The Super Ladies

by Petrone, Susan

  “Is what a good idea?” he said blankly. Margie didn’t say anything, just tilted her head slightly to the side as though she was trying to get a better look at him. Kids would always cave if you waited long enough. “We’re just playing around,” he added mildly.

  “You’re playing around with your lives,” Margie said. The hood was starting to feel hot, very hot, but Margie kept her hand there just in case. “You’re supposed to ride inside the car, not on the hood.”

  “It’s a free country,” the kid said, and a few of the other boys snorted back laughs.

  Margie was starting to feel foolish. Why had she thought a bunch of drunk teenage boys would listen to her? Now her hand was starting to feel very hot—not her hand exactly; the metal of the car hood around her hand felt like it was burning up. She realized she had started to sweat; either she was nervous or this was the most epic hot flash she’d ever had.

  “You can’t tell us what to do,” one of the boys in the backseat said. The streetlight cast deep shadows on the car. She couldn’t see the kid’s face, only that he was sitting in the middle. “Fat old lady can’t tell us what to do,” he muttered just loud enough for everyone to hear.

  Margie felt the area around her hand get hotter as she said, “If you’re acting like idiots, I can.”

  The two boys sitting on the hood jumped off with a lot of unnecessary noise. “Get back on. She can’t stop us,” the loudmouthed kid in the backseat said.

  “No man, it’s too hot,” one of them said.

  There was a sizzling sound, and slowly steam began to rise from one side of the hood. Margie still had her hand on the car, feeling the heat grow, and suddenly she realized that she felt the heat because it was coming from her. She turned her eye from the driver of the car to the hand that still rested on the car. She was causing the car to overheat.

  “What are you doing to my car, lady?” the driver said. He turned off the engine, but the steam from under the hood only increased.

  The first time she gave blood, back when she was seventeen, Margie had been fascinated by watching the blood flow from the needle, through the clear rubber tubing, and into the bag. The fact that the needle was stuck in her arm, that it was her blood, didn’t bother her. The process was more compelling than the small prick of pain from the needle. She had that same feeling of removed fascination now as she kept her hand on the car hood, feeling the heat flow from her body to the car. When she replayed the words “fat old lady” in her head, she could feel the heat intensify, and there was a satisfying rise in steam coming from the car. The horrified looks of the driver and his friends were even more satisfying.

  The two boys who’d been on the hood had backed away from the car, and those inside were slowly getting out, as though Margie might turn her hot hand on them. She only removed her hand from the car when the mouthy kid in the backseat got out. Ironically, he was kind of pudgy himself, with a soft, round middle that would be a potbelly before he was thirty. She turned to face the kid head-on. “Guess what?” she said to his bewildered, chunky face. “I can stop you.”

  Margie took a dozen steps across the tree lawn to the sidewalk and came face-to-face with her eldest child. Eli stared at the boys and the steaming car and then looked at his mother in amazement.

  “Come on,” she said.

  Eli wisely didn’t say a word, just followed his mother back to the minivan, where Juno greeted them as though they had been gone three days instead of twenty minutes. They drove in silence for two blocks before Eli asked, “Mom?”

  Margie’s nerves were still on edge and her head too filled with what had just transpired, too full of questions to talk. “Not now,” she replied. When she didn’t say anything else, Eli took the hint, although Margie could tell by the way he was playing this complicated little game with his fingers that he was doing everything in his power to stay calm. The finger game was something Eli had done ever since he was a little boy and had to be patient. Eli’s fingers danced in his lap during the ten-minute car ride home. Margie pulled the van into the garage, killed the engine, got out, and let Juno into the yard. She still hadn’t said anything else to Eli. What do you say to your child when you just caused a car to overheat purely by touch? Instead she wandered out into the backyard, watching the dog sniff this way and that, hot on the trail of something.

  Eli gingerly walked up and stood next to her. She could hear him shuffling back and forth on the balls of his size-thirteen shoes. “Um, Mom?” he said finally.

  “Whatever you’re going to say, Eli, I don’t know the answer,” Margie said. “I don’t know how or why that happened.”

  “I was just going to say that that was totally amazing.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And you really need to call Aunt Katherine and Aunt Abra.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  On Sunday morning, when the rest of the family was still in bed and Joan at her sleepover, Margie sat at the wooden, oval-shaped table that took up half the kitchen. The kitchen table always seemed be populated by stacks of stuff. There were bills, or an article that Margie thought Karl would like, or offers on a less expensive natural gas choice, or notes from Grant’s school, or a letter about graduation, or Joan’s summer swim team schedule, or a stray overdue library book, or whatever magazine Karl happened to be reading before he went to bed—all these things migrated to the same place. The kitchen table was Ground Zero of family communications.

  Margie made a bigger stack out of a few smaller stacks of papers and cleared enough space for a paper towel, a glass of cold water, and a meat thermometer. She put the thermometer in the glass, held the glass with her left hand, and thought about heat. She thought about deserts and saunas and rain forests and the best sex she and Karl ever had (in a refrigerator-sized motel room in Carson City, South Dakota, during the hour Karl’s parents took all three kids out for ice cream). After three minutes of clutching the glass so hard she felt like it might shatter in her hand, the water temperature didn’t appear to have changed. She took a sip. It seemed only nominally warmer purely by sitting in a warm kitchen in early June. She tried it again, thinking hot, hot, hot and willing her inner body temperature to rise. Still nothing.

  “How did you feel last night…?” she murmured. Then she remembered. Why not try it? Even though it wasn’t even eight in the morning, she got up and went to the snack cupboard, which was abundant in the salty realm and painfully low in the sugar area. She managed to find a miniature bag of plain M&Ms likely left over from the previous Halloween and getting a bit waxy-looking. Nonetheless, in the interest of science, Margie ate them. She waited a minute then went back to the kitchen table.

  Sugar really did seem to be a trigger for the hot flashes, as she almost immediately began feeling flushed and warm. She was holding the glass, but the temperature didn’t rise much. Margie thought back to the night before and the rude kid in the back of the car (she was almost certain he was the same kid back in Eli’s second grade class who stole half the classroom’s Valentine’s Day candy and then blamed it on the class hamster). The memory of him saying, “fat old lady” was enough to make her blood boil. It was either her blood or her skin. As she thought about the undeserved insult, Margie felt herself perspiring, just as she did whenever a hot flash washed over her. Only this time, it didn’t just heat her up; it warmed up the water in the glass too. The temperature on the meat thermometer started to rise. Still Margie continued clutching the glass of water, thinking heat, thinking rotten, horrid little git. Then the water in the glass started to bubble and boil.

  That’s when she called Abra and Katherine.

  She didn’t bother saying hello, just: “I need to show you something.”

  “Hi to you too,” Abra replied. She sounded groggy. “You do realize that Sunday is the one day when I sleep in?”

  “Sorry. But I can do something unusual.”

  “I don’t
want to know about what you and Karl get up to in private.”

  Margie paused, feeling the need to show rather than tell. “Something unusual in the same way that you and Katherine can do something unusual.”

  There was dead silence on the other end of the line, then a quiet “What?”

  “I kind of need to show you.”

  “Well, you’re obviously more awake than I am. You might as well come over here.”

  Katherine and her family had plans with Hal’s family later that day. “I can meet you two for breakfast if it’s that important,” she said when Margie called her.

  “Abra’s house. Half an hour. Bring food.”

  “Got it.”

  If Katherine were in a war movie, Margie always figured she’d be the character who manages to find a generator, twenty-seven blankets, and a case of penicillin in the middle of a disaster area. Margie arrived at Abra’s with a bowl of fruit salad. Katherine brought something she called a Brazilian quiche. “It needs to cook for thirty to thirty-five minutes,” she said, “but I figure we can talk while it’s in the oven.”

  “Doesn’t the oven need to warm up first?” Margie asked.

  “I called and told Abra to preheat it,” Katherine said, getting three plates out of the cupboard.

  “Geez, you are efficient.” It would be easy to dislike Katherine. She was taller and thinner and somehow managed to maintain a family and a fulfilling, responsible grown-up job at the same time. Plus she had just won the breakfast war. Long ago Margie had learned the key to Katherine: she was only in competition with herself, no one else. So Margie didn’t resent her, didn’t feel bad that the Brazilian quiche smelled amazing. What did bother her was, once Abra and Katherine were seated at the table waiting for her to do something, the ability to boil water through her own body heat started feeling like a silly party trick. It certainly wasn’t as cool as invisibility or being impervious to injury.

  “What’s wrong?” Abra asked.

  “Nothing.” Margie had been standing in the middle of the kitchen, a glass of cold water held in front of her as though it was a bouquet of flowers. She lowered the glass a bit. “This is stupid.”

  “We’ll be the judge of that,” Katherine said. “Oh come on,” she said in response to Margie’s hurt expression. “I was just joking. If you called us, it must be good.”

  “Please show us,” Abra added.

  “Okay.” Margie had eaten a double-stuff Oreo on the way over just to prime the hot-flash pump. She held the glass out in front of her again and started to think heat. “You know how I’ve been getting these hot flashes? Well, last night, when I picked up Eli from a party, I discovered that they can be pretty epic.”

  “How epic?” Katherine asked.

  “Watch.” All three of them stared at the glass in Margie’s hands, watching as it went from clear, motionless liquid to slightly clouded with tiny bubbles to big rolling, boiling bubbles. Abra’s gaze went from the glass to Margie’s pink face.

  “I never would have believed it if I didn’t see it,” she said.

  “Last night I made a car overheat.”

  “What?” Katherine said. “And now you just made that boil. You heated water to two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit with your body. It’s unbelievable.”

  “No more unbelievable than you two,” Margie said. She didn’t know what else to say. Apparently, neither did Abra or Katherine. Thinking about any one of their new abilities too closely was mind-boggling. Margie put the glass of hot water on the table in between Katherine and Abra. Katherine immediately reached out and picked it up.

  “That’s one hell of a hot flash,” she murmured, feeling just how hot the glass had become. “Everything I’ve ever learned about the human body has been completely shattered in the last few weeks.”

  Margie leaned against the smooth butcher-block kitchen counter. She had always secretly envied Abra’s clean, nicely decorated little house. Margie was pretty sure her own house wouldn’t be clean until all three kids lived somewhere else. “Abra, have you, you know…” she stammered, “turned invisible lately? Eli told me what he saw when you hurt your ankle.”

  “It hasn’t happened since then,” Abra admitted. “Maybe it was just a… Oh God, I don’t know what it was.”

  “Remember what I said about the explosion?” Katherine asked quietly. “Maybe it affected all of us, just in different ways.”

  “Maybe.” Margie paced around Abra’s kitchen and headed for the living room, where she knew Clint would be looking out the front window. She picked the cat up and carried him back into the kitchen. Holding a purring, cuddling animal made talking about all this a little more palatable. “He’s comforting,” she said in reply to Katherine’s quizzical look. She thought back to what she knew of Joan’s experiment. “You might be right,” she said.

  “How so?” Abra asked.

  “Joan needed us to give her another sample because our results were messed up. Only ours. I was thinking about the other women she got samples from. There were a few other moms from her swim team and from school, but they’re younger parents. Those women are in their thirties. And the other cancer survivors were ones I knew from my support group, and they’re all older.”

  Katherine leaned forward in her kitchen chair, focused. “I’m not exactly following you.”

  “I think we were the only samples from women who are, you know, actively going through The Change.” She said this not knowing if it made sense or not. She wasn’t a scientist, but the distinction seemed important.

  “Joan was hit by the explosion too. Is anything going on with her?” Abra asked.

  “No.”

  “But that makes sense. She’s a kid,” Katherine added.

  “It’s just the three of us.”

  The kitchen timer rang, and Margie handed Katherine a pot holder. After all, it was her quiche. Nobody said anything until they were seated, eating, thinking. “So what do we do now?” Katherine asked.

  Abra chuckled. “I don’t know, maybe I should try sneaking into a movie for free.”

  Katherine was aghast. “Are you kidding? You can turn invisible and you want to resort to petty thievery?”

  “I thought it’d be fun.”

  “But we could do something with these abilities. Something good,” Katherine said, her eyes shining with the same light they had when she was in front of a classroom explaining the miracle of cellular reproduction. “This is going to sound really stupid, but we could, we could fight bad guys or something.”

  “Fight bad guys,” Margie repeated. “Have you been talking to Grant lately?”

  “I know it sounds like something an eleven-year-old would dream up, but if we can do these unusual things, then together we could maybe make a small difference here or there. Like Janelle. We helped her.”

  Abra broke the silence. “We did,” she said. “If we hadn’t stopped, there’s no telling what might have happened. He could have killed her.”

  “You two saved her. I just drove the car,” Margie said.

  “It was all three of us.”

  “And what am I going to do with this…skill?” Margie said as she picked the glass of water up off the table. It had cooled slightly. “Make the room uncomfortably warm for the bad guys?”

  Katherine stood up and took the glass from her. “I don’t know. But what you can do is pretty stinking incredible. We have the ability to make a difference. We should use it.”

  Margie thought for a moment. Growing up, she had never been the kind of girl who played with dolls or knew how many kids she wanted when she was twelve or had her wedding planned before she even met her future husband. Yet she had to admit, she’d become that woman, the one who creates life accomplishments through her kids and her spouse instead of on her own. Time for something different. “Okay,” she said quietly. Katherine was already standing
, so she stood up too. It seemed appropriate.

  Abra struggled to her feet and leaned against her chair. “I’m in. I’ve got nothing else going on in my life. I’m not even doing the crazy cat lady thing right.”

  “Our neighbor’s cat had kittens,” Margie said. “I can get you a starter kit.”

  “No,” Abra said. “I’d rather give this superhero thing a try.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The problem with deciding to be a crime-fighting superhero is that bad things don’t happen at your convenience. They certainly don’t happen right on your street when you’re sitting on your front porch on a Sunday afternoon with your laptop and an elevated ankle. After Katherine and Margie left, Abra had most of a Sunday to herself. She had managed to hobble out to the front porch, laptop clutched in one hand. Her ankle was still tender, but she could walk on it provided she was wearing the Ace bandage. It seemed like a small victory. Still, she was hobbled, dependent. It was that dependency, that realization that she didn’t have anyone in her corner full-time that sent Abra to Leap.com, a dating website.

  For most of her life, Abra hadn’t had a problem meeting men. She’d been with Evil Richard for most of her forties. Now that that relationship was over, it seemed she’d apparently passed from “ripe” to “expired” without knowing it. To be fair, she didn’t have many opportunities to meet people. Most of the single men she encountered through work were very young techie types who truly seemed way too young for her. And most of her favorite activities were solitary pursuits. All she wanted was a decent guy around her age. It didn’t seem like an outrageous request.

  Abra had a skeletal profile on Leap—three recent photos, the basic questions answered, a few sentences about her interests (running, hiking, books, good food) and what she was looking for in a relationship. Of the guys who messaged her after seeing her profile, a few had been interesting enough in their emails to warrant a face-to-face meeting (she felt compelled to rule out major grammatical errors, such as guys who didn’t seem to know the difference between “they’re” and “their” or who used apostrophes with wild abandon). None of the dates amounted to much. There hadn’t been any real connection. She hadn’t yet tried messaging anyone directly. Now it seemed time to take a more proactive approach to finding someone. With her ankle still in recovery, she had some time on her hands. Why not spend it cruising dating sites?