“Ethan, are you sure you’re okay with me doing this?” Lizzy held up a little curved needle, some thread, and what appeared to be a dull pair of scissors. “If you have to get surgery on any of this, they’ll just have to reopen them again. And I promise, this will hurt. A lot. I don’t have any anesthetic for you.”
“Let’s get it over with,” I said before I could talk myself out of it. “I trust you.”
When Lizzy had taken us to a Luna safehouse—one that looked like a shoddy car shop—I hadn’t been expecting her to ask to stitch me up. When we arrived, I called Shelly and let her know what happened. It felt like most of the tension between us had disappeared. I still promised myself I’d apologize in person the first chance I could. I didn’t spare any details, assured her I was okay, and we both took a few seconds of silence to process everything. When I hung up, that was when Lizzy showed me the needle.
I wish that I could pretend I was tough about the whole thing. I knew it would hurt, but on top of the injuries themselves, it was almost too much for me. I kept still as best I could, but I whimpered like a kicked puppy. She wasn’t even halfway through the smallest cut on my body before tears tried to form from the pain. Exhaustion and stress didn’t help, but even without those, there was no chance it would have been anything but a miserable experience.
“Oh no, please don’t cry.” Lizzy sounded like a worried mother and stopped suturing me. “I don’t know if I can keep doing this.”
“You’re doing great. It just hurts. We knew that, right? You said it was going to.” If she just had to watch a person she considered a friend get killed and kill someone herself, I wasn’t going to have her stop just because I wasn’t comfortable.
It didn’t end up taking nearly as long as I thought it would. For some reason, I was imagining a near-surgical process, where I’d be there for hours upon hours while she fixed up my entire body. Granted, with the pain, I did lose track of time somewhat. But it couldn’t have been more than an hour when she wrapped everything up.
“I’ve only ever practiced with an at-home suture kit,” she admitted, putting everything away. “You’ll need a healer or a real doctor when we get back home. They’ll be able to fix you up to avoid infection, but this should hopefully hold you together.”
“Thanks,” I said, wiping my face with my right hand. It came away covered in sweat. Looking at the stitched-up wound on my left hand made me feel a little woozy. “You seriously learned this from just a practice kit? That’s impressive.”
Her face went a little red. “No, I watched videos online. I thought it would be cool to try. Didn’t think it’d come in handy quite like this. I’ll let Rebecca know just how brave you were for me.”
“Thanks. Maybe she’ll give me some candy and a sticker for being such a brave boy at the doctor's office.” I chuckled, still using Shimmer objects to help me move around.
“I mean it. Not just with the stitches, but before. You’ve put your body on the line to keep people in the past nine months than most people have in their entire lives.” Lizzy sat by my right and let out a deep, shaky breath. “Really, thank you.”
I nodded and looked down, not saying anything. I counted the stitches I could see, but quickly lost count of them all. I looked at the gross scar that looked even worse after being sutured back together. I touched my right eye and winced at the pain it was already causing me. All those wounds and scars, all the constant pain, and for what? I didn’t feel like I saved anyone. Julio had to be dead, I just knew he had to be. We were forced out of our old home by McLeod. Hell, even Robert had died. Being brave and getting hurt was one thing, but I wasn’t feeling great with this hero stuff.
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t save him. I...I don’t think I’m cut out for this.” I balled my hands into fists and stared at the floor. “Everyone still keeps getting hurt or keeps dying, and I don’t know what I can do to stop it. I’ve gotten stronger. I have the resolve. I don’t freeze up when things get dangerous. But I don’t know if I have what it takes to do this. It feels like it's all too much for me.”
Lizzy put her arm around my shoulders and pulled me in. I matched the gesture, letting her carefully lean her head against my chest. “You can’t save everyone. Sometimes that means your friends. Julio made his choice, and maybe things would have turned out differently if he hadn’t made that choice. He still made it, now we’re here. In the end, he still died trying to keep us safe. You can’t always save people from themselves. If you don’t want to keep doing this, that’s your choice. If you decide to call it quits, I want you to know that you’ve done a lot of good. I bet all those people at the concert are happy they get to hug their family and friends again.”
“Thanks. Sometimes I can get in my own head.”
“You’re still young. You’ll have time to figure this stuff out.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re barely older than me. Like, a year at max. Speaking of you, how’re you doing?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Julio was always a little difficult to deal with. He was a little cocky, brash, and so sure of himself. The typical attitude I’d expect from a teenage boy who knew he had superpowers. I didn’t want him to die for one mistake. He was just a kid, and even though his parents signed off on him coming while knowing the dangers, I’m not sure what to do. I’m going to have to face his parents and tell them that I’m the reason he didn’t come home.”
“Don’t do that to yourself.” I gently squeezed her shoulder. For such a tall lady, she seemed very small in my grip. “You said yourself you can’t save everyone from their own choices. Thank you for having my back. I’m sorry about what you had to do.”
A choked laugh escaped her. “I got lucky that someone brought a bat with them. Maybe they caught the concert on the way back from baseball practice.”
After a few seconds of silence, Lizzy took a shaky breath. “Do you...do you mind if I just vent to you a bit? Your sister wanted to make sure everything at the concert hall was taken care of and she said she’d send people over to get Francine, so I figure we have a little while to wait before we can hit the road.”
If the mood had been lighter, I would have told her it was a stupid question. The way I considered it, none of my friends needed to ask about venting to me. They were all people I thought of as extended family. If I wasn’t going to make Shelly ask for permission to get something off her chest, I wasn’t going to do it for the girl with her head on my chest who desperately needed a hug.
“Of course. I know you have Rosie, but if you ever just need someone to yell at, you can call me any time.” Some of the tension in her shoulders left when I said that.
“Thanks. I haven’t told anyone the full extent of this, not even Rosie, but today has shown me that we don’t always have as much time as we think. If something were to happen to me, I want one person to know about me.” She took a shaky breath and let it out. “One thing that’s tearing me up the most about Julio is that I think kids should be protected. I was hesitant to bring him with us in the first place. I thought I could do enough to keep him safe and let him see what the world is like for us when we’re out on assignments.”
She stopped to let her body shake with a few silent sobs. I gave her as much time as she needed, squeezing her shoulder in support while she wiped away tears from her face.
“And the obvious reason for that is because kids are inherently vulnerable and should be protected. When I was his age, I was bullied a lot, and it fucking sucked. I wasn’t as confident then as I am now. I know you’ve seen how mean some kids can be in high school.”
“Wait, you were bullied? I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I never would have guessed. You’re so much fun and you’re such a pretty person. People who look and act like you didn’t get bothered too much in my school. They were usually the most popular ones there.”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“Oh yeah, people get picked on for anything. Tall, short, thin, heavy, big boobs, small boobs, curves, or no curves. I promise you girls will get picked on for anything physical. Hell, boys will too, but this one’s about me, so we’re not talking about boys today. I know that I look good, and I was even a cute kid, but bullies just zeroed in on my lack of confidence. Name-calling, taunting, teasing, isolation, ostracism, and whatever else you could think of. I would get pushed and my hair pulled sometimes. Nothing too physical. That damn balance beam did more damage to my body than any of my bullies did. That was about the extent of how nice it got. To be honest, it wasn’t until I was out of high school that I started to make friends. Even now, you and Rosie are probably my best friends.”
“I’m happy to hear you think so much of me. I wish I could say I would have been able to stand up to those bullies for you.” The soft laugh from her helped ease the tiniest amount of tension.
“Because of that, I started looking for validation on social media. I could be mostly anonymous, I didn’t have to worry about in-person social pressures, and I could really control how much I let people know about me. For a while, it worked. People were nice to me, I felt like I had friends, and I felt like I had a group of people that I belonged with. Some of them were younger, a few of them were older, some were girls, and most were guys. I was so enamored with being accepted, that I would talk to anyone who’d give me the time of day.
“Eventually, that turned into men over twice my age asking inappropriate questions. I had posted a few regular selfies in private groups. They were just selfies of me in normal clothes like T-shirts and pajama pants. Those older guys would start asking me things like what my bra size was, as if they’d actually know what any combination of numbers and letters I gave meant, trying to casually cover it up as something normal. Some of them had daughters my age and I knew it was strange. Something in my gut told me those questions were wrong. But these were the only people outside of my family that showed me any kind of affection.”
“That’s disgusting.” I remembered how Rebecca was worried about the age difference between us, two adults close in age, and found myself getting angry. Lizzy was right, kids did need the protection of adults. They didn’t need adults asking inappropriate questions when they were looking for affection and acceptance.
“It wasn’t just that. They asked me what color panties I was wearing, what kind of panties I owned and liked, if I had sex, if I masturbated, if I had adult toys, what positions I liked, and I’m sure other stuff that didn’t stick with me as much.” She tensed up again. “You’re squeezing me a bit hard there, big guy.”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” I loosened my grip and went a little red. “I was getting mad and I didn’t notice. Sorry.”
“It’s okay, that’s just the protective caveman in you.” She patted my hand and continued. “I know that got you a little steamed. Stop and imagine it a little. Think about if Megan was fifteen years old and someone who’s forty-five asked her what her bra size is and what color panties she has on.”
I took care not to squeeze her shoulder, but I did grit my teeth. “For his sake, I’d hope he wouldn’t be in the same room as me.”
“Exactly! That’s how normal guys think and react when they hear about middle-aged men asking sexually inappropriate questions to teenage girls.” Lizzy sighed and cleared her throat. “But I...I would answer their questions. I wasn’t comfortable with it, and I think they knew that. There’s no way they didn’t know. I was just so desperate to keep those ‘friendships’, I was scared I’d be ostracized there too.”
She tensed up again and took another shaky breath, thankfully not from me gripping her shoulder too hard. “When I was sixteen, it escalated to where they would ask me for pictures of me in my underwear. I had a lot of issues with how I thought I looked, which I did mention to these people. The girls were almost completely supportive. Having dealt with that on their own, a lot of them understood how I felt. Hell, most of the guys around my age were pretty supportive too, like how I imagine you would have been if we’d known each other at the time. But these gross older men would be the ones to ask me to post full pictures of me in my underwear. They said it’d ‘help with my body confidence’ like they were secretly doing it for my benefit.
“And I did do it. They would ask, and being a stupid teenager, I would send them pictures of me half-naked. I should have known that they weren’t doing it for my body confidence. They just picked me because I was vulnerable, young, and insecure, the perfect combination for those scumbags. This might be a big shocker, but it didn’t make me feel any better about how I looked. It made me feel worse because people were seeing this body I thought was ugly.”
I was getting so angry imagining it. I imagined the other ladies I loved in my life dealing with this. Had people behaved the same way with Shelly? She wasn’t much older than Lizzy. Would people do the same thing with Megan when she was in high school? Had they done the same with Lori? It all just made me so infuriated, and I felt sick to my stomach.
“Around that time, I loved to go to a local coffee shop by my house. They had the best pastries ever. It turned out there was a creep there who learned when I would show up, and he started to record videos of me. He’d get behind me and record up my skirt if I was wearing one. If I wore leggings or yoga pants, he’d record right on my ass. It didn’t matter, not really. If I was there, his camera was rolling.”
She started shaking a little and had to wipe away tears that fell from her face. I sat there silently and let her take as long as she needed before she was ready to continue. Lizzy was such a sweetheart. I couldn’t believe that she had dealt with such vile people before we met. I couldn’t believe how she ended up so sweet after what she dealt with.
“One day, I ended up catching him recording up my skirt. After that, I was too scared to wear them anymore. That may have been a small blessing because I was terrible about keeping my legs closed when sitting in them, so skirts just weren’t really for me anyway.” She stopped to have a little chuckle. “Sorry, back on track. I caught him recording me, I asked him why he was doing that, and he immediately broke down in a massive panic. He showed me the site where he uploaded all of them too. I nearly puked right there in the coffee shop.”
“What happened after that?”
“Well, he showed me just how many videos he uploaded. I swear, I hadn’t even been to that coffee shop that many times. The comments were revolting. Awful sexual comments, talking about my underwear, my VPL, my ass, and ‘how bad I wanted it’ for how I dressed. I started to freak out and a cop happened to be there. What happened to the guy after that, I don’t know for sure. I’m guessing he at least got arrested. After that, I stopped wearing skirts entirely. If I wear leggings or yoga pants out in public, I always wear shorts over them. Honestly, you and Braden are the only boys I’m comfortable enough with to wear them around without anything else covering them. That outfit I wore when you came by my place wouldn’t be one I wear outside the house. I had to talk myself up to wearing that swimsuit on the day we first met.”
“Oh, Lizzy. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to say anything. You’re doing a perfect job just listening and being here for me.” She wiped more tears away and gave a weak smile. “After that, I stopped playing into those old perverts’ games. Whenever they talked about me in an inappropriate way, I told them they didn’t have the right to talk to me like that anymore.”
“How’d they take it?”
“Oh, they got all defensive, acting like they were just trying to help me out the whole time. They would complain to the other girls there, acting like they were the victims. These grown men crying to teenage girls because another teenage girl told them to stop asking to see her in her underwear.” Lizzy shook her head. “Eventually, I distanced myself from that group. In a way, they did help me realize my value, but it was because they were weirdos grooming kids and I learned that I deserved better than being treated that way. One day, I looked in the mirror, and I told myself that there was more for me in this world than what I’d been dealing with. Every day, I told myself that. Whenever people bullied me, I told myself that I was meant for better things. Legitimately, just a few weeks later, I discovered my Anomaly.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yep. My sister had had a dance coming up and she wasn’t very good at putting on makeup. I’d been practicing for a couple of years at that point, so I was pretty good at it. I focused on making her makeup barely noticeable, and she nearly turned invisible. She was my test subject while I figured out exactly what I could do. Without her help, I probably wouldn’t be here, but my life took a huge turn in a better direction after that. I’m here now, for better and worse.”
I pulled her in for a tight hug, ignoring the pain it caused me.
“Wait, why do you look like the one who wants to cry?” she asked, baffled.
“Because your story is so sad. You went through so much and you’re still so strong.” After all the stress, pain, and anger from hearing her life story, I just couldn’t help getting emotional myself. “I’m glad you’re my friend.”
“Oh jeez, you’re worse than I was when I was on painkillers after getting my wisdom teeth removed.” She returned the hug in full though. “You’re a good guy. If something happens to me, I’m glad you know why I’m here, and why I think us adults should be protecting these kiddos. It’s not just from this world of Anomalies, but from the normal world too. You better take care of Megan and make sure she can come to you with anything she needs, got it?”
“You got it.” I sniffled and pulled back, staring up at the ceiling. “Thank you for trusting me with that. I’m going to make sure she’s safe. I won’t let that same stuff happen to her.”
“Then I’m happy to have told you.” She smiled. There was a buzz at the door of the fake car shop we were waiting in. Lizzy sighed. “Looks like it’s time to get this mess cleaned up.”