Rivals (3 page)

“Hi, Grandma,”
Brent said weakly.

Grandma scared
Brent. There was a good reason for that. Maggie knew she wouldn’t scare
Weathers. At least not yet. He didn’t know her secret.

“Hello,
ma’am,” the agent said. “You must be Mrs. Reynolds, the children’s guardian,
is that correct?”

“I’m
seventy-one years old, young man, and it seems I have better hearing than you
do. Get out. Now. Or I’ll call the police.”

Weathers tried
to smile. “Ma’am, I
am
a law
enforcement officer.”

“Then I’ll
call your boss and tell him you were harassing a senior citizen and a tax-payer
of over fifty years. I would imagine they frown on that sort of thing where
you come from, hmm?”

Weathers’
smile disappeared. “Very well,” he said. He glanced over at Maggie. “We’ll
talk again. Count on it. But for now, just try to keep a low profile, okay?”
Then he left.

“Good, he’s
gone.” Grandma came hobbling over toward the two kids on her cane. “I imagine
you two are surprised to see me here. I was very surprised when they told me I
was now your official next of kin. I’ve come to take you home. I’ll be moving
in with you since you don’t have anyone else to look after you.”

Maggie nodded
slowly. “Okay,” she said. “But, honestly, we can probably look after
ourselves. I mean, I know how much you enjoy your time in Florida—”

Grandma came
closer and reached down to put a hand over Maggie’s. “Margaret Reynolds Gill,
your eighteenth birthday isn’t until next July. When that day comes, I give
you my full permission to tell me to go to hell. Until then, you will do as I
say. You will do exactly as I say. And if you try to argue with what I say, I
will give you the back of this hand across your cheek. You’ll notice I’m
wearing my diamond engagement ring, the one your mother’s father gave me
forty-nine years ago. I put it on today extra special because I knew I was
coming to see you.” Grandma turned her head to the side. “Hello, Brent,
dear,” she said.

“Um, hi,”
Maggie’s brother managed.

It took
forever for the two of them to get discharged from the hospital. Pretty much
every doctor in the place seemed to want to come and talk to them one last
time. To ask them more questions. Finally one doctor came in who said he
wanted to give them some answers. “Except,” he said, “I’m not sure we have
any. Not any that mean much, anyway. You both check out fine, physically.
Better than fine, really. Um, Brent—your chart says you broke your arm
last year?”

“That’s right.
I was jumping off a diving board into a pool and I hit the bottom with my
wrist. It was in a cast for six weeks.”

The doctor
consulted something on a clipboard. “You see, normally that would show up on
an x-ray, even after it healed. But I don’t see so much as a hairline or a shadow
here.” He looked up and smiled at them. “Whatever happened to you in that
ravine—you came back healthier than when you left. Now, we’d love to do
some more tests—”

“Not on my
dime,” Grandma said. She lead the two of them down to the parking lot, where
Brent got a surprise. A hundred and five pounds of teenaged girl came flying
at him like a bullet out of a gun, trailing balloons.

“Oh my god oh
my god oh my god you’re alright,” Lucy said. Lucy Benez had been Brent’s best
friend since they started high school together and met at an anime festival.
He was truly, truly glad to see her and he actually kissed her on the cheek,
something he’d never done before.

She stepped
back and looked at him. She was so excited her face was flushed. She wore her
hair in two pony-tails sticking out at angles from the top of her head and she
had braces. Not just on her teeth, either—she had braces on her legs as
well, metal contraptions she had to wear because one of her legs was two inches
longer than the other. The doctors were slowly but surely trying to fix that
by stretching out the shorter leg. She said it hurt a lot but she didn’t let
it get to her. “When I heard I just about died,” she told him. “But I knew
you would be okay. You’ve been out in that desert a million times. And oh my
God. Oh my God. I’m so sorry about your Dad. He was so great. Oh, Brent.
Brent! Here! These are for you!” She handed him the balloons. They all said
GET WELL SOON on them.

Lucy could
only walk at a sort of fast hobble, but she easily compensated for it by
talking twice as fast as everybody else. He’d asked her why, once, and she
said that she had twice as much to say as anybody, and anyway half of what most
people said was just dumb, just hello, what a nice day, I see you’re getting
taller when you really weren’t, and she figured she would get that half of
every conversation over with in the first couple minutes and by the time the
conversation wound down she would have gotten to the really important stuff,
the stuff people actually wanted to hear.

Listening to
Lucy talk made Brent out of breath. Still. There was no one he wanted to see
more. He was scared, to be honest, and really worried, and he was still
screwed up about losing his dad. He needed her friendship more than ever.

“I am totally
here for you. You can count on me, whatever you need, whether that’s someone
to talk to, or a shoulder to cry on, or who knows, maybe you just want to go to
the movies some time and pretend like things are still normal and nothing has
changed and that it’s okay to just go and, say, see a movie. If you want that,
I am here.”

“Grandma?”
Brent asked. “Can we give Lucy a ride?”

“I’m not sure
if there’s room,” Grandma said, unlocking the driver’s side door of her station
wagon.

In the back
seat, on the ride home, Brent confided everything he’d been secretly thinking
to Lucy. He knew he could trust her. He started small. “I don’t think I’m
really going to like living with the two of them,” he said, nodding discretely
toward the front seats. Maggie and Grandma were talking to each other, loud
enough to drown out anything he said. “They argue all the time—it’s
awful. It’s been going on for years now, but before, at least they didn’t live
in the same house. We only saw Grandma on holidays. They would always get in
a fight and Grandma would end up slapping Maggie because she used a curse word
or because she said she was a democrat or an atheist or whatever. Most of the
time it wasn’t even true, she would just say it to get a rise out of Grandma.
I think she wanted to get hit.”

“But why?”
Lucy asked. “Why would anyone want that? Other than a masochist, I mean, and
from my experience masochists are pretty rare. I mean, actual masochists.
Lots of people do things that hurt them, but—”

“Because,”
Brent said, because he knew Lucy didn’t mind being interrupted, “then Mom and
Dad would have to take us home early. But now, where are we going to go if
there’s a problem? And Maggie’s already starting in on her.”

“Your sister
is really pretty,” Lucy said. “And very smart, which is a rare combination.
Only a very few of us—I mean, of us females, I’m speaking for us as a
group here, not for my own self—can say that much. It’s a shame she’s
also—”

“Listen, Luce.
There’s something else.” He had been thinking about how to put this. He had
failed to come up with the right words, though, the words that would make it
sound real. Whenever he said it out loud it made him laugh, even though he
knew it was true. “Whatever happened to us, it changed us.”

She nodded
solemnly. “Sure. Losing both parents would have to change somebody. I can’t
even imagine what I would do if my dad—”

Brent shook
his head. “Not—psychologically. I don’t mean it changed my personality.
I mean it changed me physically. Lucy—I think I have superpowers.”

Once inside
the house Maggie went straight to her room and slammed the door. Grandma went
to the kitchen. When Brent and Lucy headed for his room, however, she leaned
around the corner of the doorway and scowled. “This your girlfriend, boy?”

Brent’s eyes
went wide. He stared at Lucy, then back at Grandma. “No!” he said. “We’re
just—friends, we study together sometimes, it’s—”

“I’m holding
you to the same rule I gave your mother twenty-odd years ago. When there’s a
girl in your room, you keep the door open at least one foot, and you don’t play
any loud music. I know perfectly well why boys your age listen to their music
so loud.”

“You do?”
Brent asked. He didn’t know whether he played his music particularly loud or
not.

“I do,”
Grandma agreed. “I may look old to you but I was sixteen once.”

“We’re
fifteen, Mrs. Gill,” Lucy said, with a huge metallic smile.

“Reynolds,”
Brent corrected her.

“Mrs.
Reynolds. I mean. I guess you were Brent’s mom’s mother? I mean, of course,
you still are. Except she’s—but you don’t stop being somebody’s mother,
that’s not something you can—”

“We’re just
going to sit in my room and talk,” Brent explained.

Grandma
blinked, every flicker of her eyelids magnified by her huge glasses. “Yes, I
imagine you will.” Then she stepped back inside the kitchen and out of view.

Brent went
into his room with Lucy. She unstrapped her leg braces, then flopped on his
bed while he put his balloons in the corner. Brent always thought better while
he was pacing, so he started a circuit of his room, going from his computer
table over to his poster of Edward Abbey and then over to his closet door
before starting over on the same path.

When he didn’t
say anything for five or six laps, Lucy sat up on the bed and grabbed at his
arm as it went by. “Hey. Hey. Talk to me.”

“You don’t
believe me. I understand that,” he told her. “I wouldn’t believe me either.
It’s a ludicrous thing to say. Nobody in the real world has superpowers, nobody
in history has ever had—”

“Brent,” she
said, interrupting him for once. “I do.”

“What?”

She smiled.
“If anybody else said it, then, maybe, yeah. I would be kind of skeptical.
But this is you. I believe you. I always do.”

He ran his
fingers through his hair and started pacing again, then thought of something
and hurried to his closet. He threw the door open and started rooting around
under piles of dirty clothes.

“What are you
looking for?”

“Research
materials,” he told her. He pulled a plastic bag out of the closet and threw
it to her. She caught it easily.

She opened the
bag and spilled out a couple dozen comic books with bright, lurid covers. They
all showed men in various muscular poses, most of them punching something or
about to be punched by somebody else. They wore elaborate costumes, some with
masks, some with capes.

He picked one
up and stared at it. “I haven’t looked at these in years. I used to really
love these but then after a while they seemed kind of dumb. Look, I remember
this one. It’s about a guy who got bitten by a radioactive aardvark, right?”

“Um, let me
see—no, that’s the one whose experimental airplane crashed on this
totally deserted island, right, and he found a cave, and inside the cave were
all the gods of world mythology, and it turned out, right, he could summon any
of them to help him out if he just said the right word.”

“Oh, yeah,”
Brent said. “Is this what I am now? Am I going to have to start beating
people up?”

“Hopefully
only the ones who deserve it,” she told him. “You know, criminals, and
dangerous types, and—and oh my God, you could fight supervillains, that
would be so cool, except there aren’t any, are there? Because you’re the only
one who—hey, I just thought of something, your sister, did she? I mean,
I assume you both—but—but—”

He rolled the
comic book into a tube in his hands, rolled it tighter and tighter because he
didn’t know what else to do. It was only after he’d rolled it as thin as a
pencil that she noticed and stopped talking.

“Brent!” Lucy
said. “Stop! Those are highly collectable!”

“It is kind of
old,” he said. “Do you think it might be valuable?”

Lucy stared at
it in numb horror. “Not anymore,” she said.

“Oh my God,
that was stupid,” Brent said, smoothing it out as best he could. He put it
down on his desk.

“This isn’t
just about superpowers, is it?” she asked him. “You have something else on
your mind. I mean, if I had superpowers, that would be the only thing I could
think about. I’d be concerned with finding out what my limitations were, and
whether I had a fatal weakness to something, like, my powers didn’t work
against the color blue, or if there was some special kind of radioactive rock
that could hurt me, or—” She stopped. “There is something else. I can
see it on your face.”

“Yeah.”

“And it’s big.
It’s bigger than the existence of superpowers.” Her eyes went wide. “Bigger
than that?”

“Yeah.”

When he said
nothing more she made a rolling motion with one hand, to suggest that he get on
with it. She looked like she was dying to hear his big news.

“There’s one
more thing else I have to tell you. Except I don’t want to.”

“But—”

“But I have
to. Because I have to tell somebody. And of all the people in the entire
world, you’re the one I can trust the most.”

Lucy pressed
her lips together. She knelt on the bed and folded her hands in her lap. Then
she nodded, to indicate she was ready to hear it.

“I think I
killed my dad,” he told her.

Maggie turned
on her iTunes and sank down into the chair in front of her makeup table. The
music throbbed through the room like fingers massaging her neck, but that just
made her jumpier, like someone kept touching her on the shoulder telling her to
turn around and look when she knew there was nothing there. She couldn’t seem
to relax, couldn’t seem to think straight.