Rivals (19 page)

She’d made him
a costume.

“You can’t be
a, a,” she said, waving her hands in the air, “superhero, right, without
dressing the part. Can you?”

He picked up
one of the gloves and pulled it on over his left hand. It fit perfectly. He
made a fist and it just looked right, like a superhero’s fist.

“Oh my God,”
he said. “This is amazing. It’s—it’s green flames. Green flame, like
the flame that gave me my power.”

Lucy glanced
up at his eyes, then looked away again. “I thought you could call yourself the
Green Flame. Except there’s two problems. One is, you might not want to
constantly be reminded that the green flame also killed your dad, and the
other, is that it would be kind of easy for mean kids to call you the Green
Flamer, so maybe we need to work on the name. But I really liked the way it
came out.”

“You made
this?”

“My mom helped
some. Well, a lot. But I designed it. It’s not a big deal.”

“Not
a—Luce! This is unbelievable! This is way, way beyond the call of duty.
I have got the single best friend anybody ever wanted,” he said, truly blown
away.

“Well,” she
said, and she started to smile, even though she still wasn’t looking at him.
“I figured, every time you save somebody you end up ripping your shirt or
getting blood all over yourself or whatever, so maybe this would be—”

“Dana is going
to flip when she sees me in this,” he said.

He might as
well have dropped a live grenade on the floor.

Suddenly a
hundred pounds of Lucy Benez was leaping through the air at him, leg braces and
all. Her small fists bounced again and again off his chest and her face was
contorted in rage. She was hitting him, he realized, punching him like crazy.
He tried to grab her arms but she just yanked them away from him and fell over
onto the bed.

“You stupid,
you dumbass, you jerk!” she shrieked. “You freaking assface! You piece
of—”

“Lucy! What
are you doing?” he asked, trying to grab her again. She writhed like a snake
on the bed.

“I worked for
weeks on this! I had to save up every cent of my allowance to buy the fabric!
I drew maybe a hundred sketches for what it should look like, I bought special
color pens so I could show the ladies at the fabric store so it would be the
perfect colors, I must have jabbed myself with needles and pins a million times
because it had to be perfect, and yes, I did it myself because, whether you
believe it, or not, I have, talent, I have so much, talent!” She was sobbing
and gasping for breath at the same time. “I have some, some brains, in my
head, unlike your, poor little, rich girl, brain-dead, girlfriend, who thinks
she, can just, buy everybody, thinks, she can buy you, but she will never, love
you, a millionth as much, as I’ve loved you every day, since I met you!”

She rolled off
the bed and hit the floor hard, her leg braces clanking against each other. He
reached for her again but she waved a hand like a claw at his face and then she
pulled herself up to her feet and hobbled out of his room, hobbled down the
stairs, out the front door.

He started to
chase her—he could catch her easily—but Grandma was already there
at the door with her plaster-wrapped arm held up to stop him.

“Did you hear
what she said?” he asked.

“Half the
neighborhood did, for my money,” Grandma told him.

“I have to go
after her!”

“If you do,”
she said, “it will be the biggest mistake of your life.”

“But—but—”

“More
importantly, I believe that my soup is burning. Go turn it down, dear. That’s
a good boy.”

“Come on in,”
the stoner said, holding the door open. He kept scratching at the sparse
goatee on his chin. “We were just watching a movie on cable,” he told her.

Maggie stepped
inside an apartment that stank of old stale pot smoke. It was one of the cheap
student apartments down by the local community college, a place where you were
always likely to find somebody sitting outside on the lawn playing an acoustic
guitar, but unlikely to find anybody playing one well. There were guys in the
park playing hackey-sack and girls two years older than Maggie wearing no
make-up and ponchos. Every time she’d been to this part of town, Maggie had
wondered what they knew that she didn’t. What secrets she was going to learn,
when she got to college.

It looked like
she would never find out.

Whatever
, she told herself. Buy the car.
Get
moving. Get out of town
.

“So how old
are you?” the stoner asked. “You look kind of young.”

“I’m
eighteen,” she lied. She’d gotten his name out of the local free paper, out of
the want ads. He was selling a car for twelve hundred dollars and the ad
suggested he needed to sell it as soon as possible. It seemed like her best
chance. Maggie had wasted a lot of time going to used car lots. Places like
that wanted to see some ID up front, and they had not been impressed when she
started laying out twenties to smooth things along. One place had even called
the cops on her, while the salesman tried to convince her that whatever her
parents had done, it couldn’t be so bad that she needed to run away. Rather
than telling him the truth she’d just run.

“Listen, can I
see the car? I’m kind of in a hurry.”

The stoner was
watching the TV on the other side of the room. Three other guys, all of whom
had beards and the dull, glazed eyes of stoners, were sitting around the TV in
various states of consciousness. “Yeah, hold on a sec.” The advertisement on
the TV ended and a newscast came on. “You know about the super kids? The
brother and sister who keep fighting, right, but they’ve got super powers
and—”

“I’ve heard
about them,” Maggie said.

“Well check
this out. The brother snapped and totally attacked a reporter last night.”

“What?” Maggie
stepped over toward the couch, intent on seeing the television. “Turn it up
for a second,” she said.

The guy with
the remote had laid his head back on the top of the couch and was looking up at
her with a huge smile. He wasn’t blinking. She grabbed the remote out of his
hand and turned it up herself.

“—unprovoked
outburst, leaving one vehicle badly damaged and this reporter scared for her
life. We met up with Brent Gill at around seven last night as he was coming
out of his suburban home. He looked agitated, but when we asked him what was
making him upset his reaction was like nothing we’d seen before.”

The reporter’s
face cut to a video shot of Brent walking straight toward the camera. His eyes
were wild. Maggie had never seem him so angry. The reporter asked him a
couple of questions Maggie couldn’t really hear—something about his
girlfriend, which surprised her (what else had he been up to that she didn’t
know about?) and he said, “No comment. No comment, okay? I don’t want to talk
to you right now!” The reporter said something else that Maggie couldn’t make
out at all. Then Brent came right up to the camera until his face filled the
entire screen. “Leave me alone. All of you. Just leave me alone. Leave me
alone, and leave Dana alone.” (Dana Kravitz! Maggie thought—so Jill
Hennessey is behind all this!) His nostrils flared. Then he said, “I’m not
asking anymore.”

The camera
pulled back as if the cameraman was running backwards to get away from Brent.
The scene widened out and Maggie saw Brent standing in a circle of reporters,
some of them backing up themselves, some pressing in closer with microphones or
tape recorders or just notebooks and pencils. There was a news van very close
to Brent, its headlights painting broad yellow stripes across his shirt and
pants.

He punched it.

Just swung
around and hit it with his fist. It jumped up off the ground and then fell
back on its tires, bouncing a little. One of the headlights shattered and
steam shot out of the broken grille on its nose. Its passenger-side door
popped open and a cameraman fell out, then quickly got up and ran off. Brent punched
the van again, darkening its other headlight. And again. And again.

The camera cut
back to the studio where the same reporter as before said, “Channel Seven news
is still debating whether or not to press charges against the boy who, until
very recently, we were calling a hero. More on this story as—”

There were
other stories on the news but she didn’t listen to them.
It’s finally
happened,
she thought
. The world
in all its suckiness has finally caught up with the golden boy
. She wasn’t sure how that made her feel, actually.
Maggie switched off the TV. Suddenly four stoners were looking at her. None
of them recognized her, though. Her disguise worked, as usual. “Now I’d like
to see that car,” she said.

“Um, sure.
It’s just downstairs.”

As Maggie had
expected, the stoner college boy was easily distracted. When she handed over
the money he just asked her if she didn’t want to test drive the car first, but
he didn’t press the issue—he was too busy counting the twenties to pay her
any real attention. He muttered something about title transfers and needing to
change the car’s registration, but when she said she was in a hurry and they
could take care of all that later, he just handed over the keys. She told him
her name was Greta Garbo and he didn’t even shrug. He wanted a phone number
for her but it was easy to make one up.

Five minutes
later she was on the road in her brand new broken down much used, oft-repaired
Honda. It was gray, sort of, where it wasn’t rust colored. The interior stank
of pot smoke but if she rolled down all the windows she could breathe enough to
drive. She got on the road and headed toward the highway. There was nothing
to hold her anymore. Nothing to stop her from making a clean getaway.

Except…

Except there
was one thing she wanted to get first. She would leave all her clothes, leave
all her things at the house rather than face Grandma again. But in her locker,
at school, there was one thing she couldn’t just leave behind.

Taped on the
inside of her locker door was a picture of her mom.

If she could
just see it, one more time. If she could take it with her, and look at it
every time she started forgetting what Mom looked like—it would help a
lot. It would make her feel like she wasn’t going crazy. That the guilt she
felt for the things she’d one wasn’t going to take her whole life away, just
like she’d taken the drunk’s TV set.

It was a
mistake, she knew. Going to the school would put her at risk. Her disguise
probably wouldn’t fool any of the kids there who knew her. And most likely
Brent would be there. But if she was quick, if she didn’t take any unnecessary
chances, then… maybe. Maybe it would be alright.

The school was
barely two miles away. It was an easy drive, and when she was done she could
get right back on the highway from the school’s feeder road. She could be
halfway across the state by lunch time.

“Let’s do it,”
she told herself, and threw the car in gear.

There were
plenty of available spaces in the school’s parking lot. Theoretically if you
didn’t have the correct permit you could be towed for parking there, but she
didn’t plan on sticking around long enough for that to happen. She got out of
the car and headed for the main doors of the school, the doors she’d passed
through every weekday for the last three school years. There was no one
around—classes were in session and the hallways would be empty. That was
good.

She passed
right underneath a security camera on her way in. She considered grabbing it
and tearing it off the wall, but the damage was already done—she had
already been taped going into the school. Whatever. By the time the police
saw the tape she would be long gone.

She didn’t see
anyone until she was passing the Home Ec rooms. There was a girl, a freshman Maggie
didn’t know, using the drinking fountain to wash off her retainer. When she
saw Maggie the girl pressed herself up against the wall and stared in terror.

“Grr,” Maggie
said, and scratched at the air like a cat.

The freshman
girl squeaked in panic. She turned her head to one side as if she really
expected Maggie to attack her, as if she couldn’t bear to watch the blow coming
at her.

“Oh, just beat
it,” Maggie said, and the girl was running before she’d even finished her
sentence. The girl would probably go and tell her teacher, and the teacher
would call the principal’s office, and the principal would call the cops.
Whatever. That would take time, and her locker was just up ahead. When she
reached it she wasted a few seconds trying to remember the combination, then
realized she didn’t need it. She grabbed the locker’s handle and pulled. The
whole door came away with a nasty screeching noise that made Maggie’s teeth
hurt, it was so loud. Up and down the hall classroom doors popped open and
kids looked out, wanting to see what was going on. It didn’t matter. She
would just grab the photo and walk out, and if anyone tried to stop her she
would just—

The picture
wasn’t there.

There was
nothing on the inside of the door. The locker itself was completely empty. It
didn’t even smell like her locker anymore. It smelled like someone had
scrubbed it out with disinfectant, a nasty smell that managed to be sweet and
acrid at the same time. Not willing to believe it, Maggie turned the bent
locker door over in her hands and checked the number, but it was the same
number she’d always had.

“You
bastards,” she growled. They had cleaned out her locker.

Well, of
course they had. The police had probably insisted on it. They would have
wanted to know if there was anything in the locker that could lead them to her.
She imagined one of the vice principals sorting through her stinky gym clothes
and disassembling the ham sandwich lunch she’d left in there the day before she
ran away. They probably went through all her textbooks and read all the notes
in the margins. And they had definitely taken her picture of Mom away.