I didn’t have superpowers. I hadn’t gone to Hero Academy, or been Amazing Man’s Apprentice, or had friends with names like Smoke and Myth. I had never even met Amazing Man. People like him and Avatar were distant, larger-than-life figures, like the President or the Queen of England. If I ever was lucky enough to meet Amazing Man, I’d probably squeal like a little girl and ask for his autograph.
I was no Hero-in-training. I was just a college student, finishing my second year of mechanical engineering at the University of South Carolina at Aiken. I had recently been admitted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and would move to Cambridge after this semester was over to finish my degree there.
Dad had never sold this house. This was the only home I had ever lived in. And my room wasn’t smaller than it should be. It was exactly the same size it had been when I had gone to bed last night. For some reason, when I first woke up, I had viewed it the way I had remembered it when I was a kid. When you’re little, everything seems huge. Now that the confusion that had fogged my brain was fading away, I saw the room the way I had always seen it.
And I hadn’t been bullied, either. I had always gotten along well with my peers and had a ton of friends. If anyone ever had gotten it into his head to bully me, he would wind up having to fight almost everyone in school. I was popular.
I shook my head at myself as my confusion continued to fade away. That must have been one dilly of a dream I had last night for me to wake up with all these crazy thoughts in my head. Me, a superhero? What bizarre dreams would I have later tonight? Would I be an international rock star? The Sultan of Dubai? Married to Taylor Swift?
I paused, intrigued. Oh please God let me have a dream about being married to Taylor Swift, I thought.
Then I remembered why the thought I needed to get up had been nagging me. I was supposed to meet with some friends from USCA to study. I glanced at the clock on my desk. Ugh! Thanks to me waking up as confused as Rip Van Winkle, I’d barely have time to make breakfast and eat before I’d need to head out. If I didn’t eat before I left, I’d be as prickly as a porcupine.
I hastily threw on some clothes. As soon as I opened my bedroom door, I smelled the tantalizing aroma of cooking bacon wafting through the house. My mouth watered. They said ambrosia was the food of the gods, but if that was the case, it was only because they had never tried bacon. Good. More for me.
But who was cooking? I was the one who did all the cooking after Mom died. Dad would likely set the house on fire if he tried to boil water. I remembered when he had tried to make an apple pie for me once when I had come home after a rough day at school. He had used white bread slices as a crust, and had put in equal parts sugar and salt. I don’t think he had even bothered to peel the apples. Out of politeness, I had choked down as much of the revolting concoction as I could stand. It was not something my taste buds or my stomach would ever forget.
As I walked closer to the kitchen, I heard someone singing. It was a woman’s voice. Weird. Had Dad finally met someone he was comfortable enough with to bring home? He hadn’t dated anyone since Mom had died.
I entered the kitchen. Who I saw there made my heart skip a beat.
Mom?
I couldn’t believe my eyes. How could this be? And yet, here she was, as large as life.
“Mom!” I shrieked. I flung myself on her. Startled, she stumbled. We both hit the counter and almost fell.
Even so, I didn’t let her go. I didn’t want to ever let her go again.
“Theo, what in the world has come over you?” she asked as she unsuccessfully tried to untangle herself from me. She stopped trying when she saw I was bawling. Her tone changed from indignant to concerned. “Why are you crying? What’s wrong?”
“You’re dead,” I blubbered. “Or at least you used to be. You died from cancer when I was twelve.”
“I’m very much alive,” she said gently as she stroked the back of my head. I was crying on her shoulder like a baby. Even over the smell of bacon, I could smell her slightly floral perfume I always remembered. “And I don’t have cancer or anything else for that matter. I had a checkup just last week. I’m as fit as a fiddle.”
She certainly looked healthy, though smaller than I remembered. As I calmed down, I realized she wasn’t smaller than I remembered. It was just like my room: it wasn’t Mom or my room that had gotten smaller. Rather, I had gotten bigger.
Mom was a sight for sore eyes. She was a short woman with dark features. Though she looked as slim and delicate as a flower, she was far stronger than she appeared. She often helped Dad with the farm work in addition to all the work she did around the house. When she wore short sleeves, you could see the smooth muscles rippling just under her tanned skin. She often said she weighed almost exactly what she weighed when she had graduated high school. It was the only bit of vanity I had ever seen in her. Even on formal occasions, she wore but a minimal amount of makeup and inexpensive clothes. Her otherwise black hair was flecked with gray.
“I’m not 19-years-old anymore, Theo, and I’d look pretty silly pretending like I am,” she often said when I asked her why she didn’t dye her hair. Her eyes had twinkled. “Besides, your Dad likes the gray. He says it makes me look like a sexy librarian.”
If there was one fault my mother had, it was a tendency to overshare.
My study group completely forgotten, my Mom and I sat down at the kitchen counter and had a long talk. I told her about the bad dream I had in which she and Dad had died and I had trained to become a Hero. A lot of people would have laughed out loud at the notion of their grown son dreaming about flying around in tights and a cape, but not Mom. She had told me more times than I could count that I could do anything I put my mind to and that I worked at. Even now, powerless though I was, I just knew that if I told my mother I wanted to be a superhero, she would say, “That’s nice, dear. Do you want me to sew a costume for you?”
As we talked, I held her hand like I had when I was a little kid crossing the street. If Mom thought that was weird, she didn’t say anything about it. Memories of the earlier conversation about her gray hair and many others flooded into my mind as I clung to my mother as if she was going to disappear.
I remembered how Mom had taught me to read before I even started school. I remembered her sitting up with me late into the night, reading aloud to me when I was too sick and miserable to go to sleep. I remembered her patiently teaching me to swing dance when I was fourteen as I stomped all over her feet. I remembered how she had smelled when she tied my bow tie for me the night of my high school senior prom. I remembered her eyes shining with pride when I got my acceptance letter from MIT.
I remembered it all. Those happy memories and many others filled my mind, replacing the ones from my dream like a bright light displacing shadows.
After a while, my father came in, looking just as I remembered him: a bigger, taller version of me. His name was James Conley. I have to admit I teared up all over again, even though I now realized all those bad memories I had weren’t memories at all, but rather, remnants of a bad dream. In reality, Dad had never been killed by Iceburn in that supervillain’s attempt to kill me. In reality, I had never buried him or sold the land he had spent his life slaving over. In reality, he was a prosperous farmer who had dozens of farmhands rather than being the debt-ridden man who lived from hand to mouth the way he had in my bad dreams.
Mom had to start a new batch of bacon. The bacon she had been cooking when I walked into the kitchen was burnt; I had distracted Mom too much with my crazy talk of her and Dad’s death. When she finished cooking, we sat and ate bacon and a batch of blueberry pancakes Mom had already made. I now remembered that we ate breakfast together as a family almost every morning.
I felt a warm glow as I helped Mom wash and dry the breakfast dishes. Dad sat at the kitchen table and read the morning newspaper, periodically looking up to read aloud to us in outrage something nutty one of our political leaders had done or was planning to do. As there were a l
ot of nutty things in the paper, Dad ranted and raved a lot. It was fortunate for my and Mom’s entertainment, but unfortunate for the country.
I had never been happier washing dishes and listening to the news.
Come to think of it, I had never been happier, period.
The only thing that remained from my earlier confused state was I still could sometimes glimpse out of the corner of my eye a gray-white shape. The shape nagged at my mind like a barely remembered undone task. I ignored the shape, figuring it was a figment of my imagination and a stubborn remnant of my dismaying dreams and confusion from earlier.
Besides, I was too happy to be with my parents to think of anything else.
Could today get any better? I thought.
As if on cue, the front doorbell rang.
I excused myself. I walked through the living room to go answer the door.
“There you are,” the girl on our front porch said when I opened the door. “I thought you had been abducted by aliens or something.”
As if a button triggering a video had been pressed in my mind, my brain was suddenly flooded by memories of the blonde in front of me. Her name was Amber Kaling. She was one of my fellow engineering students I was supposed to have had a study session with this morning. Like me, she was a sophomore at USCA. Also like me, she was moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts for the rest of her college career, though she was going to Harvard, not MIT. She had been a USCA cheerleader before she had given it up to spend more time on her studies. She was on the track and swim teams, she could knit a sweater, sew a dress, build a computer from scratch, and she could tell you more about Star Trek than Gene Roddenberry could. She was a year younger than I and lived just a few miles up the road with her parents.
And, she was my girlfriend.
No, let me correct that: She was my hot girlfriend.
Amber had long blonde hair that looked like it had been spun from gold. It framed her heart-shaped face like a rich curtain. Her blue eyes were the color of a crystal-clear lake. Her square, black-framed glasses augmented rather than marred her looks. Maybe having a thing for the sexy librarian look was genetic. Amber had a rosebud mouth that was subtly highlighted with red gloss. She had on black skinny jeans that clung to her runner’s legs like a second skin. She wore an oversized red plaid shirt that hid a curvy torso I was very familiar with.
If Amber wasn’t the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, she certainly was a finalist for the distinction. Christopher Marlowe had been wrong about Helen of Troy—Amber was the one with the face that could launch a thousand ships.
Not only was she beautiful, but she was also smart and funny and good. She volunteered at the county soup kitchen. Every Saturday morning, she drove her disabled grandmother to the beauty salon and then had lunch with her afterward. She would give a needy stranger the shirt off her back if he needed it.
I swallowed hard. I had a sudden vivid memory of what she looked like without her shirt on. And here I stood, completely unprepared, fresh out of needy strangers.
Best of all, Amber loved me as much as I loved her.
This vision was my girlfriend? I fought off the strong impulse to high five myself.
“Are you okay?” Amber said, jarring my mind from lingering over the memories of what she looked like naked. “You’re staring at me like you’ve never seen me before.”
“Sometimes I just can’t believe how beautiful you are,” I said, finally chasing down the cat that had stolen my tongue.
Amber looked at me the way my mother often looked at my father, like he had been personally responsible for putting the stars in the night sky. “If you think a little sweet talk is going to get you out of standing the rest of us up,” she said, “then I must say you know me very well.” She kissed me on the lips before brushing past me to go inside our house. She tasted like peppermint and possibilities. Kissing her felt the way a sunrise looked.
I followed Amber to the kitchen, admiring the amazing view she presented from the back. Mom and Dad greeted Amber like she was a member of the family. She practically was. Mom and Dad knew I planned to propose to Amber before we moved to Massachusetts. I had been saving money from my part-time job as a tutor in the university’s computer lab to buy an engagement ring. Dad had offered to loan me the money, but I had told him I’d rather come up with it on my own. I had taken one of Dad’s Jamesisms to heart: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Dad had said that more times than I could count. Despite that oft-repeated advice, Dad had no problem borrowing liberally from Hamlet’s Polonius.
As I luxuriated in the warm glow of being surrounded by the people I loved, the nagging feeling about an uncompleted task I had experienced before came back. Though I knew I wasn’t seeing anyone except Amber, I got the strangest feeling that I was being untrue to someone. The fog I could almost-but-not-quite see out of the corner of my eye returned.
The word “fog” reminded me of the woman I had dreamed about being a Hero Apprentice with. What was her name? Mist? Cloud? No, neither of them was right.
“Your father and I are going to drive to town to pick up some groceries,” Mom said, stopping me from further grasping at mental straws. The fog in the corner of my eye got fainter. “Do you need anything while we’re out?”
I told her I was fine. In a few minutes, they were gone, leaving me and Amber alone in the kitchen.
“How long do you suppose they’ll be gone?” Amber asked.
“An hour and a half to two hours, probably. Why?”
“Since you missed our earlier study group, I figured we could fit in an anatomy study session.”
“Neither of us is taking anatomy,” I said, confused. Then again, maybe my memory was playing tricks on me again.
Amber started to unbutton her shirt. She smiled at me the way Eve had probably smiled at Adam when she had offered him the apple.
Amber said, “Even though you’re one of the smartest people I know, you can be awfully obtuse sometimes.”
Her shirt fell open, exposing a very sturdy yet very sexy bra. I found myself gaping. When the Bible said “my cup runneth over,” it could have been quoting Amber. Amber was very self-conscious about her big chest, which was why she normally dressed in loose tops to de-emphasize it. She often mused about getting a reduction. I had told her she was perfect the way she was. I had jokingly threatened to break up with her if she did anything to alter herself.
The truth of the matter was I would sooner saw off my arms and legs than break up with Amber.
Amber shrugged out of her bra, exposing even more of her perfection. I reached for her. The urgency of our desire for each other kept us from withdrawing to my bedroom. Soon, our two bodies became one. It happened right in the middle of the kitchen’s cold tile floor. Amber didn’t seem to mind. I knew I didn’t. We were too lost in each other to care.
After an exquisite eternity, Amber and I exploded in each other’s arms.
I had been wrong earlier when I had thought the day couldn’t get any better.
Never before had I been so happy to be so wrong.
22
I filled my umpteenth bushel basket, topping it off with a few more peaches. Even though it was early morning, the sun beat down implacably like a red-hot hammer. The high humidity made being outside like walking around in a steam room. My long-sleeved cotton work shirt clung to me like I was in a wet tee shirt contest.
Summers in South Carolina were no joke. Hell might be cool and refreshing by comparison. If the Sunday morning fire-and-brimstone television evangelists were right, I would find out soon enough if I kept doing what I had been doing the past few weeks with and to Amber.
I was willing to take the risk.
I wiped my wet brow with my shirt sleeve. It was a mistake. The peach fuzz that was on the fabric now made my forehead itch. My forehead had plenty of company. Hours of picking peaches had managed to get peach fuzz in places I barely knew I had. I wanted to cover myself in catnip and invite every cat in miles to make
me their human scratching post.
I was hot, tired, sweaty, thirsty, and itchy.
I had never been happier.
I was in the middle of Dad’s peach orchard. The rows of fruit-laden peach trees around me rustled with activity. Most of the people picking peaches along with me were Dad’s employees. Most of them in turn were Mexican. People loved to criticize Mexican immigrants to this country, but good luck in getting your average native-born American up before the crack of dawn to go pick peaches in the heat of a South Carolina summer. The brown-skinned men whom Dad employed worked tirelessly, showed up when they were supposed to, and were as honest as the priests who presided over them at Mass every Sunday morning. Some of them had been with Dad as long as I had been alive. Most of them were my friends; many were like uncles or brothers to me.
In addition to Dad’s employees being out here with me, several of my friends from college were here as well. When I had told them Dad always needed extra hands to get in the summer’s harvest, they had jumped at the chance to make some extra money. Amber would be here too if it weren’t Saturday. Today was the day she chauffeured her grandmother around. The fact Amber wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty was but one of the many things I loved about her.
Dad and Mom were here picking peaches too. Dad worked on a tree behind me, while Mom was over on my right. Though Dad theoretically was supervising the rest of us, in fact he was picking as many peaches as we were. As for Mom, as she had put it when I had asked her earlier why she was going to pick peaches with us, “Some women go to the gym and do yoga. I help work the farm. Besides,” she had said, her eyes twinkling, “your Dad likes it when I get all hot and sweaty.”
Eww. Like I said, Mom sometimes overshared.
Though I was working hard, I was surrounded by friends and family. Who could ask for anything more?
Why, then, did something keep nagging at my mind? It had bothered me off and on ever since I had awaken confused in my room weeks before. It was the same sort of feeling I got when I had something to do, but whatever it was had slipped my mind. It was as if my subconscious was tugging at my shirt, trying to get my attention, and saying “Hey dummy! You forgot something.”
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