Rivals (4 page)

She stared in
the mirror and grabbed a mascara and started doing her lashes. She’d read an
article in Cosmo about how to give yourself a smoky eye and she’d been wanting
to try it out. Applying makeup was still a relatively new thing for Maggie.
She’d been a tomboy and a jock for most of high school, and it was only when
she started her senior year that she started really taking care of her
appearance. It was right after Mom died, in fact. She’d figured out that it
took total concentration to do your makeup effectively, and that while you were
busy applying just the right amount of blush and eyeliner, you couldn’t think
about—

I killed
Dad
.

—anything
else. Well. That didn’t work. She threw the mascara down in disgust and
started crying into her hands, big noisy sobs that no one would hear over the
music.

I could
have gone back, like Brent wanted.

Maybe Dad
was still alive.

“I didn’t know
that we were okay!” she told the mirror. “I thought Brent was still on fire.
I thought we had to get to a doctor ourselves. I thought—”

She rubbed
away her tears with the balls of her thumbs and grabbed for a tissue. When she
looked back in the mirror she got a shock. She had managed to rub mascara all
over her cheeks and temples and up onto her forehead. It was like she had
taken a paintbrush full of black paint and swiped it just right across her face
at eye level. It looked…

Well, it
looked like she was wearing a mask.

She didn’t
know whether to laugh or cry so she did both and she must have made a lot of
noise because eventually there was a knock on her door and then Grandma came
in. “I didn’t give you permission to enter my room,” Maggie said, rubbing at
her face with the tissue. Where was the cold cream? She couldn’t let Grandma
see her like that. The old biddy would think she was playing dress-up or
something.

“Young lady,
turn off this music right now,” Grandma said, loud enough to be heard.

Maggie reached
over to her computer and turned it up, slightly.

“You’re
certainly your father’s daughter,” Grandma said. “Wild.”

“Dad was a
good man,” Maggie insisted.

“He was a
hellion. Never worked an honest day in his life. All he wanted to do was
traipse about in the desert all the time, probably half-naked like a little
boy!”

Maggie spun
around in her chair. She couldn’t believe this. “He was an engineer! He
worked harder than you ever did.”

“He ruined my
little girl. Your mother. Made
her
crazy, too. Neither of them ever understood what family really means. Well,
I’m not going to let that happen to you. Now you and I have had our
differences over the years—”

Maggie
snorted.

“—but
that ends now. You kids need a parent around here. The Lord knows I’m too old
for the job. And He also knows I don’t want it. But I am going to keep you on
the straight and narrow. Something happened out there in the desert and now
you’ve got the papers calling, and the government watching you. That is not
acceptable. Not at a time when you need to focus on your studies. I am going
to make sure that you both get off to college, where you’ll study nice,
respectable subjects. And if I have to tan both of your hides to get you
there, I will.”

Maggie rolled
her eyes. “Why are you always such a hardass, huh? My father just died. I
just got out of the hospital. Be nice to me!”

“Nice,”
Grandma said. She brought her hands up where Maggie could see them. She
showed her the engagement ring on her finger, with its tiny little diamond.
That ring was one of her favorite threats. Always, when she slapped Maggie,
she turned the diamond around so that it was inside her palm, and then she
would hit Maggie with the back of her hand. She had threatened many times to
hit her with an open palm—which would rake that diamond across Maggie’s
cheek and cut her, maybe even leave a scar.

“Before she
died, your mother told me about you,” Grandma said, when they were both clear
that niceness was not going to be part of their relationship. “She told me
about your little problem. About your sticky fingers.”

Maggie blushed
despite herself. “She didn’t. Mom would never do that.”

“She told me
how worried she was about you. She told me you had stolen a bag full of makeup
from a store downtown. Or at least, that you tried. She told me she had to go
down there and talk your way out of the store, had to
grovel
in front of
a security guard
to keep the store from pressing charges. Do you
know what I told her?”

“No,” Maggie
said. “I’m not psychic.”

Grandma leaned
forward. Her eyes were very large and very bright behind her glasses. “I told
her she should have let you rot in jail. But since that’s not an option this
time, I need to make sure nothing like that every happens again. I came in
here to lay down some ground rules. First off, no boys.”

“Excuse me?”

Grandma
scowled at Maggie. Nobody could scowl like Grandma. “I called the school and
I know what kind of grades you’re getting. You can go to one movie with a boy
of your choice the day they tell me you’re working on straight As. Rule two
is, no friends.”

“What?”

“I know what
kind of friends a girl like you is likely to have. Smokers. Giggling little
no-brains. Probably a couple of drug users. That ends now. After school,
you’ll come straight home and do your chores and your homework. Then you and I
are going to watch television every night from eight until nine thirty.”

Maggie’s lips
pressed together. “What happens at nine thirty?” she asked.

“Bedtime,”
Grandma said.

Rule three was
no allowance. What would Maggie need money for, anyway, since she wasn’t going
to be hanging out with her friends and would have all her meals at home?

Rule four was
no talking back.

It went on
from there for a while. Maggie stopped listening. She pulled her knees up to
her chest and hugged them there. She closed her eyes and just let the words
wash over her, mixing with the music until it all just felt like wind in her
hair.

“Which brings
us to rule seventeen,” Grandma said.

“No, no, no,
you didn’t,” Lucy said, cradling Brent’s head against her chest. She ran one
hand over his hair, over and over. “You couldn’t possibly have.”

He was crying
openly now. The events of the last week had totally undercut any idea he ever
had about being a tough guy. “He said it wasn’t safe, that we should probably
just leave. And it was so weird in there—I could barely hear his voice.
It was the last thing he ever said to me! And then I found that well
or—or whatever it was. It was closed off, there was a lid on top. But
it looked kind of loose, and I thought I wanted to see if there was anything
inside. I don’t know what I expected to find. But when the lid came off there
was something green and glowing down there and it was getting bigger—like
it was coming up from a long way down, coming up really fast.”

Lucy kissed
him on the top of his head. Which was a little weird but he didn’t mind. It
felt kind of good.

“Dad came
rushing up behind me. He was shouting but there was no sound at all,
everything was perfectly silent. He looked down into the well and then he
grabbed the lid and tried to put it back on but—but it was too late. It
was just too late. He was on fire, he was…”

“You didn’t do
anything.”

“Yes, exactly!
I didn’t stop him! I didn’t even try!”

“No, no, no,
no,” Lucy said again, and pressed her lips against his forehead. There was so
much comfort in that kiss. It was amazing how good it felt just to have a
friend right then. “You didn’t know. You couldn’t possibly know.”

“Oh my God,
Luce, it was so horrible. He—he melted while I watched. I would have
stayed there and just watched and probably got killed myself if Maggie hadn’t
come along. She saved me. If I’d been as smart as her, or as fast, maybe I
could have—I could have done
something
for Dad.”

“No, no, no,
no,” Lucy repeated. “It wasn’t your fault.” She sat down next to him, so
close their thighs were touching, and wrapped her arms around him. She held
him tight while he shook and cried and got it out of his system.

“Now he’s
gone,” Brent said. “I don’t know what to do. Everything is different—I
can’t talk to Grandma about this stuff. I keep thinking about what Dad would
want me to do with these new powers. He would want me to do good things, I
think. If I do good things, if I help people, maybe that’ll make up a little for
killing him. Do you think so?”

“Shh,” she
said. “You didn’t kill him. And I think he’d be proud of you whatever you do.
I heard him say that like, a million times.”

When his
sobbing had slowed down a little, when he wasn’t sucking in breath that he couldn’t
seem to swallow, he turned slightly in her arms and looked up at her. She was
smiling bravely. Like she wanted to show him she didn’t think he was a bad
person. It meant so much, to see her smile like that, her face just a few
inches away from his. Her mouth so close to his. He leaned in just a little
closer, and she did, too.

“You rock,
Lucy,” he breathed.

“Thanks,” she
said. One of her hands tangled in the hair on the back of his head and she
started pulling him even closer. Their lips grazed each other and he felt her
braces underneath.

He pulled back
hurriedly. He had just almost kissed her! That wasn’t cool. Desperately, he
tried to think of something to say that would smooth over what had just
happened. “Best friends forever, that’s what the girls say, right? BFFs?” he
asked her.

He didn’t
understand the look in her eyes. It was hopeful and terrified and lost and
disappointed and burning with triumph all at the same time. He had no idea
what she was thinking, or feeling.

Then she lifted
her arms away from him and reached for her leg braces. “I have to go home,”
she said. “I forgot that I have to get dinner ready tonight, Mom is working
late and if I don’t get the pork chops started right now my Dad isn’t going to
have anything to eat, and he’ll just laugh, and then he’ll say forget the pork
chops let’s order a pizza, which would normally be cool, except his cholesterol
is up again and the doctor says he can’t have any cheese, and anyway I can’t
eat pizza because it makes me break out but I want you to know, I’m totally
your BFF, and I will always be here for you if you want to, to, to talk, yes,
to talk, or you know, just hang out. Chill. Be cool, together, just two
friends hanging, we don’t even have to talk, we can just be quiet sometime and
see how long that lasts which, you know perfectly well, for me is not going to
be that long. But we could try that.”

“Thanks,” he
told her, as she hobbled out the door. She didn’t reply or even look back. He
really hoped he hadn’t screwed things up by nearly kissing her. It wasn’t like
they’d ever thought of each other that way before but she was a girl and he was
a teenage boy and sometimes you couldn’t help yourself, and—

“Oh God,” he
thought. “What if I made her feel so uncomfortable she won’t be my friend
anymore?”

A scratching
sound on his window scared him half to death. He jumped up and ran to the
window, throwing it open to see what was outside. It was Maggie, crouched on
the roof looking in at him. She had a lot of eye makeup on and it made her
eyes look huge.

“You’re not
the smartest brother anyone ever had, are you?” Maggie asked. “And you don’t
understand other people at all.”

“If you wanted
to insult me you could have just come to my door,” Brent told her. He climbed
through the window and into the chilly night air. You could see half the
neighborhood from up there, rows of two-story houses curling in on themselves
on meandering dead-end roads. In the distance the mall was a smudge of light
on the dark blue horizon. “When was the last time we were up here?” he asked,
feeling like the roof had gotten steeper or maybe his center of gravity had
changed. It didn’t feel nearly as stable as it used to. “Before Mom died, I
know, but how old were we?”

“When I was
your age.” Maggie skipped easily up the slope of the roof to stand on the very
top of the house. “That’s probably how long it’s been since we did anything
together without complaining about it.”

“Without
you
complaining about it,” he corrected her. He wished
she would come down from there. He didn’t want her to fall. He didn’t want to
lose another family member for some stupid reason that didn’t make any sense.
“Why did we stop hanging out together, anyway?”

She shrugged.
Then she stood up slowly on the toes of one foot, balancing herself by
stretching out her arms. “I guess we didn’t have anything in common. But now
we do again.” Then she dropped to a crouch, pumped her legs—and sailed
out across the darkness towards the roof of the house across the street. He
could just hear her call back, “You’re it!”

Brent ran
across the roof and jumped after his sister, still convinced somehow that it
wouldn’t work, that he would fall crashing to the street below and shatter
every bone in his body. But the muscles in his legs seemed to wake up as he
moved, pumping harder and faster than he’d ever gone before. He pushed hard
with his left foot and suddenly he was up in the air, hanging there it
seemed—weightless, almost flying. Then he started to come back down and
he saw the other rooftop beneath him. His feet pedaled in the air and then
came down hard on the shingles, knocking a few of them free. He looked down to
watch them spiral toward the gutter and nearly lost his balance. He threw his
arms out and they wheeled through the air and he actually felt like he was
going to take off, that he could flap his arms like wings and fly. He settled
down and looked at his feet and saw the two dark holes he’d made when he
landed. “Oh, crap,” he said. “I think I broke their roof.”