Ryan had seen enough bras hanging up to dry to know the immediate application of that one. Groans from girls confirmed his assumption.
“They can’t undo belts, because those are metal and leather, not thread, though they’re trying to find a way to work the buckle loose from the end of the belt, without unfastening the buckle. I’m thinking, if a bad guy’s pants start falling down, maybe he’ll get distracted,” said Aaron. “But since this person is not speaking up, I figure they’ll either talk to you separately, or they just don’t want to do it. Because some people seem to have thought badly of his ability with hooks and eyes.”
Some nervous laughter.
“Potentially very useful, in an oblique kind of way,” said Dr. Withunga.
Aaron wasn’t done yet. “And there’s one person whose grandfather lived with the family, and grandpa’s alimentary system got stopped up a lot.”
Murmurs of “ew,” “gross,” “yuck.”
“This person took pity on their grandfather and discovered the ability to break up the blockage and loosen the old man’s bowels. This person sticks around home because the old man is grateful to get relief once a day.”
“I’m assuming you’re telling us this,” said Dr. Withunga, “because this person can loosen anybody’s bowels.”
“‘Loosen’ is an understatement,” said Aaron. “This person probably won’t come forward right now, either, but I’m thinking, a bad guy who’s about to shoot a gun or throw a knife or strangle somebody is going to get seriously distracted if his bowels let fly and he’s got poo slopping down his legs.”
More exaggerated grossed-out reactions from people in the group.
“You have such a practical imagination, Aaron,” said Dr. Withunga.
“I try to make you proud of me, Mom,” said Aaron.
Another kid raised his hand. Young, maybe still in fifth grade, but probably sixth. Must have a parent waiting outside, or an older sibling in the group. “I’ve got one,” the kid said.
“Go for it, Wye,” said another kid halfway across the room.
“We got a baby brother about a year ago, and when he started toddling around, he fell over, and he hated doing that, so he stopped trying to walk or even stand by himself. My parents talked about it, but what I noticed was that when he was holding my hand—just a finger, really, and I wasn’t holding him at all—he never fell, he never even wobbled.”
“So when he was holding on to you,” said Dr. Withunga, “he could balance.”
“He’s walking now because he practiced his balancing with me. It’s the only time he stood up, was with me. And now he can walk.”
“So have you tried that with anybody else?” asked Dr. Withunga.
“Who?” said Wye. “Everybody else walks fine.”
“Can you make people lose their balance?” asked Bizzy.
“Never tried,” said Wye. “Because that would be mean.”
“Don’t practice on cripples and old people,” said Bizzy.
“There are plenty of games on playgrounds where people expect to fall down a lot,” said Dr. Withunga. “You might just pick some people and make them lose their balance. Nobody high on the monkey bars, nobody running across a street—”
“Yeah, I get it,” said Wye. “I know how to play nice.”
Dr. Withunga kept the session going a long time. There were a lot of micropowers that Ryan barely even understood—like the girl with hypervision. “Not X-ray vision,” she insisted, “not like an MRI. I can’t burn people with it, no lasers, nothing like superpowers in the movies. I just focus. I can see from really far away and make out letters on license plates or street signs.”
Somebody who knew The Lord of the Rings said, “Like elf eyes.”
The girl shrugged. There was nothing particularly elfin about her. “But I don’t know how my hypervision could possibly help.”
“Me neither,” said Dr. Withunga, “but it’s a cool power, and we’ll keep thinking about it.”
“It wasn’t always cool,” said the girl. “I saw a lot of things very clearly when other people thought nobody could possibly see.”
“There’s always a learning curve,” said Dr. Withunga. “And a price to pay, unfortunately.”
“I don’t have supersharp vision,” said a young man on the back row. “I just know what’s written.”
“Not sure others will know what you mean,” said Dr. Withunga.
“I needed glasses when I was little. I mean, I needed them really badly. But I’d go for an eye test, and the doctor would say, tell me the letters you see on the chart from left to right, so I’d tell him. All of them, right down to the tiny ones. I couldn’t actually see any except the big tall ‘E’ at the start. But because I named them, no glasses. My parents were told I had amazing vision.”
“How did you finally get those Coke-bottle lenses, then?” asked Ryan. “Very attractive Coke-bottle lenses.”
“I was about eight, and I figured it out. They didn’t want me to tell them the letters—the doctor already had the chart memorized. They wanted to find out which letters I could actually see.”
“So you can read letters that aren’t visible to you,” said Bizzy.
The boy shrugged. “Yeah.”
“But the letters have to be in plain sight, right?” asked Bizzy.
The boy shrugged again. “Usually.”
“Ever see the letters on a paper that was folded?” Bizzy asked.
The boy shrugged. “Sometimes.”
“Well,” said Dr. Withunga. “I’m surprised this didn’t come out in a session before this.”
“Wasn’t sure I wanted people to know that I could read a sealed letter or a closed book,” said the boy.
Somebody whistled. A few people said wow.
“Don’t tell the CIA about him,” somebody said.
“Wouldn’t matter,” said the guy. “I don’t spy. I don’t cheat on tests. Wouldn’t be fair.”
And so on. And so on. Ryan began to realize that every micropower had a story behind it. Things that could go wrong, that had gone wrong. The kid who could make cars go out of gear since he was three—his parents still didn’t know it was him that did it, and he wasn’t going to tell them, now that he was a driver himself, now that he knew how many thousands of dollars they had spent on completely unnecessary transmission work back when he was little. Dr. Withunga asked, “Do you ever do it now?”
“No.”
“Can you shift from one gear to another, instead of just to neutral?”
“Easy,” he said.
“Into reverse?”
“That can go bad really fast,” he said.
“Do you have to be inside the car to change the gears?” asked Dr. Withunga.
“No,” he said.
“That’s scary,” said another kid who was old enough to drive.
“I’m not out to hurt people,” said the gear shifter.
“But you could stop a getaway car,” said Ryan.
“If I’m close enough to it, for long enough. Just takes a couple of seconds, but cars passing at freeway speed, I don’t have time to find the gearbox before they’re gone.”
“Maybe now it’s time to say,” said Dr. Withunga, “that any of you who have powers that might be helpful, you all know that being with a group of micropots strengthens you and sharpens you, right?”
Yeah, of course, they all knew that.
“But we’re looking to protect a micropotent who has been chased by some seriously scary people from her home country,” said Dr. Withunga, “and we don’t know how dangerous they might be, or what form the danger might take. Ryan and Bizzy both asked me to warn you, anybody who might be willing to help, that you might be putting yourself in harm’s way, and even if everybody uses their micropowers with skill, we haven’t heard of any micropowe
r that evaporates bullets in the air or turns knife blades to rubber.”
There was a long silence.
“Some of you are kids,” said Bizzy. “And even if you have the best, most useful power in the group, we’re not bringing kids into this.”
“Define ‘kid,’” said a kid who looked to be twelve.
“You’re one,” said Dr. Withunga.
“I bet I’m as old as Ryan,” said the kid.
“Fifteen,” said Ryan.
“Well, dang,” said the kid. “Try to look older next time.”
“I’m growing my beard,” said Ryan. “Can’t you tell?”
That earned a chuckle from a bunch of people.
It still took half an hour for the brainstorming to end. After that, about two dozen GRUT members had short private conferences with Dr. Withunga, and a few people—mostly girls—wanted Bizzy to show them what she actually did with her face.
Ryan listened in and was surprised that Bizzy really didn’t hold back. “It’s like learning to wiggle your ears,” she told them. “You find some facial expression that just naturally makes the movement you want, and then you work on isolating it. It takes a lot of practice at first.”
When they found out she didn’t know how to wiggle her ears, she made Ryan demonstrate.
“The only one moving is your left ear,” said one girl.
“If you blink just one eye,” said Ryan, “that’s a wink. It means something. But if you blink both eyes, that’s just blinking, doesn’t mean a thing.”
“So what does raising your left ear up and down without moving your right ear mean?” another girl asked.
“That I’m a truly intriguing and attractive person,” said Ryan, deadpan.
“No it doesn’t,” said the second girl. And they all went back to Bizzy, getting more demonstrations of some of her individual changes. Through it all, Ryan saw how she showed them none of the movements that were part of shifting to glamor-face. There were things that weren’t good to pass on or reveal.
It made Ryan wonder if glamor-face might be teachable. What if Bizzy could make millions of dollars posting videos on the internet demonstrating how to get from normal to glamor-face, a step at a time?
No, Ryan decided. Bizzy was only recently coming to understand just what she did. She had only just learned how to move to any face other than glamor-face. But the power she started with, what she used to do as a little kid, going straight to glamor-face—that just came naturally. And Ryan was willing to bet that perfect symmetry and proportion was not teachable or even, for most people, attainable.
Finally, the last of the lingerers broke away and Dr. Withunga asked what fast food they wanted for supper. It was after eight p.m. and they had two hours to drive before they got back to Charlottesville.
“I am so in trouble,” said Ryan. “Even if Dad did call and warn her. If she picked up the phone when he called.”
“I thought your dad couldn’t call her.”
“He probably texted something like ‘Call me to find out why Ryan won’t be home before ten.’”
“That would work?”
“My mom loves me. Another proof she’s crazy.”
“Why will you be in trouble, then?”
“Because Mom’s already on edge. We had that conversation last night. And then the next night, I don’t come home till way after dark?”
“So she’s going to react to her anxiety rather than to what you actually did.”
Ryan sighed. “She doesn’t really know about my micropower.”
“Nobody told her?” asked Bizzy.
“Who? Defense? She thinks he’s an idiot.”
“Well,” said Bizzy.
“He’s actually not. And he’s my friend. I think she hates him because I really care about him.”
“She didn’t figure out that you saved his life by being, you know, sort of marginally super?”
“My dad also called your mom,” said Ryan. “Or he was going to.”
“I called her, too. She’s fine. She knows you’re with me, and she figures your warlock powers, used on my behalf, will keep me safe and maybe take out a few of the loveks, if they actually make a run at me.”
“Warlock,” murmured Ryan.
“I already reserved the word ‘witch’ for my mom,” said Bizzy, “and I can’t call you a ‘wizard,’ because it makes me think of Michael Gambon.”
“He’s a very attractive guy.”
“No he isn’t,” said Bizzy, “so you’re much prettier. Not pretty, but closer than he is.”
“Never wanted to be pretty.”
“Good thing,” said Bizzy.
Ryan switched back to actual conversation. “The thing is, if I get home at ten, they’ll assume I got you pregnant by nine-thirty.”
“Or vice versa,” said Bizzy.
“No, they won’t actually think you got me pregnant,” said Ryan.
“I thought you said your parents were crazy.”
Instead of carrying on the playful argument, Ryan just kissed her lightly and then said, “You’re crazy.”
“That’s what you love about me,” said Bizzy.
“I’m so sick of you kids,” said Dr. Withunga. “Are you going to chew each other’s hamburgers and then spew them into each other’s mouths while kissing?”
Bizzy answered, “Except for the part about it being so disgusting that we’d both end up puking—”
At which Ryan said, “Into each other’s mouths—”
“It sounds kind of romantic,” Bizzy finished.
It was the drive-through at a Dairy Queen near Lynchburg that got their business. Dr. Withunga refused to buy any milkshakes or ice-cream products.
“Oh, you need a permission slip from our parents to buy us anything sweet?” asked Ryan.
“I don’t care what kind of crap you eat,” said Dr. Withunga. “I just don’t want anything sticky and cementlike getting spilled inside my nice clean car.
Dr. Withunga seemed pleased that she was dropping them both off at the same house. “One-stop dropping,” she said.
“We climb the stairs with a wall between us, and dream about each other all night,” said Bizzy.
“I have no doubt,” said Dr. Withunga. “We’ll talk tomorrow after school. When I’ve had a chance to collate the whole list of volunteers and their powers.”
“My mom’s going to hate all of this,” said Bizzy.
“And I’m going to hate dodging all my mom’s questions so she doesn’t know that a bunch of Slovenian witch hunters are going to be targeting our house,” said Ryan.
Dr. Withunga clucked her tongue. “Think again, Ryan,” she said. “If you don’t tell your mom and dad—and I mean tonight—I’ll tell them about the loveks first thing in the morning.”
“And here I was just thinking that you weren’t a petty tyrant,” said Ryan.
“I’m sure you meant that in the nicest possible way,” said Dr. Withunga.
“But of course,” said Ryan.
“I prefer ‘first-class tyrant’ anyway,” said Dr. Withunga. “Nothing petty about me.”
“My mother won’t be cooperative,” said Ryan.
“That’s her privilege.”
“My micropower belongs to me,” said Ryan. “It’s not her decision.”
“I am a mother,” said Dr. Withunga, “so I’m on her side.”
“The battle lines are drawn,” said Ryan.
“I already won the battle, so comply with the terms of your surrender tonight,” said Dr. Withunga. “Now go inside, both of you. It’s cold with the doors open like this.”
Her car was gone before they got to their front doors. So when they kissed good night, it absolutely was not to show off in front of Dr. Withunga. It was just for them. And that made them keep at it until the
Horvats’ door opened.
It was Jake. “Mother says that she’s fine with you kissing on the porch because you’re standing up, but it’s too cold to keep at it any longer.”
“She really said that?” Ryan asked Bizzy.
“Sounds like a direct quote to me,” said Bizzy. “Should we show Jake how kissing works?”
“I know a lot more about it than clown boy does,” said Jake. He closed the door.
“It wouldn’t have helped him anyway,” said Ryan. “Kissing you doesn’t teach him about kissing ordinary girls.”
“You forget what an incredible stud my little brother is,” said Bizzy. “I think the only thing wrong when he kisses girls is that they can’t stop squealing in excitement, which means that they’re always blowing down his throat, which makes a horrible burping sound.”
“Seriously?” asked Ryan.
She clamped her mouth over his and squealed. The air she expelled made a burping sound going down his throat.
He pulled away from the kiss. “You have now officially ruined kissing,” he said.
“You don’t want to do it anymore?” she asked.
“You weaponized kissing,” he said.
“I won’t do it again,” she said.
“You say you won’t,” said Ryan.
“If I say I won’t, then . . .”
“You’ll decide I need to be punished for some terrible offense.”
“Solemn vow,” said Bizzy.
“Good night, my love,” said Ryan. “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
“Now cracks a noble heart,” said Bizzy, showing off, as usual, that she actually knew the whole quotation more correctly than Ryan.
“That’s just what a woman who blows down your throat would say,” said Ryan.
Bizzy opened her door and went inside.
Ryan stood outside in the cold. Tomorrow was Halloween, wasn’t it? Or was it the next day? How could he have lost track of Halloween?
It never snowed on Halloween in Charlottesville. October was way too early. But the air smelled really cold and crisp. It smelled as though it wanted to snow.
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