“Remember Jane? You know, gun girl?”

Did I remember Jane? Back when we were stupids kids, Jane and I… well, we were. . . she was my first kiss, though you couldn’t necessarily call her my first gal. But yeah, you always remember your first car, your first kiss- and no, she wasn’t my first that. That was Emmy after we got married.

But still- Emmy doesn’t know much about that part of my life. Though I have caught her looking at me sometimes, wondering why my eyes get all misty when I hear subway trains roaring through the tunnels.

We’d been back for a little while, spending a bunch of the dough we’d gotten from a rare job that’d gone right. I think Queen Bee had paired off with Mothman for the evening (yeah, she was pretty, but something about her said to stay away. I used to listen to that voice more back then). The train dove by, the wind blew through, around and over us, smelling of steel and rock. In the dim light of the tunnels, Jane looked to my seventeen-year-old eyes like a twenty-year old goddess in plaid flannel, jeans and cowgirl boots.

She leaned in, smiling, and we kissed. I swear, by Jesus God Almighty as my witness, I felt my head pop in the back when our lips touched.

I can see more clearly now, ‘course. I may’ve been a skinny, naive kid but Icarus was more interested in his gadgets than in any girl, and poor Jake had a chip on his shoulder a mile wide an’ a yard thick, always complaining about something like how he got the short end of the stick or how the next plan wasn’t gonna work. And Miguel? The Black Tiger? He was a spic. Not the plus then it is today. Not by a country mile.

Me, though? I was just some dumb, nerdy kid who liked to play with his chemistry set, and found it was easy to make stuff freeze. Soon, my dad was actually proud of me for once because I was borrowing his gun instead of playing with my test-tubes. But I was doing a new set of experiments. Crafting, perfecting, making my first prototype of the Winterbeam, the gun I used to do almost all my ‘super villain’ stuff.

Hell, I never even thought of myself as a super-anything. My mom was a smart cookie, but even she couldn’t stretch the family budget when Dad lost his job at the factory. When I found out that the local department store kept a lot of its profits in a glorified safety-deposit box, I figured out pretty quick how I’d be able to pop the lock.

And I did. And I got the cash. And I made a little trip to the bank, paid our mortgage for the month, and put the rest under my mattress- where most other guys I knew were hiding their Playboys.

Mom said nothing, and never turned my mattress after the first time. Dad said nothing, always sweating when the mail came,waiting for that past-due notice that never came. And me? Well, the cops never quite came after me officially. But there was this weird, unspoken thing you usually hear about the most dysfunctional small towns happening, but it seemed pretty much in place in our little corner of the city, too:

Everybody knew, but no one accused. Not openly. I still got invited to parties, and my mom still went to her bridge club, and my Dad still went bowling every Wednesday night. But there was a new kind of awkwardness around our family. If there were a bunch of people talking and laughing in a room at school, the room always got quiet when I walked in, and people started looking at the floor. When Dad stepped up to take a shot, the bowling hall got quiet. When the moms would get together to make an act for the family talent show at the school, they’d ‘forget’ to include my mom until it was too late.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Well, I got sore. But what was I gonna do? I used the Winterbeam pretty sparingly; I iced the driveway of our crappy neighbor on Halloween morning instead of evening, and my little snowball bombs? They weren’t these massive hand grenades of arctic tundra blasts that swallowed up whole houses of innocent people, like they showed in the comic books. Think more like cherry bombs that iced the floor and made you fall, or numbed up a leg so’s you couldn’t run after me, or your arm so you could raise your fist or point a gun at me.

But the snowballs came later. I hadda pull another job or two when things got bad, and dad had to deliver papers in the morning just to get food money. Another job on the safe in a hardware store and the JC Penny down the road- that one was tricky. That’s the one where I wore a dark blue suit and fedora I’d gotten from a thrift store, and I wore a mask I made quick out of a white stocking I pulled over my face when I thought a regular eyemask might not be enough. Plop on a fedora and a cloak to hide any more details and keep my hands free, and you had Beantown’s only bona fide super-villain.

I kept it going for a little bit. I was set for college in the fall when my dad passed away, just a month before my high-school graduation. What was I supposed to do? Give him a potter’s field funeral? Dang it, but real funerals can be expensive, and the morticians know they’ve got you over a barrel. So, I did my fourth job, the one that some joejack caught on camera. Now there was a blurry photo of a guy in a fedora and a white stocking mask robbing a place after dark, using something that left icicles on the lock (the cops got there faster this time), and suddenly the papers dubbed me ‘The Snowman.’

The sheriff dropped by after that one. Knocked on my door and everything, asked my mom if he could have a little chat with me. I imagine that was an awkward conversation for the sheriff maybe more, even, than it was for me. I’d known that my dad had been good friends with Sheriff Lawson when they’d been in high school together, but I hadn’t known until that day that the Sheriff had dated mom for a while back then. I also didn’t know he’d carried a torch for her for a long time, even after she’d married my dad a week after their graduation.

He had a chat with me in our garage, alright, with the chem set and everything I’d used right behind him. I thought then that he was just thick as a brick, but in retrospect he was probably cutting me a break for the sake of my mom and the memory of my dad.

I’d never been more nervous than I was that day, and the only day I’ve ever been more scared was my wedding day. But the sheriff was nice enough. Just told me he knew I was good with a test tube, knew that we were having trouble financially, said he could get us help to keep the lights on. He went on to ask me if I knew anything about the thefts in town (surprise, I said no), and if I could point him in the direction of anyone who might know something.

I was pretty stupid myself, being seventeen and all. But right then I realized I was being offered a chance, a way out. And I was gonna take it. My science teacher had been gradually turning over from being a pretty button-down, coat-and-tie teacher like the others to being a goatee-and-black turtleneck-wearing beatnik type. Plus, he wasn’t hardly teaching anymore; just giving us textbook pages to read and sitting at his desk and reading the paper, when he wasn’t yappin’ about how the country was bein’ run by corrupt bankers, racist industrialists an’ the military and the like. Some kids loved it, others didn’t. I didn’t care one way or the other.

So, I gave him up. Said he’d been talking about how corrupt the banks and America was (slam dunk- every kid in his class would corroborate that), and Sheriff Lawson said he’d look into it.

Just before he left he looked at my chemistry set. “Nice setup here, Mitch,” he said, looking at the tubes and beakers, some with tiny rings of frost around them. “Science project?”

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TO BE CONTINUED...