“You might just have to suck it up and send her a message yourself,” Rebecca told me, taking a sip of her now-regularly ordered iced coffee. According to her, it was one of the best tasting things she ever had, at least after the first two days of ordering it. She added that it was a pretty low bar the iced coffee had to clear, but it leaped over it and planted the landing with perfect tens all across the board.
“I know, you’re right.” I looked at my phone’s blank screen, still making zero progress on doing what I should have been.
A week had passed since we sat in on Lizzy’s Sunday team training. Seeing Julio and Braden get a better feel for their powers made me want to practice with Alex again, and since Lori was our leader, I was hoping she’d be involved too. I just...hadn’t really worked up the courage to text Lori to try and schedule a time to get together. I was still feeling ashamed about everything. It made it hard for me to reach out, even though I knew she’d understand. Out of all my friends, she’d understand the most. It was her power to understand what people were feeling. Still, in a lot of ways, it was easier to open up to Rebecca than it was to the woman who was already the best friend I ever had.
“This coffee stuff really is damn good,” she said, trying to shift the subject after seeing the discomfort on my face. We both already knew that I wouldn’t be able to wait forever for Lori to reach out, so there was no point in beating that dead horse, unless I still couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“We’ve been here every day for a week,” I reminded her. The two of us hanging out had become a daily thing. We’d both had bad days where our emotions got the better of us, so we were doing our best to help each other through it. For a mother who lost her daughter, I thought she was handling it remarkably well. “I’d be surprised if you were still getting it if you hate it.”
“It was an acquired taste, I’ll admit.” She took a long drink, so it really must’ve been a quickly acquired taste after a couple days. Her eyes got wide like she just remembered something. “Are there names for powers or for people with them?”
It took me a moment to realize she was talking about things like superheroes. “Not one that I know. I don’t even know what I’d name my own power.”
“Oh, well, I was reading those comic book things. I thought those would be a good place to start with some entertainment from today since, you know, we have powers. They’re colorful and they don’t give me headaches.” She stopped herself and took a deep breath. “Anyway, I was reading some and they had codenames for their identities. Some have cool names for their powers, but it’s mostly for their superhero alter egos.”
“You think we should have names?” I asked. I’d been thinking about it since there had been a handful of reports come out that people may have been using powers to fight crime. Chloe told me about a fight that was stopped on campus by someone with super strength, after she forgave me for ignoring her for a month, thankfully.
She replied with an indifferent shrug. “Just one of those things I thought about while trying to get to sleep. Doesn’t it sound fun?”
“I guess, but I still don’t know what I would call my own power. No one else can see the objects I can create. It feels like it doesn’t make sense to name something that someone else couldn’t see.”
Rebecca just stared at me like she was waiting for me to deliver a punchline. When that didn’t come, she carried on, “What are you talking about? I saw the orb that you had to use on Eric.”
“Wait, really?” I asked. I felt myself leaning over the table. “No one else had been able to see my shields. How’d you see that?”
“With my eyes, duh.” She pointed toward her glasses like she was being cute. Maybe I thought she was. Only a little bit. “I didn’t see any shields. Just the ball.”
I leaned back against the firm wood in our booth, letting what she told me settle. The shields weren’t visible, but the all-or-nothing orb attack I used was. I hadn’t shown anyone the hand or any of the other things I’d been working on. I figured they’d follow the same pattern as the shield. That was why I needed to practice with others to figure everything out. If the ball was visible, that would change how I could work my power.
Rebecca’s concerned-filled gaze was fixated on me. “Well, there’s nothing you can do about that right now. Describe your power to me. I’ll help you name it.”
I knew she was trying to keep me from getting in my own head, so I went along with her. After all, it would be neat to have a secret name if I ever needed one. “I don’t really know how to describe the things I make. They’re part of me, at least sort of. I have some sort of connection to them. I can physically feel it when they’re destroyed. It’s like a tingle in the base of my skull. If I have too many barriers destroyed in succession, I get a bad nosebleed and might black out. I was out for a week the first time it happened.”
“Give me details that don’t involve you hemorrhaging everywhere, Mr. Sunshine. Something nicer, please.”
“They’re sort of...purple-pink in color.” I made a small barrier in front of me to make sure I was remembering it right. Sure enough, the colors rolled across the barrier and shimmered in front of me. “I’ve always seen them as a slight shimmer, like it’s visually telling me it’s there.”
“That’s what I saw in the ball, so I think you’re right on that.” She stopped for a minute to tap her index finger on her chin and think. After a while, she finally came up with something. “I think Shimmer is a good name. And it’s a good name for the things you create. Shimmer-Shield, Shimmer-Hand, whatever you want.”
Shimmer. I said it in my head a few times and tried putting it into sentences, probably looking like I was a complete weirdo with how much I was moving my head around in thought. It actually fit in well and rolled off the tongue nicely. I had some concerns with it, but I didn’t have a better name to offer up in its place. “Do you think it’s cool enough?”
“Ethan, with all due respect, you may be the least cool guy I’ve ever met,” Rebecca told me gently. I didn’t take any offense to it on account of her being completely right. “That’s such a juvenile concept anyway. Seeming cool is for kids. You nearly died saving a child and a woman you just met. That’s actually cool.”
“When you put it like that, I kind of like it,” I said. I carefully took a bite of the warm pastry in front of me, having learned my lesson from the first time. I kept repeating the name, putting different inflections on it. “Shimmer. Shiiiimmer. Shimmer.”
“It might not have a hidden meaning or anything special, but it’s short and memorable. I’ll always remember when Shimmer took a beating to save my life.”
“What about you?” I asked, swallowing down my delicious baked food. Her comment left me embarrassed, but I tried to not let it show. “Have you thought about your own name?”
“Maybe a little.” Rebecca’s face went nearly as red as her hair and she suddenly had a deep interest in a small nick on the table. “I was thinking Paracusia. If I had to have one at all, that is.”
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
“What’s that mean?” I had never heard the word before, but it sounded like one of those fancy medical words that I would have trouble pronouncing if she hadn’t done it for me.
“It’s a kind of auditory hallucination,” Rebecca informed me. Her face was still red, but she wasn’t quite as reserved as she had just been. “I’ve been good at throwing people for a loop with my voice power. My voice isn’t really a hallucination or anything. Anyway, no one needs to know that part.”
“Why not a name that takes inspiration from your other power?” I finished off my pastry and took another sip of iced coffee. The warm food being washed down by the cold beverage was a refresher, and really, one of those little things I had started looking forward to each day. Even on my bad days where it was a nightmare to get to the little café, I always felt better after those treats.
“And risk giving that away?” She almost looked offended that I’d asked. “I was imprisoned for over a century and brought back here because of that power. I’m holding that one close to the vest for as long as I can. And I may have seen ‘paracusia’ in the dictionary I read before bed and thought it sounded unique.”
“You read the dictionary before bed?” I always thought people read stuff more...interesting before they went to sleep. “Like, willingly and for fun?”
Rebecca took the last bite of her own pastry and downed it with her coffee. The café was starting to get full. Some people had started to point toward us—mostly me—and were whispering. It was just paranoia when I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I had to fight every urge in my body to make sure that there was no one behind me, but we were in the corner booth, so it would have been impossible. Unless someone was hiding in the wall, which I wasn’t about to rule out.
“You guys today are very wordy,” Rebecca said. “I was well-read for my time and I have some catching up to do. I try to learn a few new words every night before I sleep. That’s how I learned what hemorrhaging is, just so you know.”
“You say we’re wordy, but I can barely follow any writing from the Civil War era.”
“Different kind of wordy. The more literate everyone became, the more English evolved in day-to-day speaking.” She seemed to notice the café fill up and how a lot of them were looking our way. Without paying them any more attention, she got up and waved for me to follow to the hallway, where we could get away from nosy eyes and ears.
“Are you going to get in touch with Lori?” she asked, idly brushing some loose hair off her shirt.
“I will when I get back home, promise. I need to see how Megan is doing too.” That kid was nothing but love and energy, so any adoptive parents shouldn’t have had any issues with taking her in. Realizing that put a pit in my stomach. I was really starting to miss having her around.
“You should look into a hobby,” Rebecca told me. She pulled out a tiny, beat-up dictionary. “Even something simple like learning a word a day has helped me a lot. Settles me down.”
“Does school count?” I asked. I knew that I needed to pick something up. I had a laptop and a TV. There was no reason for me to avoid getting drawn in by a show or movie series, and that required very little effort on my part.
Rebecca rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Find something that you genuinely enjoy, silly. If your studies are that something, then more power to you, but it should be something you have fun with during your leisure time. Anyway, I have to go. I’m a couple days behind on grocery shopping and I don’t want to eat canned raviolis for dinner again.”
She went off with a wave and I thought about what hobbies might be fun after I nearly offered to make her dinner out of reflex. I needed something that was easy to start with and didn’t require a lot of knowledge going in. I remembered that craft store that Lori took me to when she had to get something for her mother, where she had suggested I work on creating something that was meaningful to me. There was nothing else going on for me that day, so I decided to pay that crafts shop a visit again.
I didn’t remember my way to it exactly, so I had to use my navigation app for some help. With it’s help, it wasn’t long before I was standing in front of the light blue structure. One thing that was really starting to creep me out about all the shops in Luna was that there was hardly anyone walking around outside. I knew that the complex wasn’t exactly Times Square, but seeing all the shops without people nearby reminded me of those old ghost towns that were barely standing. It had to be because the structure was way bigger than needed for the number of residents.
The inside was a different story. It was nice and still filled with a bunch of little knickknacks along with the usual crafting stuff. The same kind old lady—Ms. Anne—was standing behind the cash register doing a light amount of tidying up. Looking at all the crafts around me almost made me feel overwhelmed and I had to battle the urge to run from freaking yarn that surrounded me. Rebecca was right, I definitely wasn’t the embodiment of coolness.
“Good morning, young man.” Her voice was warm and sweet. She squinted and looked me over. “You were with Lori here not too long ago. Her not-boyfriend, right?”
“Right, her not-boyfriend,” I confirmed, looking around. I figured she was going to ask if I was looking for anything, so I went ahead. “Do you have any easy hobbies for novices? Something that’s a little easy for the brain.”
“Puzzles,” she said flatly and instantly. “I always recommend puzzles as a first hobby. They look nice, and all you need is time and a table to put one together. Why not start with a three-hundred-piece one, honey?”
At first, I wasn’t so sure. A puzzle? I hadn’t done one since I was around five, and that’s the age group I had always associated puzzles with. Some warm memories with Mom, Dad, and Shelly came to mind. We all tried to complete this big puzzle, but we were all being goofs about it, even Shelly. I think it took us months of family nights to finish the thing. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I really enjoyed those silly puzzle nights. Maybe that was something I needed again. “You know what? A puzzle sounds great.”
Miss Anne guided me to the area where she kept most of the puzzles. There were a bunch of famous paintings, planets, or images that have stood the test of time. I looked at ones that were based off planes and trains with neither of them sparking much of an interest. Some of them were of those huge college football stadiums, which I thought was cool, though not what I wanted to put together as a puzzle. When I saw the one for Ohio State, I did think it’d be funny to put it together and show Chloe.
After some internal debate, I decided on a thousand-piece Starry Night one to work on with Shelly, a five-hundred-piece princess one to work on with Megan, and another thousand-piece one with an astronaut looking at a planet I couldn’t recognize. That last one was for me to work on by myself. Shelly would probably enjoy a relaxing activity and Megan would enjoy anything princess-themed, so those two felt like safe bets.
“I have some people who might want to join in, so I’ll get these three today,” I said to Ms. Anne, pulling out my wallet. Like that toy store in Missouri, everything was cheaper than I expected. She insisted that the price was correct, and it was more important that I enjoy my new hobby than worry about the price. I felt guilty about it, but her kindness disarmed me. “Thank you, Ms. Anne.”
“Of course, honey. You enjoy now!” We exchanged waves while I walked out.
I was more excited about the puzzles than I felt like I had any right to be. Now that I had them in my possession, I was already wanting to start getting to work on them. I needed to figure out how to get in contact with Megan so I could show her the princess one. I was sure she’d be pumped to work on that one. My entire walk back home was filled with thoughts of doing puzzles. It really was the silly, little things that mattered.
I opened the door to the empty apartment. As usual, Shelly was out taking care of her business, leaving some food for me in the fridge. I left the princess and Starry Night puzzles on the counter for later while keeping the astronaut one with me. I went into my room looking at the box, wondering how hard it would be to complete. Starting with the outside would be the best bet, probably.
There was a silver flash and a blade was pressed against my throat. I barely looked up in time to stop myself before I ran right into a nasty decapitation. I dropped the puzzle, and it was a weird thing to notice at the time, but it didn’t spill out of the box. My room was only dimly lit, so I couldn’t see who held their sword to my neck.
I was forcefully spun around, the blade leaving enough distance between it and my neck that I could manage to turn my head. I saw an unfortunate familiar face. Long, curly blonde hair couldn’t hide her piercing blue eyes that were sharp as the sword she held in her hand. The woman looked taller without her armor, somehow, so it felt like she towered over me. Or maybe that was just the fear of being trapped in an enclosed space with someone like her.
“I need you to listen to me and bring your leader.” Her voice was deeper than I had been expecting. Getting a better look at her, her face was pretty with sharp features. She had a Roman nose, high cheekbones, and a jawline that was as pronounced than my own. It really fit her terrifying image. “How fast can you get them here?”