Rivals (9 page)

“Yes. And I
don’t want to open up old wounds. Really.”

Mandy’s shoulders
lifted and then fell again. Was she crying? “I assume you have some reason to
bring it up, though.”

“Yeah. This
one’s nice,” she said, holding up a black halter top with a wide teal stripe
running down the middle. “It matches my skirt, too.” It was an attempt to get
Mandy to turn around, to look at her, but it didn’t work. “Back then. When
you told me. Do you remember what I said?”

“Yes. ‘Don’t
do it yet. If you absolutely have to, come find me. We’ll run away to Europe
together instead.’ Just like that.”

“I would have
done it, too. I would have taken you anywhere, rather than see you destroy
yourself. Now I’m asking—”

Mandy turned
around then and Maggie saw there were definitely tears in her eyes. She didn’t
look angry, though, or sorry. She looked terrified. “When was the last time
we hung out?” she asked.

“What?”

Mandy ran the
back of her hand across her nose. “When was the last time we went to a party
together? When was the last time we sat down and watched a DVD? Or talked about
boys? Or went shopping at the mall? When was the last time you asked me how I
was doing? When, Maggie?”

Maggie’s brain
spun around in her head. “I know I’ve been kind of distant, lately,
but—”

“It was more
than a year ago! You turned into something weird after your Mom died. You
deserted me, even though I could have been such a good friend to you, even
though I wanted to help you through your grief, you just deserted me. And now
you come here, today, less than a month before Homecoming and you want me to
run away with you? Just like that?”

“It’ll be just
like old times. M and M against the world.”

“I won’t do
it. I just won’t. I know I owe you. I know you need me right now. But I
won’t do it. Give me that!” Mandy grabbed the halter top out of Maggie’s
hands and threw it behind her. “I can’t do it. I’m not strong enough. I’ve
already been accepted at Northwestern for next year! I can’t be homeless. I
can’t be broke all the time. I don’t have superpowers like you.”

Maggie stood
up and took a step toward her friend. She just wanted to hug her, to tell her
she understood, that it was really okay—anything to get her to stop
crying, even lies. Like,
I’ll be fine on my own
, or,
I’m sorry, it wasn’t fair even to ask
.

But when she
got close enough to touch Mandy shrank away from her. Mandy’s eyes went very
wide as she backed right into her bureau and knocked a set of silver
hairbrushes to the floor.

“Please don’t
hurt me,” she said, in a very small voice.

Brent would
have driven Grandma to the hospital, learner’s permit or not, but Maggie had
taken the car. He didn’t know what had happened between her and Grandma but it
had to have been bad.

Really bad.
Grandma’s fingers were sticking out in random directions. He was pretty sure
all of them were broken. “I’ll carry her,” he told Lucy. “I’ll just pick her
up and run to the hospital—I can get there faster than with the car,
anyway.”

“Sure,” Lucy
said. She was very calm. “Except, when you were carrying me before? You were
just walking, and still I bounced up and down with every step. If you run with
her, she’ll be shaken up like a bottle of soda. I don’t think it would help.”

“There must be
something I can do! What good are these powers if I can’t help my own family?”

“Chill,
Brent,” Lucy said, and pulled her cell phone out of the outside pocket of her
backpack. She dialed 911 and told the operator what was going on. An
ambulance was there five minutes later.

Grandma was
screaming the whole time. She couldn’t seem to stop. She was in a lot of
pain. When Brent climbed up into the ambulance beside her, she lifted her head
and looked down at Lucy, who was about to get in, too.

“Your little
girlfriend should go home, Brent,” Grandma gasped. “I don’t want her seeing me
like this. It’s bad enough the doctors will see me.”

Brent
apologized to Lucy with a look. “I’ll see you there,” she said. She shrugged
good-naturedly and started hobbling home as the paramedics slammed shut the
rear doors of the ambulance.

There was more
screaming. A lot of it—until the paramedics gave Grandma something for
the pain. When she settled down and her eyes started drooping behind her thick
glasses, she reached for Brent’s hand with her good left hand and he felt the
diamond scratch his skin.

Oh no
, he thought.
Oh no. Not today—not
when Mags was so upset already.

Grandma must
have hit Maggie with the diamond. Just like she’d threatened to do so many
times. What had Maggie done that was so awful to deserve that? Brent supposed
it didn’t matter. It could have been anything. As far as Grandma was
concerned Maggie couldn’t do anything right. “Grandma,” he said, softly, “you
have to forgive her.”

“I’m going to
press charges,” she told him. “You saw what she did.”

Yeah, but
you hit her first
. Except—that
wasn’t good enough, was it? Perkins the bully had hit Ryan Digby first. That
hadn’t made it okay for Brent to beat him up. Still—it was his sister
this time. That made it different, somehow. Not in a way that was fair, but a
way that mattered nonetheless. “If you don’t forgive her, how are we going to
work as a family? You don’t know what she’s going through. Please.”

“I won’t have
her in my house anymore,” Grandma insisted.

Our house.
Not yours.

“She’s wild.
Like an animal. Just like her father.”

Our father.
Our father who just died.

“She’s a
spoiled little brat and she needs to learn discipline or she’s going to get
herself in a heap of trouble,” Grandma finished.

Too late,
Brent thought.

The ambulance
reached the emergency room and there was more waiting, and the pain medication
wore off and Grandma started screaming again. Eventually, though, a doctor
came and took her away. A nurse took Brent by the arm and lead him toward a
waiting lounge. “Your friends are already here. They’ll take care of you,”
the nurse told him. He pushed open the door and saw Lucy inside—talking
to Weathers.

“Brent,” she
said, and jumped up to hug him. He gently pushed her away.

“What are you
doing here?” he asked the FBI man.

“Investigating
an assault on an elderly woman. That’s the kind of crime I take pretty
seriously,” Weathers told him. “I might have to make an arrest.”

“Not unless
she presses charges. That’s—that’s how it works, right? She has to
actually accuse Maggie of a crime.”

“So you’re definitely
certain it was your sister, Maggie Gill, who broke your grandmother’s hand?”
Weathers asked.

Brent frowned.
That was a weird way of putting it.

“Are you
recording this?” Lucy asked.

The special
agent smiled and opened up his jacket to show them a miniature voice recorder
in his breast pocket. “Yes,” he said. “Very astute, Ms. Benez. I have a
terrible memory, you see, and this helps me recall everything exactly as it was
said. In case, say, I need to provide evidence in a court of law.”

“Don’t tell
him anything, Brent. Not until you have a lawyer,” Lucy said.

Brent shook
his head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not like he doesn’t know exactly what
happened. The question is what happens next. Look, Weathers, I can fix this.
I can talk my grandmother out of pressing charges. And I can talk to Maggie,
make her understand that we can’t go on like this. I’m the only one she’ll
listen to. But you have to help me, too. You have to promise you’ll go easy
on her.”

“I just want
to make sure nobody else gets hurt,” Weathers told him. “Alright. You have a
deal. If you can defuse this situation, if you can bring your sister in so I
can talk to her, I’ll make sure she gets full marks for cooperation.”

That wasn’t
what Brent had been asking for, but maybe it was the best he was going to get.

“Of course,
you’ll have to find her before you can talk to her.”

Brent scowled.
“You don’t know where she is?”

“As I’ve said
before, the Bureau don’t waste its time following around American citizens.
Though in Maggie’s case that may have to change, now. No, I have no idea where
she went after leaving your house today.”

Brent bit his
lip. He had no idea, either. He tried to put himself in her shoes. Where
would Maggie go if she felt like everything was crashing in on her? Mom’s
grave? Starbuck’s? Nothing seemed right.

Lucy put a
hand on his arm. “Where would you go, if you’d just hurt your Grandma?” she
asked.

He closed his
eyes and tried to imagine it. He had to fight his own instincts, which told
him that he would never, ever hurt a member of his family. He had so few of
them left. But when he got past that, the answer was clear.

“I’d go see
you,” he told Lucy.

She nodded.
“So who’s your sister’s best friend?”

Special Agent
Weathers drove them straight over to Mandy Hunt’s house—or what was left
of it. Brent could see right away he’d picked the right friend. Maggie had
been there, and she hadn’t left through the front door.

Not that he
could see a front door. The entire front side of the house had collapsed
inward, broken boards and sheared-off rebar sticking up at crazy angles, the
roof slumped over a gaping hole where the front wall had been. Water sprayed
diagonally across the street from ruptured pipes and fires were starting to smolder
in the heaps of shingles and broken plaster that spilled across the driveway
and into the road.

If Maggie had
dropped a bomb on the place, it might have done less damage. But Brent knew
instantly what had really happened. She had been in such a rush to leave she
had punched her way out right through the house. It didn’t surprise him that
she was capable of wreaking such havoc. He knew her strength, since he shared
it.

“Stay in the
car, I’m calling the fire department,” Weathers announced, but Brent had
already pushed his door open and jumped out onto the sidewalk.

“Come back
here, Gill,” the FBI man shouted, lowering his window. “I can’t let you go in
there! It’s an insurance nightmare.”

“There might
be people in there, and they could be dead by the time the firefighters get
here. Stay with him, Luce,” Brent said, and in the backseat Lucy nodded. Her
face was wide open, her eyes locked on the destroyed house.

Finally, he
thought. A chance to do some real good. Nobody could debate that saving people
from a collapsing house was heroic, or noble, or worth doing. Standing by and
waiting with Weathers would be unthinkable.

Brent jumped
into the mess and grabbed a steel beam that had fallen across the front of the
house. Straining a little, he pushed it up over his head and then jumped
inside. It fell back behind him and the whole house swayed, but he was inside,
in what might have been a living room once though it was hard to tell. Ahead
of him was the kitchen, still largely intact but wreathed in flames.

“Hello!” he
shouted. “Is there anyone in here?” He would feel pretty stupid if there
wasn’t. There was no answer, but anyone in the wreckage might be unconscious.
He pushed through the kitchen, flames licking at his clothes. Part of his
sleeve caught on fire so he slapped it out. To his left was a stairway leading
up, to the right an empty bathroom. He headed for the stairs—and then
jumped back as half a ton of bricks and girders came crashing down from the
upper floor, smashing the risers and filling the air with red dust that made
him cough.

He didn’t have
much time. The ceiling above him was sagging, water dripping across the
plaster and then down the kitchen wall. He bent his knees and sprang upward,
smashing through the ceiling and the hardwood floor above, grabbing at anything
he could hold onto and pulling himself upward through the hole he’d made.

He found
himself in a master bedroom, pale blue paint on the walls and satin curtains
covering the windows. The floor sloped to one side and the bed had rolled down
to smash against the far wall. It was partially blocking the doorway so he
grabbed it and hauled it out of the way, then jumped out into an upstairs
hallway. There were doors on three sides of him, then, and they all looked like
they’d jammed inside their crooked frames. He kicked one open and found a
bathroom with no ceiling—the floor was littered with broken wood and
burning shingles. The next door was a linen closet with all the towels and
sheets in a pile on its floor.

One more door
to go. He got a good run up and hit it hard with his shoulder. It collapsed
instantly under his momentum and he rolled through into a girl’s bedroom with
horses on the walls.

In one corner
of the room Mandy Hunt was curled up in a ball, wheezing and shaking. She
didn’t react when he shouted her name.

Brent took a
step toward her—and the house shifted over to its right. The wall above
Mandy tilted inward and started to collapse, while all the furniture in the
room started sliding across the floor, squeaking as it ground its way down
toward the lowest part of the uneven floor.

Plaster and
sheared-off sections of lath showered down on Brent’s head. He could hear
nails popping as they were pulled free of the floorboards, and downstairs he
heard a whoomping roar that he thought might be a gas line catching fire.

At any second
the house was going to collapse under its own weight. He could hear the sirens
of a fire truck in the distance but he knew it would never arrive in time.
“Hold on, I’m coming,” he called, in case Mandy could hear him.