Hero (26 page)

"Why would you ever let someone fall in love with you if you aren't going to be around to enjoy it with them? I know you think I'm pretty cruel sometimes. It's true. I can be. But I'm not that cruel. I wouldn't wish this on anyone."

We breathed the same air for a minute, and I watched Scarlett stare out the window.

"Maybe you should talk to him," I said. I hadn't read the handbook for these situations. "Maybe if you saw him and told him what was going on, I don't know, maybe he's just waiting to see you again to talk about it."

Scarlett took her delivery cap off. Underneath she was patchy and bald from chemo. Her blond ponytail was a hair extension woven, rather sloppily, underneath the cap. She reached under her seat and pulled out a new cap with a blond ponytail.

"What are you talking about? I see him every night," she said, and adjusted the cap so the ponytail looked even in the back. "So do you."

I didn't want to hear what came next, but she said it anyway.

"It's Golden Boy."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I MET SCARLETT at her house, the prettiest trailer in the park, at exactly 7:30 a.m. the next morning. Scarlett said if we went early, maybe she'd get out in time to take a nap so that no one at tryouts would notice how exhausted she really was. "They're always 'running behind' at the doctor's office," she said. "Not exactly what you want to hear when every day could be your last."

On the way she stopped at a 7-Eleven for some biscuits and a Diet Dr Pepper. She spooned some extra-spicy salsa out of the nacho fixin's container onto the biscuits.

"What do you care?" she said, when she saw me make a face at her breakfast. "I'm just going to throw it all up anyway."

We parked the car across the street, and she asked me to find her appointment card in the backseat while she wolfed down the last half of a biscuit. I found the small card underneath a repossession notice for the car. I decided not to bring that up. One crisis at a time. I read the card, which said we were about half an hour late.

"Oh, I almost forgot to ask," she said. "I need to borrow two hundred and fifty dollars."

I thought she had to be kidding. She waited until now to ask me to pay for it?

"Hey," she said, and shrugged, "good chemo ain't cheap."

I calculated how much I had in my savings and told her I'd write her a check. Thank God for those extra shifts I'd picked up to pay for Dad's dry cleaning. She said she'd pay me back as soon as she could, but I knew better.

"This wasn't part of the deal," I said while scribbling out the check. "I said I'd drive you because you were too tired after the treatments to pull it together for practice."

"Yeah, okay, whatever." She snatched the check. She wasn't even looking at me.

"You got a girlfriend yet?" she asked me as she yanked open the door to the concrete building. My heart dropped a little, my usual reaction to this question.

"Uh, no," I said.

"Well, when you do," Scarlett said as she tossed the remains of her ham biscuit in the waste bin, "try to pick one whose insides aren't rotting."

In the waiting room, I flipped through a Reader's Digest and found myself lingering on a page called "The Lighter Side of Life." Scarlett had been uncharacteristically restrained with the woman at the front desk, who castigated her for being late. She said it meant she'd have to wait a while longer because they were "running a little behind." Scarlett turned to me and grinned when the receptionist said that last part.

Scarlett went behind the closed doors, where husbands, partners, friends, and I were not allowed to enter. The excessive number of young people in the waiting room made me wonder what the hell we'd done to the world that this many kids were getting chemo. You could tell by the varying degrees of hair loss approximately how long each one had been in treatment. I scanned the room, and each one was too embarrassed to make eye contact with me. One of the teenage girls sat rocking back and forth like she had a bad cramp in her stomach and was waiting for it to pass.

I didn't realize how rude it was to be the one healthy kid staring at all the patients until I got to the last guy in the room. Apparently, he'd decided to make a joke out of the whole process—he'd painted arched eyebrows where his real ones had been, and he wore a towering bouffant wig on his head. He was grinning at me, waiting for my eyes to come to a rest on his. His middle finger was raised in my direction.

I laughed out loud—I couldn't help it—and saw that the entire waiting room was staring at me like I was crazy. This wasn't the kind of place where you laughed. I didn't have time to apologize. The emergency alarm on my ring went off.

The doors busted open, and Scarlett came running out, clenching her ring finger.

"We gotta go!"

She almost knocked over the crabby receptionist, who fell back in her seat. Scarlett grabbed my arm, yanked me out of my seat, and the next thing I knew, we were sprinting down the hallway.

The window at the end of the hallway was open. Good thing, because Scarlett heated up, lifted me off the ground, and seconds later we were flying through the air.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

"LOOK WHO DECIDED to show up," Golden Boy said. He eyed me and Scarlett suspiciously. She set me down, and I saw Golden Boy's eyes on our clasped hands. Scarlett knew he was looking, and gave my hand an extra squeeze for emphasis. She barged past Golden Boy.

"Where's the fire?" she said.

Golden Boy pointed toward the parking lot of the ramshackle apartments we'd been staking out. Scarlett turned on the heat, yanked me up into the air with her, and we were suddenly off again.

I tried to focus on the emergency, but I couldn't help but think about Scarlett. Was it safe for her to be back in action this soon after the procedure? I was about to ask her if she was okay, when she did something that threw me for a loop.

She dropped me. I whizzed through the air and thought for sure I'd splatter on the pavement, so I closed my eyes. Instead, I landed on top of someone and thought I heard a bone crack. It knocked the wind out of me, and when I finally caught my breath, I saw that I'd landed on Snaggletooth. And the cracking sound I heard wasn't his bone, it was his tooth. I'd landed right on the back of his neck and driven his tooth straight into the concrete sidewalk.

A pair of quick hands lifted me off the ground.

"Get up," Golden Boy shouted at me as he whipped around Snaggletooth at superspeed and tied him up. "We're supposed to apprehend them, not kill them." It was the first time I'd seen him since Scarlett had told me her news. He eyed Scarlett again as he wound up Snaggletooth.

Typhoid Larry was leading Transvision Vamp to Ruth's car. Her hands were tied behind her back, and Larry told us he'd first given her a wicked case of glaucoma so she couldn't resort to her usual eye tricks, and then he'd given her a debilitating case of tendonitis so she couldn't run. Larry was getting smarter with his powers. He'd also tied a bandana around her head to cover her eyes. She stumbled and hit her head on the roof of the car as she climbed in the backseat.

"Right on time," Ruth said. "I was waiting for you two to show up."

Golden Boy didn't offer me a hand to get up. I got the message loud and clear and got up just fine on my own.

"Where the hell were you two, anyway?" he said.

It wasn't my place to tell him.

"Shouldn't we get these guys to headquarters?" I wasn't very smooth at dodging questions, and he could tell.

His demeanor changed immediately. His molecules slowed down and he actually came to a full stop. He looked at me. I could tell he was wondering exactly how much I knew about him and Scarlett.

"Hey! Wake up!" Ruth shouted from her car. "We got trouble!"

She pointed down the street, where Scarlett had pinned Ssnake in an alley. She was pummeling him with her fists. Her arms flung wildly, weaving trails of flame in figure eights, and from the force of her blows, she didn't seem to care if she broke her hands or his ribs. She tore into his stomach like it was a punching bag.

"Stop her!" Ruth shouted.

Golden Boy got to Scarlett, who was still ripping into Ssnake with no intention of stopping. She was lost in rage, and it was our job to get her back before she killed this poor loser. Golden Boy grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her back. She whipped around, her eyes lit up with flames.

She looked around frantically for something to hit, her chest heaving, and she tried to get her bearings. Ssnake crumpled against the wall and slid down to the ground in a motionless heap, like a giant spitball thrown against a blackboard. Scarlett pushed Golden Boy to the ground, and I saw the shock on his face. Flames escaped from Scarlett's mouth as she seethed. I ran over to her and grabbed her, like my dad had grabbed me the first time I'd ever had a seizure.

"Scarlett, listen to me," I whispered into her ear. "Everything's going to be okay." My hands were burning, and I couldn't tell if it was my powers or hers, but it hurt like hell.

More than anything in the world, though, she needed to know that she wasn't alone, so I took a deep breath, braced myself for the pain, and hugged her tightly.

My skin sizzled as she sobbed into my chest. The burning was almost more than I could take—the worst pain I'd ever been through up until this point—but I held on tight. She was trying to spit some words out, but she couldn't manage to catch her breath from all the crying. "Shhh, you don't have to say anything." I stroked her hair and tried to ignore the fires burning my skin.

"But—" Scarlett gagged and sobbed. "I—" She choked back more tears. Then she got fed up with herself, shut her mouth, looked up at the sky, and counted to ten to catch her breath. She put her mouth next to my ear, and before the sobbing took her over again, she managed to get out one sentence.

"I left my purse at the clinic," she whispered. I saw Golden Boy, still on the ground, his eyes burning with envy that she was confiding in me and not him.

I held on to her as she began crying again, and told her not to worry about it, I'd take care of it. She cried and cried.

By now, Ruth and Larry had caught up with us. They'd hoisted Ssnake to his feet, lifted his arms over each of their shoulders, and helped him to the car. Larry tried to latch the Power Inhibitor around Ssnake's neck, but Ruth motioned for him to stop. It was an unnecessary precaution. He wasn't going anywhere.

I made eye contact with Ssnake; I was glad he'd regained consciousness. Underneath his mask he had cloudy, listless eyes, and the minute he saw me staring at him, he turned his swollen head away in shame. I guess supervillains could get embarrassed, too.

After Ruth and Larry escorted Ssnake away, Scarlett looked up from my shoulder and her face grew still.

"The fuck are you looking at?" she asked Golden Boy.

He stood there, silent. For a long while they stared at each other. I didn't know who was going to move first, and I wanted to be anywhere but in between them. I made my best effort to back away without drawing any attention to myself. I looked at Golden Boy's face, strong and earnest, but rattled. Then I saw Scarlett's face soften for just a second, and it made me think about how long she must have waited for the right moment to let him know how she felt about him, how long she must have waited for their first kiss. Kevin took a step forward and opened his arms up to hold her.

Scarlett pushed him away as hard as she could. He crashed into some empty metal trash cans and fell on his ass. Then Scarlett burst into flames and disappeared into the sky without looking back.

As I stumbled toward the clinic, I realized I hadn't been this sick since I was a kid, since before my powers had developed. My head was pounding, and I felt feverish and weak. I'd woken up in the parking lot on the hood of Scarlett's car just a few minutes earlier. Maybe the day's events had taken more out of me than I thought; it was a vicious rebound effect. Or maybe I was recovering from Scarlett's burns, healing myself. Either way, I wasn't sure how long I'd been out, and I'd never been knocked out like this before.

Inside the clinic I waited for the elevator and felt like I was being watched. The light had burned out in the hall, so it was difficult to see. I looked down the corridor and was convinced I heard something around the corner. Footsteps. I peered down the hallway but didn't see anything except the door to the stairwell.

I looked up the shaft of empty space made by the staircase as it spiraled up. I swore I saw something move. I lifted my foot up to the first step as quietly as I could and slowly began to ascend the stairs. About halfway up, I was certain there was someone else in there with me, but I couldn't tell if they were ahead of me or behind me. I stopped for a minute to listen, but I think they stopped each time I did. All I could hear was faint breathing, and I was sure it wasn't my own. Stairwells are dark, creepy, and claustrophobic, especially when you could have someone a flight above you or a flight below. Panic seized me, and I held my breath so long that I thought my lungs were going to burst, and all I could think about was getting out of there.

I raced up, three, four stairs at a time, and threw myself against the exit door on the sixth floor.

I tumbled forward and knocked over a coffee table, which sent plants and magazines spilling out onto the floor. I looked up and saw the entire waiting room staring at me. The receptionist stared at me, horrified, her ear to the phone.

"Uh," I said. "My friend left her purse."

It wasn't much hassle to get the purse back. The receptionist handed it to me without asking a single question. The guy with the bouffant wig was still there. He didn't bother to look up. To leave, I took the elevator. I kept an eye on the stairwell as I exited the building.

The street was empty, and the parking lot across the street was full of cars, but no people. I crossed the street and crouched down to look under the cars.

The coast was clear. I didn't see any feet, so I got up and headed toward Scarlett's car. I didn't like walking around in public with her purse. I tried to hide it under my arm, but there was just no way to look manly with it. I hurried to her SUV.