Volume 6: Anaphase

Issue 3: To the Library!

Jannette Adrian Churchwell

By Nova

Chapel Hill High School was the most ostentatious public school I’d ever seen. It was a large four or five story building, built in the old Spanish style. This, in and of itself, wasn’t too fancy—but the school was topped by a huge, ornate bell tower that rose high above the surroundings. While the cracked, faded paint along the walls suggested that the school probably had its best years behind it, it compared very favorably to the cold, gray brick of a building that was my high school.

I stepped inside to a pretty quiet campus. It appeared that almost all of the students had gone home, and the few I passed in the halls paid me no real attention. I had a suspicion that most of them thought I was just another student, especially since my small stature put me a head under some of those I passed in the halls. As I followed signs to the library, uncomfortable memories surfaced as I passed rows of lockers. Half-forgotten jeers, never getting invited to anything, the grape juice incident…

But the jitters of what I was doing mostly chased these memories away.

Linda was a friend from work; very stressful work that put us in all sorts of situations and places, so by now it wasn’t too weird to meet with her outside of that context. Holly though… I’d never met up with her outside of Aesop’s. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. In fact, I really liked Holly. We could talk for hours about anything, from nerdy stuff like Icons to something as boring as the weather. But I didn’t know how to change that context… Like, how do you just ask someone if they’d like to get coffee or lunch or whatever?

Fighting Odachi was easier than that.

And while it might have just been some sort of superhero instinct that made me suggest helping her at the library, I really did want to hang out with Holly. Of course, I had no idea what I would do, or even what I’d wear. I hadn’t had a “normal” job since I was eighteen, and ever since I’d been wearing scrubs in some capacity. So I’d just thrown on a pale blue sundress and paired it with some fancy beige sandals—the only nice clothes I still had. But it was way too cold for a sundress outside. What would Holly think if I wore something like this to the library? Should I have just worn a t-shirt and jeans? Was I overdressed? Underdressed?

Somewhat shakily, I reached the door before I could convince myself to turn around. Opening it revealed a nice, spacious library—though not one as nice as one might expect from a school with a literal bell tower. Row after row of bookshelves filled the room before me, only broken up by study tables, couches, and a circular desk at the center of my vision. Holly sat there, typing away at the computer, and when she noticed me she motioned for me to come over. With a deep breath, I took a step into the library.

Holly stood to meet me as I approached. She was almost unrecognizable, wearing a simple black button up, slacks, and far more subdued make-up than I usually saw her in. She wasn’t even wearing her jet black hair down, and instead had it in a tight ponytail. “Hey Jan, glad you made it!” Holly said as she suddenly pulled me into a hug.

“O-oh!” I stammered, taken aback. I raised my arms to reciprocate, but suddenly grew very aware of my power tracing through Holly’s cells, feeding me data on her body. Based on her adrenal levels, she was more nervous than she was letting on, and given the flush of tes-

I suddenly pulled away from the hug, blushing furiously and feeling like a voyeur.

“Jan?” Holly asked, looking almost abashed as I paced back slightly.

“N-nothing!” I said, trying to pretend like I hadn’t seen what I’d seen. “Just glad to be here, that’s all!” I forced out an awkward laugh.

Holly seemed troubled for a few moments as she stared at me, but her expression cleared. “Me too,” she said.

“Well, uh, how can I help?” I quickly asked, trying to change the subject.

“I have a stack of books to put back on the shelves, how well do you know the Dewey Decimal System?”

“Uhhh…”

Holly laughed. “Alright, it’s simpler than you think. But you don’t really need to know it for this. Just look at the shelves, see how we have numbers on the ends? Try to put the books with numbers in between those two somewhere there. They’re sorted numerically by the number on the spine, then alphabetically by author’s last name after that.”

I stared at her. “I guess that makes sense,” I said, not quite sure it did.

“Alright.” She hoisted the stack into my arms. “Careful now. It’s heavy.”

They were heavier than they looked, but—thanks to my constant regeneration—my muscles could lift more than a normal human my size. “Not a problem,” I said.

“These are all history books, so you can file them on the same shelf. It’s about six rows down, labeled ‘history.’”

“Makes sense,” I said, glancing down at the top book. “The Life of Meteora,” I read aloud. “Good book?”

Holly shrugged. “It’s fine, pop history mostly.”

“You’ve actually read it?” I asked, a little surprised. “I knew you liked those old Soviet heroes but…”

“It was the book I brought on a flight once. I thought it would be useful for a paper I was writing… turns out I wasn’t that lucky. There’s a good reason it’s in a high school library.” She laughed.

“A-alright,” I said, not really sure I got the joke. “I’ll put these away, then be back quick.”

“Sounds good,” Holly said, taking her seat back at the desk. “Let me know if you see any ghosts!” she added in a false whisper, then giggled and leaned back in her chair.

I laughed. It was good to see my company had made her more relaxed about the whole situation. Counting the shelves, I quickly found the one labeled ‘history.’ I went into the aisle. The Dewey Decimal System was not as easy as Holly implied it would be, and it took me about ten minutes before I had managed to stow them all and return to Holly. Another stack of books had manifested in front of her, and she motioned to them with sarcastic flair. “More fun library stuff.” She laughed.

I sighed. “How many of these do we have to do?”

“Oh, it never ends.” She motioned behind her desk and, leaning over, I could see stacks after stacks of books just hidden out of sight.

“Jesus… T-that’s gotta be more than a hundred!”

“Probably. I have no idea. The rest of the library staff leave it to me cause they know I can’t complain, being an intern and all.”

“Why not quit?”

Holly seemed to think for a moment. “Well,” she started, slowly, “I guess there’s not too many jobs out there for historians any more… especially if you don’t have a Master’s or PhD.”

“Not even at the university?” I thought back to the graduate TAs that tried to teach me back during my Stanford days.

“Oh, sure. I TA a course there, but they don’t pay you enough to live. Not in this city, anyways…”

I laughed, more out of sympathy than anything else. “True… but why not get a roommate?”

Holly sighed like she had heard this question a hundred times before. “I did my time back in my undergrad at Berkeley. I wanted UCSF to be a fresh start, but after the first year…”

“I understand that, wanting a fresh start…” I said. “But even back in my Stanford days I was stuck in the do-”

“Wait,” Holly said, cutting me off, “you went to Stanford?”

“I-I never mentioned?” I chuckled awkwardly. “I dropped out.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that…” Holly trailed off.

I cleared my throat and, desperate to change the subject away from me, asked, “S-so, not a big fan of the library?”

Stolen story; please report.

“Well, it’s not that I don’t like it here…” Holly said. “I like most of the students. A lot of them are pretty nice, or at least don’t bother me.”

“But?”

“It’s just that I don’t… Well, I don’t feel like it’s where I should be. I’m the part-time intern who’ll probably be gone this time next year…”

“I get why you don’t like it here…”

“Yeah, well… I don’t know. The work isn’t hard, it’s just a lot. And, while I don’t ever want to work in a high school again, I do like being able to help these kids when I can,” Holly said. “Especially with all that’s been going on,” she muttered, darkly.

“Well, I’m here today, so maybe the work will go by faster?”

Holly smiled. “It already is.” She tapped the stack of books on the desk. “Especially if you take care of this.”

It is a weird thing to enter into someone else’s routine. You never really get the feeling of how they did it, and watching them just makes you more aware of how out of place you are. After I had gotten through the first few stacks of books, I began to understand the flow of Holly’s library work. She, for her own part, soon joined me on the library floor as the last of the students headed home. And—while the weird feeling never left—working with her made the whole situation feel more… relaxed. By the time the sun had gone down and night fell, the idea of the school being creepy was quickly turning into a joke.

“Oooh, spoopy,” Holly laughed as the light above us suddenly flickered.

I giggled. “Oh, I’m definitely feeling a presence now.”

“Maybe it’s in that book. What do you got there?”

“Edgar Allen Poe: ‘The Raven’ And Other Poems,” I read aloud.

“Oh, Poe? That explains it.” Holly laughed again.

I laughed along with her, though I didn’t quite get the joke. “Either that or Chapel High needs to replace the lights,” I said.

“Oh, they definitely need to do that,” Holly said. “But they spent pretty much all the money on fixing up the theater after the ‘heroes’ killed that monster, and according to my boss there’s basically no money left in the budget.”

“Wait, the city isn’t boosting funding after both the attacks here?”

“Maybe they would if all that stuff with Sasquatch and those powerchems didn’t happen.” Holly shrugged. “But right now all they care about is that, so the stuff going on at Chapel isn’t getting enough attention.”

“Hmmm…”

“I did hear something about begging some company for money, turning the school into some corporate charity case. But I don’t exactly think that’s better.”

“Well, at least you’ll get something, right?”

Holly laughed. “I mean, I won’t. But yeah, I guess they might fix the light with some of that cash.”

As if on cue, the light stopped flickering the moment Holly stopped talking. She shot a wide-eyed look at me. “Oooooh, spoopy,” she said again.

I laughed, then turned back toward the bookshelves. The Poe book went next to some other books from the same author. I think I remembered reading his stuff back in high school? “Holly,” I asked, a thought coming to me.

“Yeah, Jan?”

“Do you think those… ‘heroes’ of yours really are students here?”

Holly sighed. “I really don’t know. Probably? Based on what I’ve heard, the kids certainly think they are.”

“But you?”

“I… really hope they aren’t. I know the numbers say that at least one of these kids has powers, but I honestly hope they’re just laying low.”

“Oh?” I asked, a little surprised. “But aren’t they doing some good, killing monsters and everything? Better than them turning into villains, right?”

“I guess it’s better, but I honestly wish they didn’t have to be heroes, you know?”

“N-no?”

“Like, I mean, it’s dangerous of course, and that’s not great, but…” She stopped for a second to think. “Studying the history of superheroes is my thing,” Holly said, “and ever since they revealed Champion to the world heroes have served as defenders of the status quo. They break up protests, defend the interests of the rich and powerful, and keep us in line. You know what I mean?”

“Uh…”

Holly sighed. “But we can’t live without them either. You know why we tolerate heroes?”

“V-villains?”

“It’s not villains, not really. Villains are tolerated, too. That’s why the government just locks them up when they get arrested instead of executing them all. No, it’s because every so often something crazy happens. Wichita is nuked, New Mexico is irradiated, Australia is destroyed. Heroes and villains are the only ones strong enough to fight these things, and even then they sometimes fail.” Holly paused for a moment. “And that’s why we tolerate them. We have to because they are our only line of defense against all the shit that’s been happening lately.”

“A-and they don’t have a choice either,” I interjected. “It’s their world too, ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ and all that…”

“Spider-Man? I didn’t take you for a fan of those old-school, fictional heroes, Jan.”

I laughed uncomfortably. “I… I know my heroes.”

“I guess you would, being a Stitch fangirl and all.” Holly chuckled. “And I don’t mean to say that heroes like Stitch are inherently bad… But I think there always is a choice, you know? If the ‘Chapel Trio’ really are a bunch of kids, they don’t have to join the system, you know? They can stay out of it, take care of themselves, not put their lives on the line… At least until they’re adults.”

“I take it you’re not a big fan of Starlight Academy?”

Holly scoffed. “I have no idea why the government approved a fucking child soldier factory.”

I smiled sympathetically, but the two of us lapsed into an awkward sort of silence for a minute or two. I didn’t necessarily disagree with everything she was saying, but I couldn’t say I really viewed myself as a “defender of the status quo” or anything like that. And even if I was, maybe the status quo wasn’t all that bad?

Or maybe I only thought that because I had powers. To Holly, maybe the status quo wasn’t as peachy.

Holly cleared her throat. “Heh, sorry to rant politics, Jan,” she said. “I guess when you spend all day studying this shit it sticks with you. Especially with the hero stuff playing out in miniature at Chapel High.”

I tried to shrug nonchalantly, to give the vibe that this “hero stuff” wasn’t personal to me. “I get it. The world gets crazier every year.”

Holly nodded. “I guess it does…”

“At least Icons puts out a new booster every season,” I joked.

Holly laughed. “Not that they’re balanced. I’m a Sov player and even I think the last Flashpoint was OP.”

“At least you’re saying it. When we did that draft night last week, Greg said just the opposite.”

“Oh my God, really? You never mentioned that.”

“I tried to forget it honestly… He was a jerk, not creepy like some of the others, but tried to explain everything.”

“Like…?”

“Each turn, he went over the phases, double checked my moves to make sure I was ‘doing it right,’ and when I beat him in the first round, he claimed that Flashpoint nerfed the Sov heroes.”

Holly groaned. “Fucking Greg… if I’d heard him say that to you I’d come over and beat him myself.”

“In cards, right?” I asked, half-joking.

“Oh, sure. Yeah, in cards, too,” Holly said, a gleam in her eye.

I chuckled, but felt my face blush. Turning away, I moved to put the last few books away when I heard the library door softly close in the distance. I instantly turned to Holly—the reason for my presence here suddenly returning to mind. “Did you hear that?” I hissed.

She nodded, the color leaving her face. Carefully, the two of us crept out of the aisle. In noiseless agreement, we started toward the door and—as I passed each aisle—my eyes scanned it up and down. No one, best I could tell, was hiding here.

I crossed the library to the door in what felt like moments, only stopping to grab my purse from my desk—just in case I needed my phone. While I had never perceived myself as stealthy or agile, my practiced, careful stride contrasted against Holly’s—who made much more noise as she struggled to keep up. By the time she reached me, I had pressed myself against the laminate door of the library. I peered through the small window to the hall outside.

Nothing. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Holly sidled up next to me. “Hey,” she hissed, “you see anything?”

I shook my head. “Nothing. Gonna go and look around the hall, see if I see anything weird.”

“I’ll go with you,” Holly said with such intensity that my instinct to tell her to stay put was entirely quelled. I just nodded and gently opened the door, which creaked with the same sound it made moments ago. Together, we carefully stepped down the hall, which seemed somehow… changed since I had last seen it. The shadows were longer, the lights… less reliable. Nothing was—objectively—different, but there was a tenseness in the air that hadn’t been there mere hours ago. And through it all, I suddenly had the unmistakable sense that I was being watched.

It all almost made me feel embarrassed, that I was getting creeped out from what was just a school about an hour after the sun had set. We probably weren’t even the only people in the building, and I was positive that there were some janitors, teachers, or even students somewhere else here. Plus, anyone could have come through those library doors—it wasn’t like they were locked or anything.

But why didn’t we hear them open?

The library was at the bottom of a short, T-shaped hallway. As we neared the intersection, me and Holly exchanged silent glances. Poking our heads out from behind the corner, she looked left while I looked right.

“Clear,” I murmured. There was nothing down my side of the hallway except some loose papers on the ground. “Doesn’t even look like the jani-” I started, but a sudden, choking sound from Holly made my head jerk towards her, down her side of the hall.

“J-Jan…” Holly said, shakily.

I had to admit, even with all I’ve seen over four years of hero work, the figure I saw—half-cloaked in the irregular shadow of a flickering light above it—looked wrong. It was roughly human-shaped. Two arms, two legs, a head, a torso… All entirely featureless and colored a pale gray. My first instinct was that it was someone in a morphsuit, but looking at it, I could see that the proportions were off. Its legs were too long and arms were too short to just be a person in a costume.

I had the distinct, unshakable feeling that the figure was somehow staring at us with its eyeless head—motionless, as if it was locked in place mid-stride. It was probably a hundred feet away from us, but felt too close and too far at once. In an instant, I was in front of Holly. “Stay behind me!” I hissed at her.

“W-what?” she hissed back, but neither of our eyes left the figure at the end of the hall. We stood there for what felt like hours, staring at this thing, when—in a flurry of movement—the figure bolted away from us, down the hall and out of sight.

Before I could say anything, Holly pushed her way past me and charged down the hall. “Wait! S-stay here!” I shouted at her.

“It’s getting away!” she shouted back.

She was right. Without time to think, I joined the chase.