Present Day
Nate blinked and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. The room was dimly lit by the streetlamp outside his window. For a second he couldn’t remember why he had woken up in the first place. In the darkness, he could make out the silhouette of his hamper, the dresser, and---he sat bolt upright, his heartbeat quickening. Someone was standing in the corner---no, not someone. She was flickering. A…hologram? What the hell? He stared at it tensely for several seconds, but it didn’t seem interested in hurting him---or even moving. Nate swung his feet over the side of the bed, stood up, and took a few steps towards it.
Help.
He froze.
Help me, Nate. You dad---
It vanished. Nate blinked, staring at the dark and now-empty corner. The girl’s face had looked familiar. He thought hard, his brow furrowed. A memory was tugging at the corners of his mind, a whisper of something he could not quite grasp. How did this girl know his father? And how did she know who he was? Or where to find him? How did she project that thing into his room? What had it even been? Maybe he was still asleep.
He sat back down on the bed and dropped his head in his hands. He drifted in and out of consciousness. He must’ve fallen asleep in that position because the next thing he knew he was squinting in the bleached light of early dawn. His neck was on fire.
That wasn’t the last time he saw the mysterious hologram.
The next night Nate stayed up late, chugging coffee and energy drinks just to stay awake, eager to see if it visited again. Hours went by. Just when he decided to throw in the towel and lay down, the hologram appeared in the same corner. It was around two in the morning.
Help, it moaned, locking its translucent eyes onto his. Help me. Nate noticed that its lips weren’t moving, and yet somehow he understood what it was saying.
“Who are you?” he said loudly. All the sugar and caffeine he’d consumed over the last few hours was buzzing behind his eyelids. The hologram blinked at him. He couldn’t tell if it understood or not. But then it whispered:
Sophia Montgomery.
“What do you want?”
Using me.
“Who?”
And Felicity...she…
“What? Wait!”
The hologram had started to fade. Panicking, Nate jumped off his bed and ran towards it, as if he meant to take it in his arms and hold it there for just a second longer. “What about Felicity? What’s ---”
It vanished before he could finish. Furious, Nate grabbed an empty can of energy drink from the crumpled bedsheets and chucked it at the corner.
“Fuck!”
He began to pace around the room, his mind racing. Sophia Montgomery. Wait. The girl on the footage from Union Station! The one who had been there when Felicity shot Coppula. If she was with his father, that meant she was probably at the Institute too---a patient, then? Someone with powers, no doubt, judging by the weird projection she was chucking into his room every night. What in God’s name was his father up to in that hell hole?
A rock dropped into his stomach when he realized what his next move had to be.
There were only two people who could explain why a teenager with superpowers was appearing in his bedroom in the middle of the night. The first was Doctor Reynolds, who had already proven to be as helpful as a fork up the ass. The other was his mother.
Nate went and got a bottle of gin out of the fridge, then sat down in the armchair by the window. He unscrewed the bottle and took a long swig. It burned like rubbing alcohol, but that was inconsequential at this point. He just wanted to stop feeling things for a while.
Silence and solitude brought back memories. As Nate sat at the window, his demons came back to him with brutal clarity, thrusting their way like steely knives through his alcohol-soaked brain.
***
As a child, Felicity had been rambunctious and adventurous, born with a spirit far more interested in seizing the moment than considering the consequences once that moment had passed. Nate, on the other hand, had been far more reserved and unsure. He viewed everything and everyone with suspicion and unease. While he over-analyzed and fretted, asking the particulars of who, when, why, and how, Felicity plunged headfirst into everything and only asked, “why not?”
Once she saw a cartoon character on T.V. jump off a cliff with a sheet and land on the ground unharmed. That afternoon, Felicity climbed onto the roof and tried the stunt herself. She broke her leg and earned a severe scolding from their mother. Dad was little more understanding, petting her hair and worrying about whether or not she had enough pillows under her leg. But even he grounded her in the end.
None of that deterred her from being reckless in the future. On the contrary, she seemed to develop a passionate attraction for things that could hurt her. Like rollerblading down Canton Avenue---one of the steepest hills in the United States---while it was pouring rain outside. Or doorbell ditching in the dead of winter while wearing nothing but her underwear.
At his sister’s instigation, Nate did things he never would’ve done if left to his own devices. He snuck into a movie theater he hadn’t paid to see. He climbed over the park fence at night to go skinny dipping in the duck pond. She even got him to try a cigarette with her once; they were both violently ill afterwards. After the fourth trip to the bathroom, Nate suggested confessing to their parents and facing the music. Felicity just laughed. “Why should we waste this golden opportunity? We’ll say we have the flu and get out of going to school.” They did---and they got to spend the day on the couch, sharing a big fuzzy blanket while watching old movies and drinking Sprite.
Felicity was like a comet, sparking brilliantly against the dull tapestry of everyday life, doing whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, with an almost desperate enthusiasm.
It was hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the comet fizzled out. By the time he realized that something awful had crept into her soul, burrowed in, and bled her out, it was already too late. Felicity was gone.
There were a few concrete incidents that alerted him to her new state.
Like that autumn morning when the two of them were playing alone in the backyard. Nate was trying out his new digital camera and taking photos of anything he thought was interesting---while fearfully maintaining a respectful distance between himself and nature. When he glanced up from snapping a shot of a lazy squirrel, he saw Felicity standing under a tree. The leaves swaying above her were as red as her hair, and the sunlight falling through formed buttery stripes on her head. He thought she was the most beautiful sister in the world. “Hey, over here,” he called, raising the camera to his eyes as she turned towards him.
Click.
Felicity’s face changed.
“What are you doing?!”
“Huh?”
She rushed towards him, her face twisted with fury, and began to strike him.
“I’m sorry!” he cried, holding up his arms in an attempt to shield his face from her blows. “I’m sorry! Ow, stop! Please, Felicity, I didn’t think you’d care, I---”
One of her flailing hands hit him in the nose. There was a crunch and Nate fell back with a scream. The camera flew from his hand. Blood flowered out of his nostrils. Felicity’s fist froze in midair. The wild look in her eyes faded, replaced with horror and shock. His nose ended up being broken. When their parents asked him what happened, Nate said he’d climbed a tree and fallen off. It was the first lie he told for her.
Then there was that night the following winter. He went down to the kitchen for a glass of water and found her hunched at the table. She didn’t move or even blink when he turned on the light. She simply sat there, staring vacantly at no one and nothing. On another occasion, he woke up to find her standing over his bed. When he asked her in a voice thick with sleep what she was doing, she whispered: “Do you think she can breathe underground?” The tone of her voice made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Then she turned around without further comment and walked out of the room.
Was all of this around the time she started going to those checkups with their father? He found out later that she was going to the Institute. She would be gone for a few hours twice a week, and whenever she came back, she would lock herself in her room and not talk to anybody the rest of the day.
The Institute. That fucking place. The memory of that place lived on and festered in his heart like maggots.
He never did learn the particulars of Felicity’s power. When she told him she was going to their dad’s hospital because of her strange abilities, he asked what she could do. She told him she was empathetic, and when he asked what that meant, she just shrugged and said: “I guess it means I feel stuff more strongly than other people.”
“How is that a superpower?” he asked, puzzled.
“Honestly it’s more of a pain in the ass,” was her response, and they dropped the subject.
He learned more from the visitors that would come to the house. Dad would have people over for mysterious meetings about three times a week. Felicity said they were future patients. Usually the visitors were children accompanied by worried-looking parents. Dad would take the families into his office for hours, and Nate would eavesdrop on their conversations from outside in the hall, his ear pressed eagerly against the door. Lots of words were thrown around that he didn’t understand. “Escalation” and “adroit” and “molecular structure.” It all sounded like a boring textbook. Once, though, the door was slightly ajar and Nate peeked into the office and saw a sight that he would never forget.
There was a girl standing in front of his father’s desk. She was hovering several feet off the floor, her head thrown back and her eyes rolled up into her skull so that only the whites were showing. Her mouth was agape in a silent scream.
Was Felicity going to be around freaks like that? The thought filled him with horror. Could Felicity float too? No, she could…what was it? “Empathic.” That’s what she’d said. He began to think about it more seriously in the coming days. Strangely enough, his sister had always been compassionate. It was an interesting contrast to her general recklessness, one of the many assets of her personality that fascinated him. There were times when she seemed drawn to suffering, like a walking antenna that was tuned into the grievances of anyone or anything in her proximity. Sometimes she would stop in the middle of a game they were playing and run off, only to return hours later with some stray animal that their parents wouldn’t let them keep. “How do you always know where they are?” Nate grumbled, feeling slighted that she’d abandoned him in the middle of yet another game.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“They call to me,” she said.
It wasn’t just animals, either. She always rushed to the aid of any kid on the playground who was being bullied. She would charge forward with her fists raised, bellowing foul language at the perpetrators. Sometimes she was successful, and she rescued someone. But most of the time she had the shit kicked out of her.
“Why don’t you let people fend for themselves?” Nate asked her once while he was tending to her wounds in their bathroom. He was cleaning a cut on her forehead. A big black bruise was blooming over one of her eyes.
“They’re too weak.”
“Gimmie the peroxide over there. I’m gonna have to put more on this cut.”
“Okay. But only if I get a hug first.” She leaned forward and wrapped him in her arms before he could say anything. She smelled like earth and grass---which made sense. The bullies had pinned her down in the track field and pummeled her for a while before a teacher finally intervened.
***
As Felicity’s check-ups at the Institute increased, Nate grew more curious about what happened during them.
“It’s pretty boring, really,” Felicity said. They were in the kitchen late one evening, finishing some leftover pie that had been in the fridge for the last few days. The house was dark and silent, both parents having gone to bed hours ago. “They give me some medicine to keep my powers under control and then I talk to a therapist.”
“Your powers are out of control?”
“I guess?”
“But feeling too much isn’t dangerous, right?”
“I dunno.” Felicity bit down on her fork as she stared off distractedly in the distance. “Dad says it could be.”
Nate took a large bite of pie and chewed it thoughtfully for a few seconds. Then he swallowed and scowled. “Why give you medicine for something that could be bad but isn’t yet? That doesn’t make sense.”
She shrugged. “Isn’t that what doctors do? Anyway, I think Dad just likes an excuse to get out of the house. You know things aren’t great with him and Mom lately.”
Nate’s eyes went round. “Really?”
Felicity laughed and shook her head. “Haven’t you noticed all the yelling?””
Nate sullenly stabbed his pie with his fork. “Sure, but isn’t that normal?”
“Not the way they do it.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Nu-uh. I can feel the way they hate each other.”
“I don’t wanna talk about this anymore.” She sighed, then reached across the table and pulled his pie plate towards her. “Hey!” he protested. “I wasn’t done with that.”
She stabbed a piece and then held the fork up to his mouth. A teasing smile crept across her face. “Here then.”
Nate raised his eyebrows. “You’re weird,” he said, but he leaned forward and let her gently slip the fork between his lips. That piece tasted sweeter than the others had.
***
The gin was blurring the edges of his vision. Nate slumped in his chair, his eyes drooping. His body was numb, his brain growing fuzzy with impending sleep---hopefully a deep, dark, alcohol-induced slumber that would be undisturbed by dreams. He drifted in and out of consciousness, hoping oblivion would come quickly.
***
The first time she kissed him was when he was thirteen.
They were walking home from school together and they decided to take a shortcut through the park because it looked like it was going to rain. As they wandered alongside the pond, Felicity stopped to look at some ducks drifting across the water’s surface.
“They look happy,” she said.
“How can you tell?”
She turned towards him. “I just can.” She reached out and brushed the side of his face with her palm. “You feel warm.”
“Well it’s hot out.”
“Yeah.” She continued to stroke his cheek, gazing at him intently.
“What?” he said nervously.
“You have Dad’s eyes.”
“I do?”
“But yours are kinder. And a little lighter. Like chocolate syrup.”
“Well yours are like Mom’s.”
She withdrew her hand and scowled. “Gross.”
“Why?”
“Because I hate that bitch.”
“Felicity!”
“What? I don’t have to like her just because we’re related.”
“What’s your problem with Mom?”
“She lets dad do whatever he wants. Haven’t you noticed? Even when he’s mean to her. She just sits there and takes it.”
“Did you hear them yelling last night?”
“Yeah, I couldn’t sleep.”
“I wonder what they were fighting about?”
“Who knows? It’s always something. What’re you doing?”
Nate had stooped down to look at an array of flowers blooming in the grass around their feet. “The tulips are out,” he said excitedly.
“Yeah, nerd, I hear they do that every year.”
Nate stuck his tongue out at her, then bent down and picked a red tulip. He held it out to her, smiling. “It’s the same color as your hair.” He tucked the flower behind her ear. When he went to lean away she suddenly leaned forward, and their lips met.
He was startled at first. Then the alarm curdled into something else, a hot, previously unknown sensation that curled around his insides and squeezed the life out of him. It was almost like he was being invaded by a foreign entity. He pushed her away, panting. He was trembling.
“Why’d you do that?”
“Didn’t you like it?”
“No,” he said, his voice wavering.
“Liar.”
“Stop messing around. Let’s go home before it starts raining.”
“Thanks for this,” she said, smiling as she adjusted the tulip nestled behind her ear.
“It’s just a flower,” he mumbled, hurrying along the path, his eyes downcast and his face flushed.
His confusing feelings ebbed as they walked, and by the time they got home he was feeling much better. She had probably been joking around. He was sure she’d already forgotten about it.
***
The fighting at home escalated shortly after that strange incident in the park. Their parents were like two wild animals forced into confinement together, and they took every opportunity to go for each other’s eyes. On more than one occasion, family meals turned into war zones, with plates shattering against the wall and cups being chucked across the room. Felicity was once hit in the eye by a freefalling fork. She was lucky she escaped with nothing more than a scratch on her eyelid.
Nate would often be kept up at night by their screaming. He stuffed a pillow over his head and hummed as loud as he could, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to pretend that he was in a bad dream. When those methods failed, he would tip-toe across the room, pull open his door, and listen to their voices drifting up the stairs from the living room, trying to guess how much longer it sounded like they were going to fight. Sometimes Mom would be crying, which meant it was almost over. But most of the time she would be screaming at the top of her voice, and there was no telling how long that would go on.
One night, Nate listened to an argument that went on for at least forty minutes.
“For Chrissakes, Benjamin!” Mom yelled. “I thought you’d be a little more discreet next time---oh, don’t you dare give me that look! Do you take me for a fucking idiot? Are there truly no boundaries you won’t violate?”
“Don’t you dare talk to me about boundaries, you hateful bitch!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“That new side business you’re starting with that starry-eyed brat from accounting! Did you plan on leaving me high and dry with all the bills while you skip off into the sunset with some kid who hasn’t even sprouted his dick yet---”
“Oh don’t you dare---don’t you dare compare me to you!”
“I wouldn’t dream of it! I have a modicum of respect for the people I do business with, you cunt---”
There was the sound of glass breaking, a pregnant pause, and then a swell of more cursing and yelling. Nate closed the door and crawled back into bed, stuffing his head under a few more pillows.
Maybe all the trouble with Mom is why Dad started to hit them.
The first time for Nate was in late spring, and it was around eight o’clock in the evening. He was in his room, cramming for an upcoming exam, when his father walked without announcing himself.
“Nathaniel, why didn’t you clean up after dinner? There’s a pile of filthy dishes in the sink.”
Nate looked up from his book, blinking. “It’s not my turn.”
“You turn?” His father’s lip curled. “We shouldn’t have to ask you to help out. A decent child would just know when to step up.”
Nate felt his ears reddening. “I’m sorry. I’ll go do them now.”
“Your sister is already doing them, no thanks to your negligence.”
“That’s not fair,” Nate said, shutting his book and getting off his bed. He’d meant that it wasn’t fair to Felicity, but before he could clarify, Dad’s face darkened and he snarled,
“Fair?”
Nate heard the whoosh of his father’s fist moments before it collided with his face. He fell down with a startled cry. Dad turned and left the room without another word, leaving Nate sprawled on the carpet.
Sometimes it was worst for Felicity---although whenever Dad hit her, she always got an apology afterwards. Nate once witnessed him slap her clean across the face and then take her in his arms mere seconds later, murmuring “sorry sweetie” and nervously stroking her hair.
“What are you standing there for?” he had snapped at Nate from over her shoulder. “Get your sister an ice pack.”
***
Eventually, Nate and Felicity went out of their way to avoid interacting with their parents altogether. They opted for the bus to school rather than take a ride, and they refused to go down for dinner. Instead they would hide in Felicity’s room, waiting for the arguing to end before sneaking out later in the night to steal food from the cupboards downstairs. Whenever they finished eating, Felicity would read aloud to him to pass the time or let him lay in her lap while she stroked his hair and sang lullabies to help him fall asleep. Nate knew he was too old for such things (he was fifteen at this point), but he liked being coddled. Their mother hadn’t sung to him, or even hugged him, in what felt like years. His loneliness was soothed by Felicity’s attention---though he knew it wasn’t just her attention he wanted.
He was becoming increasingly aware of a growing need that went beyond motherly comfort, something that had taken root inside his heart ever since that day in the park. He found himself staring at her a lot during the nights they spent hiding in her room, provoking her on more than one occasion to laugh at him and say, “You wanna kiss?” He always denied it, scarlet-faced, and she would laugh again and return to whatever she was doing. Sometimes, though, she would come over and kiss him anyway. He would always weakly push against her shoulders and tell her to stop. But she would just grin wickedly and shove him down, pinning him against the carpet and kissing him until he started to shake.
If he hadn’t walked in on her changing one night, perhaps kissing is as far as it would have gone.
A surge of confusing feelings had rushed upon him when he saw her standing in front of the mirror, wearing nothing but loose sweatpants and a lacy green bralette. Her hair was down, tumbling in a riot of fiery waves over the top of her white breasts.
“Oh, sorry, I---” he stammered, feeling the blood rush to his face as he started to back away, but she had beckoned him inside, and when he closed the door, she walked towards him in the dimly lit room with a look on her face that made him feel like he’d swallowed a carton of eels.
“Mom got this for me today,” she said, tugging at one of the green bra straps. She left it hanging off her slim, pale shoulder. Nate stared at it, unable to tear his eyes away. “You like it?” she said, smiling.
“I don’t know.” He laughed, too loudly, then cleared his throat and started to back towards the door again.
“You don’t know?”
“I’m your brother. It’s---I dunno, it’s weird,” he said lamely. “Who cares what I think?”
“I do,” she said softly, her eyes simmering beneath her half-shut lids. The air stirred as she moved closer, bringing with it the gentle scent of lavender soap. “Come here.”
He obeyed, and the room blurred into a haze of desire and confusion. For a long time he knew nothing but heat and darkness.
A monster was born inside his body that night.
There were other nights like it after that----though sporadically, and always at Felicity’s instigation. During high school, throughout his time at the police academy, and once after he made detective. That one had been particularly memorable. Probably because they had both assumed their freedom was at hand, and they were high on adrenaline and possibility. He finally had enough saved and a steady job to support them. Felicity was going to drop out of college and they were going to go live together. They were finally going to get out of that house.
Had their father suspected their plan? Is that why he’d enrolled Felicity full time at the Institute, shortly after Nate’s promotion? He’d always had some kind of sick fascination with Felicity’s power, a need to keep her to himself that had, in later years, made Nate’s skin crawl with disgust and anger. The day she vanished from his life was burned into his brain; he still had nightmares about the feeling that had come over him when he came home from work to find her room empty.
“Where the fuck is she?” he bellowed, bursting into his father’s office without hesitation. The fires of anger incinerated any timidity or fear left in his body from years of abuse at his father’s hands. His father was sitting at his desk, and he looked up indifferently at Nate’s noisy entrance.
“Your sister has been taken to the Institute,” he said calmly.
“When will she be back?”
“She won’t. It will be her full-time residence from now on.”
Nate felt an abyss open at his feet, and he fell straight into the dark jaws of nothingness. He stared at his father, unable to speak, for a long time.
“Did you need anything else, son?” he asked, not bothering to look up from the papers he was reading.
“You can’t.”
“Pardon?”
“You have no right to take her!” Nate yelled, advancing into the room, fists clenched.
His father looked up, an amused expression on his face. “I do, actually. I am her father, after all.”
“She’s a legal adult.”
“Who is committed to a mental hospital. I know what’s best for her. Get out.”
“No.”
The amusement slid off his father’s face, replaced with a look that would have made Nate quake if he’d been capable of feeling anything but anger.
“I won’t ask again,” his father said. He stood up and came around the desk.
“If you hit me, I’m going to break your jaw.”
His father paused, tilted his head to one side, and seemed to size Nate up for a moment. Nate knew his father was stronger, but he also knew that he was no longer a child. He was a grown man, and his training at the academy had made him formidable.
“You will leave this house by the end of the week,” his father said.
“Gladly,” Nate spat, turning on his heel. “And don’t even think for a second that this is over.”
“Leave well enough alone, Nathaniel.”
“Fuck you.”
He slammed the office door as he went out.
***
Nate lifted the bottle of gin to his lips and found it was empty. As he sucked what little alcohol there was left on the rim, he wondered why he was he thinking about all this now.
The answer came to him at once. It was because he missed her. They had never been apart for this long, and his monster was growing impatient. He could feel it rearing up on its hind legs, trying to claw its way out of his body and into her soft white arms.
Nate tried to stand up, but the room immediately turned upside down, and he fell heavily back into his chair. He leaned his head in his hand and closed his eyelids. He fell asleep at last.