl.

  Throwing a fit and scrambling to cover my notes as if it will keep him from realizing the relationship between Morris and my dad will help no one. Mostly it'll just make me look ridiculous. Instead I sidle up beside him, slow and quiet, and bump an elbow against his to draw Nate's attention to me.

  He doesn't look over at me, doesn't say anything, but he shifts his weight just so in a silent greeting.

  It's enough to wring the anxiety from me in an instant.

  After a long moment, the words sigh out of him. “Aw, hell, Vera,” he says. “You can't keep shit like this lying around. You don't see me writing all about your daddy's sordid sexcapades in my diary, do you?”

  I make a face. “That is disgusting, you know that?”

  “Hell, it's apt, as far as I'm concerned. Just 'cause I already knew Everett's banging Morris –“

  I shoot him an admittedly shocked look. “You already knew?”

  He exhales, heavy and long and tired. It strikes me just how often he must play stupid, like he's not hundreds of years old, like he doesn't know where all of the bodies are buried, and their ancestors as well. “I don't miss as much as you think I do, peaches.”

  I nod absently. If anybody could hide his knowledge from my father's probing mind, it'd be Nate.

  Or, I think to myself with a secret smile, maybe Dad let it slide.

  Nate grimaces and tosses limp black hair in desperate need of washing, clearly getting far more settled into my body than any normal person would. “Time to hit the shower,” he says. “I smell like I died and went to heaven in the worst way possible.”

  He heads off towards the bathroom, heels clicking against the hardwood floor. When the door shuts, it leaves the three of us alone with a sleeping child and a world of worry. Troy scrubs at his shirt with a wet paper towel as he peers out the living room window at everything going on down below. Hazel arranges a throw blanket over Sierra, who snuggles underneath it like a warm happy puppy.

  “She wake up yet?”

  Hazel shakes her head as she tucks the green throw blanket from the back of the couch around Sierra's napping form. “She's had a long day,” she murmurs.

  I choke back a derisive laugh at that. It's one hell of an understatement.

  She eases herself to her feet as gently as possible to avoid disturbing Sierra, tilting her head towards the kitchen in a silent prompt to follow. I'm not surprised by her ease with a kid. My impatience with rescued citizens extends to most small children. If they're not cute and sweet within the first thirty seconds, I'll admit they've usually lost my good attitude, and even then my patience wears thin quickly. There's a reason I'm counting on Graham to supply my parents with grandchildren.

  Hazel, on the other hand, was never quite weaned off the mythical adorability of small children like I was. Whether or not we wanted kids in the future was just another arena where we fought in armed verbal combat and came out bloody.

  Hazel splashes water on her face from the sink, scrubbing her hands with the gingerbread hand soap I keep on the kitchen counter. “I feel like I should call you on how this is the weirdest thing I've ever had to deal with when it comes to you, but I really don't want to hear what you'd have to shell out afterward.”

  “I'm sorry for dragging you into this.”

  She shakes her head as she dries her hands on her ink-stained pants. “Yeah, well, trust me, baby, if it hadn't been you, I think the zombie invasion would have disrupted my life pretty well all on its own.”

  “I still owe you for all of this,” I say, my voice deliberately soft.

  “Oh, yeah?” She reaches out and takes my hands. She's already threaded her pale fingers through mine by the time it occurs to me that we're not dating, that I'm not in my own body, that there's more than one reason for the gesture to make me feel vastly uncomfortable, but none which seems to want to stick. I shouldn't let this go on, shouldn't encourage her by allowing her to latch onto me like this, but I can't bring myself to let go.

  It's nice. It's always nice.

  “Why did you leave the city in the first place?”

  I almost don't hear her, her words are so quiet. When they register, I tense up out of habit. “Why does it matter?”

  “You never told me.”

  “I didn't?”

  “You changed the subject a lot. Usually with your tongue.”

  I frown. “I suppose that option is right out the window in this particular instance.”

  “Yeah,” she says with a laugh, eying my currently male body with thinly veiled revulsion, “you might want to save that gambit for when the shit's really flying, baby.”

  “Hazel –“

  “Tell me why you left. That's my price.” She lifts her gaze to mine then, steely and determined. Her grip tightens on my hands, and it's obvious she's not letting me go anytime soon. I can stay silent but I won't walk away from this. “Was it because of your dad and Morris? Did you just have some mental breakdown that crashed and burned so badly you couldn't teleport? You're not secretly on psychotropic drugs you never bothered to mention to me, are you?”

  “Yes, because I could have so easily hidden them from you for that year and a half we lived together,” I joke.

  Her expression is steady and serious. “Vera, I'm trying.”

  I nod. I know she is. I know she's attempting to take baby steps on the whole superhero thing, to dip her toe into the water without freaking out, but that doesn't stop this from being difficult.

  “I took another girl as my date to my senior prom.”

  I pause for so long after saying it that Hazel frowns. “That's it?”

  I shake my head, plunge ahead before I can stop myself. “I wasn't allowed according to the school's rules, but I did it anyway. Mariel was … well, for starters, she wasn't a guy, and she wasn't a hero, and she wasn't rich or beautiful or anything else my parents would stand. She helped her dad repair motorcycles at his garage. She went to a public high school, had a couple of tattoos, was tough but nice.”

  Hazel's smile grows, a sweet wild thing. I can't say I don't have a type. “I think I would have liked her.”

  “I think you would have torn each other to shreds,” I say, unable not to tease.

  She shrugs. “Yeah, probably.”

  “My parents never hassled me about who I was. Not once. Not anymore than they would have if it were simply boys I was attracted to. Even when I had to go to movie premieres and club openings in designer dresses that were too small, I never once heard that I wasn't allowed to do so with a woman on my arm.”

  “So you left because you were happy?”

  “I left because my dad had my prom picture on the desk in his office at his apartment. The one he moved into with Morris.” I stare at Hazel for a long moment, hoping she understands why it bothered me so much to see that photo on constant display, me in a frothy pink monstrosity my mother picked out, Mariel in a tailored suit with her short hair slicked down and dyed Manic Panic red. “I brought my girlfriend to the prom and I took a stand and they let us stay. They let us stay and nothing happened.”

  I felt lik
e something should, though, that a shoe should drop sooner or later. A few weeks later when I saw my parents faking a loving marriage for the cameras before the smoldering lobby of the Rafters while my father sported a deliberately benign expression, I decided that if anyone were going to drop a shoe, I'd much rather it be me.

  It is not my fault that my father left my mother for Morris. It never has been.

  But when you can look at a prom picture and imagine an entire city of angry citizens pointing their torches and pitchforks your way for inspiring one of their greatest heroes to run off with a notorious supervillain, maybe it's time to take your ball and go home.

  Or, more aptly, away from home.

  Hazel's sharp, just like she always is when it comes to me. “Vera –“

  A swimming sensation whirls through my head, funneling through my mind and bringing me to my knees. Hazel clutches onto my elbow, a sorry attempt to keep me upright. “Vera?”

  A moment later, my consciousness flickers and blacks out.

  I come to in my own body once again with hot water spraying directly into my face.

  I shove at the shower head and stumble backwards, unable to stop my disoriented body from grabbing for my surroundings as though they'll vanish in a heartbeat if I don't. I'm wet and slippery with soap bubbles, so it's a shock I don't completely topple to the bottom of the tub and slam my face into the porcelain.

  Outside, a familiar cheerful whoop fills the air, almost smothering a low muffled grunt of pain.

  I want to cheer about being back in my own body, resplendent in soft rounded flesh and thrilled to have my breasts back. Instead I switch off the water and quickly dry off before throwing on a pink terrycloth robe. Nate managed to turn on the water and stand underneath it but didn't even get a chance to grab the shampoo, so my hair hangs damp, limp and still rank over my shoulder.