“Word on the street is that you’re going to be a superstar by the end of this month.” Alice snaps a photo of the girl still half-asleep on the filthy motel bed in front of her, and that gets her awake. The room smells of smoke and moss, just like any other motel on the outskirts of San Angeles would. The kind of place sitting on the side of a strip of tarmac leading into those nasty Wastelands. Your one stop shop for your one-way trip, says the sign on the gas station store, and Alice believes it. Look at this place, with its piss-yellow lights and lilting wallpaper, humming tv that can only play static and pre-war movies, and oh my God, why hasn’t she woken up yet? Alice takes another picture, this time putting her camera right up close to her face and yanking her head up with a fistful of hair in her hand. Perfect! Now that’s a seller. The glossed over eyes. The helpless glare shining through her very pink bangs.
“What the—” The girl sits up on her elbow, rubbing the palm of her hand across her eyes. She’s filthy and stinks like sweat and smoke, and by the looks of her, Alice doubts she’s ever come across soap, either. “Who—”
“I think the better question is, ‘Oh my God, Alice, did you get my good side?’” She smiles at the girl, at her beads and her torn shirt, her very short shorts and their unbuttoned waist, giving her a peak of her Star-Man undies. “And the answer to that is: yes, yes I did. They’re going to love you all over the web, you know. Really love you.”
It takes a few seconds, and then the pink-haired girl is fully awake. She pounces to her feet and raises her palm out to Alice, who’s suddenly sitting behind her on the bed, facing the other way and looking at the dozens of pictures she’s taken of pink sleeping beauty over there. “With a little touch up, these pics are almost good to go.”
The girl yanks Alice’s hair and forces her onto the bed, so now she’s looking up at the girl, her first raised high over her head. Alice smiles at her and takes another photo, blinding her. Then she pops away, standing now.
As the girl rubs her eyes and swears, she says, “I found you so I can make you famous. I want to—”
“How the fuck did you find me?” the girl hisses, climbing off the bed, glaring at her. “Who are you?”
“Alice Whitman, private journalist, founder of the San Angeles Scoop. Nice to meet you!”
“Fuck off.”
“Not without making myself heard,” Alice says, wagging her finger. “See, the Protectorate and probably every other cutesy little vigilante in this city is hunting you down for different reasons.” Alice appears beside her, arm resting on her shoulder. “Some of them want to be famous. Catch the Easy Mart bomber, and you’re now on the news, shaking hands with the mayor, signing brand deals, and suddenly you’re getting a draft offer from different superhero chapters around the world! Or that’s what they probably think will happen. It won’t. You’re big news, sure, but the police are doing a heck of a job trying to hide you, so even if someone does find you, the Protectorate will be on them like a hooker to back alley bjs, if you get me.” She walks backward, spreading her arms. “And that’s where I come in, because you’re trying to run away from something, and for the most part, it’s worked. Nobody has found you. Yet. But if we figure something out between us, I can make your escape more than possible, Pinky!”
The girl glares at her, which she’s used to by now—everyone does. Her youthful beauty has the moms and the haggard teenagers working in grocery stores doing it, and her feverish energy gets the old men doing it, too.
Pink-Hair, though, glares at her with a different kind of taste: frustration.
“How did you find me?” she whispers, tightening her fists.
“Who else whisked you away a few days ago?”
“I’d remember that,” she says. “So you better start telling the truth before I snap that stick-thin neck.”
“Alright, you got me,” she says, putting up her hands, and letting her camera hang from her neck. “I had a friend of mine snatch you off the streets. It feels like a cozy power nap that’s so deep it’s screwed your head, right?.”
She pauses for a few seconds, probably trying to find a few memories that don’t exist anymore. “The—”
“Camera feeds?” Alice asks. “Don’t worry about that either. Just know that I’m here to help.”
“Why would you ever help the likes of me?” she says quietly. The tv continues to flicker, and so do the yellow lights hanging off the walls, painting them both sickly shades of yellow. “I just killed dozens of people.”
“And spiked my viewers by nearly ten thousand,” Alice says. “Like I said, hun. You’re a superstar.”
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The girl stares at Alice, then starts laughing before she waves her off and sits back down on the bed, the springs complaining as she lies back down. “How about you leave the same way you came in, journalist.”
Alice tilts her head, smiling thinly. “So…I tell the cops where you are and who you are, Juliana?”
She freezes, then opens a single eye. They both wait. Neither moves. Blow me to bits, baby, I’m ready, she thinks, seeing the smoke slip out of her mouth and the sparks glinting between her teeth as she chews her tongue.
She’s got powers Alice has never seen before. But considering the barcode engraved on her neck—
“What do you want?” she asks the blonde, blowing a tongue of pink hair away from her face.
“For you to come back to New California with me. Real California, not this ugly little place. God, have you smelt the air out there? And I won’t even mention the three-headed rat I saw eating some kind of cat outside.”
“Nuclear waste does that, I guess,” the girl mutters, sitting upright. “But I ain’t going back.”
“Afraid you’ll get caught?”
The girl rests her elbows on her thighs and massages her temples. “The Protectorate gets me, and I’ll be wishing I could so much as breathe in this kind of funky air instead of the fumes they pump their prisons with.” Juju girl looks up at Alice. “But there’s people there who would rather see me boiled and skinned for coming back.”
“So…you’re running away into the Wastelands, just so you don’t get caught?” If you think you’ve got better chances out there past the Barriers, then what’s hunting you back home? Alice swallows the saliva that’s begun to form on her tongue, because this sounds like something she can’t wait to dig into. She has her goals, sure, and this could have been done a lot easier, but it’s about the spectacle. The show. Why else do grown men and women put on colorful clothes and fight big monsters whilst the news takes pictures and the factories poison the kids with their sugar-laced cereal? “What if I tell you if you help me out, we can get you out of this mess forever?”
She snorts. “I’ve heard that one before.”
“Guessing that’s why you’ve got blood under your nails, isn’t it?” Alice asks quietly. The girl pauses, stares at her, and the blonde smiles again. “I know all about you. I have for months. And now I need your help, too.”
“I thought you said you were a journalist, not a stalker.”
“Kinda got to be both.”
Juju rubs her hands together, then wipes them down her face. “I can kill you.”
“And risk my failsafe? Come on. That’s, like, spying and black mail one-0-one.”
“Mm,” she hums, shaking her head, maybe smiling a little, too. “Fuck me, coming here was a bad idea to begin with, but if you think I’d take my chances and go back there just ‘cause of some black mail, you’re stupid.”
Alice’s blood runs cold, and it almost feels like her heart just stopped. She’s suddenly in front of Juliana, so close that the pink-haired girl swears and leans back. But Alice climbs onto the bed, on top of her, and stares her dead in those pale eyes and breathes in the smoke and the blood and the bubblegum on her breath. “I know about you. I know everything about you. You’re a toy and a puppet. A sack of fucking guts that was grown in a tube with nothing else going for her except powers that she doesn’t want. I. Know. You. I can tell you about the scars on your foot and the one on your back. You’ve got a dollar on you that hasn’t left your right back pocket in five years, and those beads around your throat aren’t yours, because you ripped them off the same neck you strangled until their body went cold. You’re a runaway with nowhere else to run. Homeless because you never had a place to call home to begin with.” Alice pants, staring down at her and into those widening eyes. She sits upright and dabs away the saliva she accidentally spat out, then shuts her eyes and breathes, just like her yoga instructor tells her to do until she’s calm enough to continue, albeit with the same cold anger in her voice. “So no, Juju. I am not fucking stupid.”
Pink-Hair tenses underneath her. “How do you know that name?” she whispers.
She gets off the bed and pats her jeans down. “I’ll give you an hour to decide. I’ll be outside, because I hate this room and the bulbs are ruining my complexion. If you don’t come out, Juju, have fun fighting Guardian.”
Alice stands under the motel room bulb for nearly thirty minutes, her sunglasses on and her medical mask on her face because of the fumes sitting in the air gushing out of passing trucks heading to the Barriers. She forces herself to calm down, to ignore the three-headed rats and their barbed tails, the people drinking themselves into early graves just across from her in the parking lot, and the superhero posters plastered on the walls all over the motel. Nothing new. All from the war and their effort and the Capes that Need Your Help! in defending America.
What bullshit.
Several minutes before the hour, the door beside Alice opens, and Juju is standing there, her raggedy t-shirt and short shorts on full display to the moths that pop and fizz in her presence. The blonde turns to face her, smiling.
“Good choice,” she says. “Now, how do you feel about being a real superhero?”