Priya was always worried she’d run into Kess when she went back home to take care of Giant, but she never did. It annoyed her that Kess didn’t seem to have even thought about Giant and what would happen to him once no one was staying at the house. But Giant had always been more Priya’s cat than anyone else in the family’s—she’d been in charge of feeding him since she was eleven and cleaning his litter box since she was fourteen.
Kess, on the other hand, should really never be trusted with responsibility for any animal. She wasn’t the sort of person who had a hard time making friends with humans and so befriended animals instead. Rather (she had explained to Priya once), whatever psychological quirk made it difficult for Kess to bond with people made it even more difficult to bond with things that weren’t even human. Kess appreciated animals, but she didn’t form relationships with them. Before the Red and Blue situation, this was something that annoyed Priya about Kess, but that annoyance and others were swallowed up by affection. Now that the affection had been wiped away by some strange magic, even thinking about Kess’s difficulty with animals made Priya weirdly angry.
Today, Priya brought Connor with her to the house. “I don’t think I’d spend every night at Stephanie’s even if my parents were gone,” said Connor, stroking Giant from his ears to the tip of his tail. “You guys are my… something… now—”
“Tribe,” said Priya as she filled Giant’s food bowl. “Clan. Pack.”
“Yeah, that. But my home’s still my home.”
“Mine is too.” She looked around the laundry room where Giant’s stuff was kept. Even this, the ugliest room in the house, shone with the beauty of familiar things. “But me and Kess couldn’t stay here together any more. We didn’t talk about it, but I think we both decided to stay away to avoid fighting about who would leave.
“But you have to live here together when your parents get back, right? When is that?”
“Three weeks.”
“Man, they really trusted you two.”
“We were good kids,” said Priya. “We were really, really well-behaved up until we suddenly joined rival gangs.”
“You’re still good kids,” said Connor. “You haven’t done anything bad. None of us have. You keep calling us ‘gangs’ but we haven’t actually done anything wrong. We just hang out and play with our superpowers.”
“Give us time.”
That stopped the conversation for a while. Priya petted Giant for a minute while he ate, just to make sure he remembered her smell. Then she asked Connor, “Do you want something to eat?”
They weren’t as hungry as they’d been at first. The transformation into a Red seemed to require a lot of food as fuel, but after it was finished they only ate a little more than they used to, more on days when they used their strength a lot. Still, it felt good to cook in her own kitchen and not Stephanie’s, which had a chandelier and appliances as shiny (and possibly as expensive) as a sports car. Priya got out the ingredients for grilled cheese sandwiches.
Connor sat on one of the stools at the counter. He looked natural there—something about his red-headed harmlessness went well with kitchen cabinets. “Priya,” he said, “can I ask you something?”
She froze for a second with the cheese half sliced. His voice when he said her name had a quality that foretold coming awkwardness.
“Of course you can.”
“Why did you like Danny?”
Awkwardness was coming and could not be diverted. Any attempts to avoid the awkwardness would only make it worse. It was like being Oedipus Rex. In a way.
She assembled a sandwich and slapped it onto the frying pan with a sizzle. “He was a bottled-water boy.”
“What?”
“It’s something my sister came up with. Bottled water, you know, it’s clear, and it’s good for you. It basically means he’s a good guy.”
Hearing herself say it, she realized that wasn’t the real reason she had liked Danny. Or rather, it wasn’t all of it. After all, Connor was a good guy, wasn’t he? Maybe Priya had been too generous with herself, all those times she thought she liked “good guys.”
“And it wasn’t just that he was good,” she said slowly. “It’s that he was good in a… big way. A way that other people want to follow. That’s why I wish he’d become a Red. Not just for me. For all of us. I wish that we had Danny and the Blues had Rod.”
Connor nodded. “Priya, do you think you could… like me?”
And there it was.
“Of course I like you, Connor. I wouldn’t have asked you to come here with me if I didn’t.”
She expected him to look dejected, which would have been bad, but instead he leaned back on his stool and sort-of smiled, which was worse. “You should have just said no.”
“If I had just said no, you would have looked at me like you were blaming me for something.” She could hear the snappishness in her voice, but couldn’t manage to iron it out.
“You’re mad at me for asking.”
“I am not—”
“Priya, you once told me you think it’s important to understand what your mind is doing. Are you mad at me for asking whether you could like me?”
She glared down at the frying pan until she could answer honestly. “Yes. Yes I am. I just hate awkwardness. I guess communicating is better than not communicating, so I shouldn’t be mad. I still am, but that will go away soon. Food’s done. Eat.”
#
When they got back from Priya’s house, Rod was in Stephanie’s back yard throwing rocks into the woods. He had a bucket of them which he had probably gathered from the fake waterfall near the house.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“You okay there, sport?” he said when he saw Connor. “You’re looking almost as vague as my mother.”
“Shut up. I’m fine.”
“In that case, come take a rock. And let me know if your aim’s better than it used to be. I can’t tell with myself because I’ve always had the aim of a minor god of aiming.”
“My aim’s as good as yours.”
“Then hit, uh, that tree.”
“Which?”
“The one with the branch like a thing.”
“What?”
“The one—ugh.” Rod took another rock from his bucket and threw it straight and fast as an arrow. It hit a tree maybe sixty feet away. “That one.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. We can throw small objects very far.”
Connor took a rock of his own. He missed the tree.
By the time the rock bucket was almost empty, Connor thought his aim really was better than it had been before, if only because his strength gave him more control over his body. Rod could break off specific branches, pointing each out beforehand and then snapping it off with a straight-flying stone.
“So hooooow’s it going with Ya-Ya?” asked Rod. He dragged out the word “how” in a tone of exaggerated curiosity like a prying mother in a sitcom. “Still obsessed with her?”
“You know, Rod, could you just be a normal friend for ten minutes?”
Rod looked at Connor’s face long enough to see that he was serious. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t know things were going that badly with her. I thought you were making progress.” Rod actually did look sorry.
“Priya would go for you before she goes for me, and she hates you.”
Rod shrugged as if that they may or may not be true, he hadn’t decided yet. “Why do you think that is?”
“You’re more important than me.”
“So it’s ‘importance’ that turns her crank?”
Connor chose a tree deep into the woods, concentrated, and for once hit it square in the center of the trunk. “Just think of who she chose when she had all her options.”
“Well,” said Rod, “I wish I could tell you what to do to get yourself into her, uh, confidences. But…” He tossed a rock up and down in one hand, following it with his eyes like it was something pretty. “I do know what will take your mind off it.”
#
TEXT MESSAGE CONVERSATION BETWEEN KSENYA CARPENTER AND ELIAS KAPLAN:
Elias: I ate three pennies today. And a bolt from my dad’s toolbox.
Ksenya: I’m sorry.
Elias: Don’t be. I kind of wanted this.
Ksenya: I guess I might have wanted it too, if we were the other way around.
Elias: Maybe I’ll shock *you* someday.
#
It embarrassed Kess how badly she wanted Lorraine to like her. She knew exactly why. Lorraine was tall and confident and had blue hair. She wore semi-ironic cat’s eye glasses and totally ironic mood rings. She carried around a sketchbook like a girl in a story.
Right now, Lorraine was at the cabin’s dining room table with her sketchbook in front of her. Kess slouched up beside her to see what she was drawing. At first it seemed to be nothing but black scrawls, but when Kess let her mind slip into dreamy-artsy mode she saw something else, something like a girl with a waspish waist and a skirt blowing in the wind and her hand held out straight in front of her.
“It’s plans for a sculpture,” Lorraine explained, not looking up. “It’ll be made of wire, mostly.”
“The girl-goddess of lightning.”
That earned Kess a brief glance of acknowledgement. “Yeah.” Lorraine squinted at her sketch and then drew a few more lines, these ones different from the others—jagged and branching like lightning, surrounding the sculpture’s hand. “You’re the local electricity expert, aren’t you?”
“I just pay attention in class.”
“If I wanted to put lightning in my sculpture, real lightning, how would I do it?”
“You could try to make a Tesla coil, maybe. People do that, make them themselves. They’re not very useful, but they look really cool, electricity going everywhere. You can find instructions online.”
Lorraine nodded and then pushed her sketchbook away, apparently satisfied.
Kess sat at one of the other dining chairs. “Can I ask you a question?”
“If you want to ask a question just ask it. Don’t ask to ask.”
“How did you get to be friends with those guys? Danny and them. It seems like you should be friend with more… boys with beards.”
Lorraine laughed. “Beards. Danny is the only one of those guys who can grow a real beard.”
Kess considered that. “Huh.”
“Seems like it should be Rod, right? But no. Rod tried to grow a beard last semester, and it was pathetic. But Danny, if he goes a weekend without shaving it comes out like ah.” Lorraine made a motion with her hands around her chin to illustrate hair growing. “Anyway, Danny’s very careful about shaving every day. It’s important to him to civilize himself. To scrape the mannishness off.”
“That’s a sad way to think about hair.”
“Not really. Nothing makes Danny happier than civilization.”
And there was a sound. A thump. It made both girls flinch in their chairs.
“What was that?” asked Kess, sounding even to herself like a girl in a horror movie.
“Something hit a wall. We’re the only ones here, aren’t we?”
“I thought so. Which wall?”
Lorraine was up from her chair, waiting for silence or another sound.
Thump.
Thump thump.
“It sounds like hail,” said Kess. “Is there a storm?”
Thump.
Lorraine moved in the direction of the sounds. The outside wall—it was definitely the outside wall along the back of the house, facing the concrete patio with the basketball goal and, beyond that, the woods. Something was hitting that wall hard. Lorraine approached the sliding glass doors to the patio but halted before she stepped in front of them and held out a hand to stop Kess. “Don’t let them see you,” she said.
And so they waited. But the thumps seemed to have stopped. After what felt like a painful amount of time, Lorraine edged the doors open. She stepped out onto the concrete, and a second later Kess followed. They looked around, stared out into the woods.
“They must be gone,” said Kess.
A rock flew past Kess’s head and crashed into the wall behind her. She gasped and jumped away from it. Lorraine whipped her head around to see what had happened, her blue braids snapping. Another rock hit the concrete near Lorraine’s feet. She shrieked.
A second later the two of them were back inside.
“I didn’t see them,” murmured Kess. “They must have been back in the trees. I didn’t think about how far they must be able to throw things. That’s bad. That means they have range. That means—”
Lorraine’s face was twisted up—her emotions were beyond “enigmatic half smile” territory now. She looked furious, scary even. And maybe a little embarrassed, because she had screamed.
“What do we do?” Kess asked. “They could really hurt us. Or maybe they just want to freak us out. Maybe we should ignore them.”
Lorraine didn’t answer. Instead she growled, loud enough for Kess to hear, and charged back outside.
Kess felt the same mental push she had days before at the restaurant. It shoved her stumbling outside even as she called out, “Don’t! Didn’t you hear me? They have range!”
The blue-haired girl let out a wordless fighter yowl and raised her right hand. Blue-white electricity flashed between her hand—one branch from the star on her palm, one from her silver fingertips—and the metal post of the basketball goal two feet away from her. She marched forward, past the goal, and tried again, but the blue lightning arc jagged up around her and over her shoulder and hit the goal again.
A rock hit the goal post with a ring of metal.
Lorraine stormed back inside with Kess behind her.
“I told you before,” said Kess. “Our lightning can’t go far horizontally. It goes to ground.”
Lorraine spun to face her. Her eyebrows were terrifying, curved and sharp like scimitars. “Why” she said, her voice all frozen venom, “would you say that to me now? Do you not understand how angry people work?”
And then the glass door shattered.
#
Rod and Connor ran through the woods at break-neck speed, though of course they had no chance of breaking their super-necks.
“No telling Priya about this, right?” yelled Connor.
“Of course not, man, I don’t do sabotage.”
That made Connor laugh—their lungs were bigger than they used to be, or stronger. “Seriously though, you shouldn’t have broken the glass.”
“They weren’t near it. Besides, it was an accident! My hand slipped.” But Rod was grinning like white fire.
###
TEXT MESSAGE CONVERSATION BETWEEN KSENYA CARPENTER AND ELIAS KAPLAN:
Ksenya: Still no super-hands of any kind?
Elias: Still no super-hands of any kind.