Rivals (5 page)

“Please, don’t
be such a drama queen! It was just a couple of shingles.”

“Are you sure
this is okay?” Brent asked. “We’re not supposed to use our powers. Weathers
said—”

“Who cares?
Do you really want to spend the rest of your life pretending you’re still just
like everybody else? Come on! If somebody can throw a baseball faster and
harder than everybody else, they give him a multi-million dollar contract. Now
we can do all kinds of things—and all the FBI wants to do is threaten us.
Don’t you want to know what we can do? Haven’t you been thinking about it all
day? Well, here’s our chance. Nobody will see us. How far do you think I can
jump?” Maggie laughed and ran away from him, jumping to the next roof. He
followed and barely touched down before he was aloft again, flinging himself
out into the darkness. This is so easy, he thought—he could jump fifty
feet without even really trying. He wondered, just like she’d said, how far he
could go if he pushed himself and as Maggie leapt to the next roof in the row
he dug down hard with his feet and pushed with everything he had. He flew
right past the roof she’d landed on and kept going, crossed the shadowy gap
between that house and the next, and as he started to come down he saw the
chimney of the next house come up to meet him like a brick wall.

His face
smashed across the bricks of the chimney, his arms flapping out to wrap around
it. His chest made contact and bright pain flashed through his body, even as
he felt the bricks crumbling, felt them shift and start to fall apart beneath
him. He reeled back and gasped as the chimney fell, bricks bouncing off the
roof and clanging off the gutters.

Maggie dropped
out of the air beside him. “Oh my God, Brent! Are you okay? You just hit
that thing face first!”

“I’m… okay,”
he said. He shook his head as if to clear it, but honestly, he felt fine. “I
think we’re tougher than we look, now.”

“Didn’t it
hurt?” Maggie asked.

“Yeah. Yeah,
it did,” he admitted. “But only for a second. Then my body just kind of…
shook it off.” He turned to look at Maggie with a huge smile on his face.
“We’re like, indestructible!”

“Yeah, okay,”
Maggie said. “Let’s not get carried away.” But the look on her face suggested
she believed him.

“Oh, there is one
thing, though,” he told her.

“What?” she
asked, concerned.

“You’re it!”
And then he laughed out loud and jumped for the next roof.

He jumped from
roof to roof barely feeling the shingles under his feet. He stopped for a half
a second to pull his shoes off—it was easier to grip the uneven surfaces
with his toes. It was an amazing feeling to be up in the air, for those few
seconds when gravity couldn’t touch him, when he might as well have been up in
space, and then exhilarating to watch the next roof come up toward him, unable
to change his course, looking for the best place to grab on with his feet.

Maggie chased
him around the mall and up toward the west side of town. He could hear her
laughing behind him, calling out mock threats: “I’m going to get you! You’re
mine now!” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard her laugh.

She tagged him
in mid-air, grabbing his foot as she streaked past him to land ahead of him on
the flat top of a hardware store. Flat roofs were almost harder to land on, because
you tended to slide, and after she grabbed his foot she pulled upwards, giving
him a wicked spin. He tumbled down onto the hardware store roof and did a face
plant right into a metal ventilation hood that crumpled up under the weight of
his impact. He was a little bummed to see that it didn’t mold to the shape of
his face. Instead it just bent in half and the fan inside clanged to a stop.
Brent climbed back up to his feet and looked around for Maggie but he couldn’t
see her. They were closer to the downtown section now, and there were plenty
of streetlights, so even the darkness shouldn’t have hid her, but no matter
what direction he turned he couldn’t her anywhere.

“Over here,”
she called, leaping toward him from across a parking lot that had to be a
hundred yards wide. Surely it was too far to jump, he thought. But then he’d
been wrong every time he thought he knew their limits before. “Are you blind
as well as stupid?” she mocked, rising high up in the night air.

Brent rushed
forward, intending to catch her as she came down, but then he saw in horror
that she was descending too fast. It had been too far—she was never
going to make the rooftop. “Mags!” he shouted, “look out!” But there was
nothing he could do but watch. She came in fast and too low and instead of
landing on top of the hardware store she hit the side of it, her whole body
smashing against the side wall and then sliding down three stories, bouncing
off signs, window casings, satellite dishes and clotheslines on the way down. He
saw her head smack against a brick windowsill and flop around on her neck as if
she were a rag doll.

“Mags,” he
said, taking a step back from the edge of the roof. “Oh, no. Mags.
Mags—”

She popped up
over the edge of the roof and landed right in front of him. Her skirt was torn
a little at the hem and there was a greasy stain on her t-shirt. Her hair was
a little messed up. Otherwise she looked perfectly fine. “I guess we know one
thing about our powers now,” she said.

“What’s that?”
Brent asked.

“We can’t
fly.” Then she tagged him on the shoulder and jumped across the street,
bouncing off the row of buildings there like a stone skipped off the surface of
a lake.

They jumped to
the far side of town and they weren’t even tired. Maggie lead Brent over to a
junkyard on the far side of a quarry and for a while they tried out their new
strength by picking up old rusted-out cars and playing catch with them. Brent
would run backward, his feet stamping down on broken glass and old orange sharp
pieces of metal, feeling as if he were running on a pebbly beach, and then as
the car came flying at him out of the night he would hold up his arms and catch
it with both hands, grabbing at exposed engine parts or axles or the edges of
windows that had lost their glass long before. Then he would wind up, swinging
from the waist, and throw the car back. That lasted until Maggie missed a
catch and the car Brent had thrown landed on a pile of old washing machines and
a couple broken-down carnival rides, which exploded in a cloud of rust and
flying springs and cogwheels and dryer doors that went spinning up into the air
and then came down hard, digging long furrows in the dirt. The noise was
immense, deafening, and Brent wasn’t surprised when he heard a dog barking and
saw someone with a flashlight come running toward them.

“Whoops,”
Maggie said. She ran up to the top of a stack of long pipes and gestured for
him to follow as she jumped back into the air and away. The flashlight speared
upwards after them but they were already gone, half a block away and
accelerating.

Brent was
still “it”, jumping from the top of the elementary school to the complicated
roof of the local industrial bakery when he noticed Maggie wasn’t chasing him
anymore. He skidded to a stop before he fell through a bunch of skylights and
then looked back. This time he could see her just fine. She was perched like
a bird on the edge of a roof, two or three blocks back, looking down. She
wasn’t laughing anymore.

Brent jumped
back the way he’d come and found her staring down into the street at a line of
very small houses across the way. The houses had unkempt yards and a
chain-link fence running around each little plot of land. In most of the
windows he could see the flickering blue light of television sets. Some of
them were dark.

The house that
Maggie was staring at had a yellow light in one window. Brent could see a man
sitting at a kitchen table inside, hunched over some papers. He looked like he
was doing his taxes or something, and having trouble.

“Mags?” he
asked, coming up behind her. “What are you looking at?”

“Dad took me
out here, once,” she said, very quietly. “He didn’t want to. He didn’t think
it was appropriate but I asked and asked until he gave in and said yes. I
wanted to meet him,” she said, nodding at the man in the window. “I wanted to
ask him some questions. I thought you should come, too, but Dad said you were
too young. I’ll never forget this house. We drove up and parked over here,
and then Dad and I stood in the street just looking at the house for the
longest time. It scared me. It scared me so much I couldn’t move. I
memorized every detail of what it looked like while I was trying to muster the
courage to go up and press the door bell. Dad wouldn’t do it for me, he said.
If I really wanted it I had to do it myself.”

Brent was
afraid he knew who the man was, now. He didn’t want to say it out loud,
though. “Did you ring it?” he asked.

Maggie wrapped
her arms around her knees. “No. I chickened out. I just wanted to ask him
why, you know? I wanted to ask him why he killed Mom.”

“We
know
why,” Brent insisted. “The lawyer said. He was
drunk, and he lost control of the car. It was just an accident. Sometimes
people make bad choices, and other people get hurt.” It was not something
Brent understood very well, himself. He had never seen why anyone would get in
a car if they knew they were drunk. Dad had suggested that when you drank,
sometimes you couldn’t tell how drunk you were, and sometimes it seemed you
were fine when you really weren’t. Brent, who had never so much as tasted
alcohol, didn’t know.

He started to
say something more when Maggie stood up straight as a knife and dropped into
the street. She landed effortlessly and walked across to the fence around the
man’s house. Brent started to follow but he didn’t know what she was going to
do. Maggie tore open the man’s trash cans and then threw the lids back on with
a clattering noise. Then she grabbed the blue recycling bin and held it up so
Brent could see.

Brent looked
up and saw the man looking out of his yellow window. His face was scared,
Brent thought. Really scared. He didn’t know what Maggie was going to do
next, either. But he recognized her. Brent could see it in his face. The man
knew exactly who Maggie was.

“Vodka,”
Maggie said, picking a bottle out of the bin. She hurled it at the house and
it shattered against the wall with a tinkling rattle. “Gin,” she said, and
threw another bottle. This one was plastic and it just bounced off with a
clunk. “Beer. Plenty of beer.” The bottles crashed on the side of the house
like machine gun bullets. “You’re still drinking!” she yelled. “How can you
still be drinking!”

Eventually,
Brent managed to pull her away before she could do anything worse. They headed
home, jumping back the way they’d come but it wasn’t a game anymore. When they
made it back to their house and climbed back in through Brent’s window, Maggie
was shaking. She stood in the door of his room and looked down at her
fingernails.

“I wanted to
kill him,” she said.

“I know,”
Brent told her.

“After all
this time I haven’t forgiven or forgotten anything. I don’t think I can. I
think there’s something wrong with me.”

“No,” Brent
told her. “That’s not true.”

“I could kill
people, now, pretty easily,” she said. “With these new powers? I could have
punched him a couple of times and that would have been all it took. I could
have picked him up, jumped to the top of the bank building downtown, and
dropped him over the side. I could have—”

“But you
didn’t,” Brent told her.

She went back
to her room without saying more.

In the morning
Weathers was waiting for them when they came downstairs.

Brent and
Maggie were already dressed, already had their backpacks on. Maggie had been
working her Sidekick hard all morning, texting with one thumb while she brushed
her teeth—making contact with her friends whom she hadn’t seen since
before Dad died, figuring out who she would eat lunch with at school. Brent
had already started worrying about how far behind he was going to be in
Algebra, having missed more than a week of classes. Both of them were in a
hurry to get to school.

School was
just going to have to wait.

Grandma had
made a pot of tea, and set out a simple breakfast. Toast and jelly and a
platter of scrambled eggs. Weathers was sitting at their kitchen table dabbing
at the corners of his mouth with a napkin.

“You two have
fun last night?” he asked, as they came into the kitchen.

Maggie took
off her backpack and set it by the door. She knew what that tone of voice
meant. Dad had never been much of a disciplinarian but he was a parent and he
could always let you know when you were in trouble with a single look or a few
softly-spoken words. This felt exactly the same as that.

“Oh, come on!”
she said. “We were just getting some exercise. There was a whole presentation
at school last year about how the President wants us to get more exercise
outdoors. Don’t you work for the President?”

Even Brent
couldn’t help but smirk at that. He quickly pulled himself together, though.

“There are
damaged roofs all over town. One house lost its chimney last night,” Weathers
said. “The owner said it sounded like a bomb hit his house. The owner of the
Gilbert Brothers Junkyard tells me he doesn’t know what happened, but it’s
going to cost him good money to repair all the damage.”

“What?” Brent
said. “That’s not fair! That was all broken down junk we were playing with.
We couldn’t possibly have damaged it any more than it was already.”

“So you admit
you were there last night? I wasn’t sure, I was just hoping you might have
some information,” Weathers said.