After the game night, I felt like I barely had any time to knock out the things I needed for Megan’s party. Her birthday was Friday, but we all decided to have the party on Saturday, granting me that crucial extra day to prep everything I could. That was a good thing, because the morning after the whole Scrabble almost-disaster was one of my worst days since we returned with Megan and Rebecca. I got almost nothing done outside of schoolwork. The most I could hang my hat on was getting some cake designs over to Lizzy. It was a humbling reminder that whatever I had going on wasn’t necessarily gone. I just wished it could have waited a week or so to remind me of its presence.
Rebecca and I wrapped Megan’s gifts together, an activity which quickly devolved into us being goofs. Once Rebecca figured out the tape dispenser without scratching up her hand, the first thing she did was put a sliver of tape right on my nose. After that, I had to be on the lookout, because she always had another piece ready to put on my cheek, forehead, or any other patch of skin she could find. Her sneakiness could not be understated. She’d managed to put pieces of tape on my arms and hands without me noticing. We ran out of usable gift-wrapping tape for the presents because of our shenanigans, forcing us to switch to duct tape.
Then it turned out we both sucked at wrapping presents anyway. Whenever Shelly and I wrapped gifts, we would reuse bags we’d received, filling them with lots of cheap shred in the process. The shred was a nightmare to clean up, but it was one of the only times we both cut loose and tossed it around our apartment. Just when I thought I was getting the hang of cutting the paper perfectly, folding it over a box’s corner without a wrinkle, and getting the ends to line up evenly, it would always look like I gave it a few good kicks. Some of the moms at my old volunteer toy drives were very picky about their wrapping standards. I was no such mother. I spent nearly a grand on the kid, I wasn’t worried about my wrapping techniques when she’d be tearing through them like a little tornado.
The wrapping and gift-hiding were taken care of Thursday. Shelly had some gifts for her that she asked us to hide as well, so we put those everywhere we could think of. We were actually running out of spots we thought were reasonable spots for a kid to access. There were already at least three that would require one of us to lift Megan up to reach. That, or we let a seven-year-old climb up a ladder and risk serious injury. We agreed that everyone else would have their gifts on a table and that would help make it look the part. There were going to be balloons, we had a wireless speaker for whatever music Megan wanted, and if I could convince Lizzy to wear a clown costume, we’d have our own birthday clown. Well, a birthday clown besides how all of us normally acted.
Friday was testing out if Val would be welcomed and for baking the cake. Lizzy had no problems at all helping with the latter, so we got started on that early in the day. Before that, we brought Val over to the house. Megan was surprisingly receptive, and we didn’t keep the truth from her. We told her that it was the same woman who attacked us in the Tomb and the same one in the armor who had been with McLeod when he attacked Pittsburgh.
Megan had been scared and upset, so Val answered every question she had with the truth, even when I could tell it hurt Val to have to explain. As everyone expected, Megan asked Val if she had killed her parents. Val told her she didn’t, keeping in line with what she told me when I asked the same thing. I chose to believe that she really didn’t kill them—or anyone in that attack—since she hadn’t tried to hide anything from Megan prior to that. It wasn’t until after I told her that Val helped keep Rebecca and I safe that she finally agreed to have the woman at her party. Granted, it wasn’t the smoothest way in the world we could have gotten her to agree. Still, results were results.
When I finished up that daunting obstacle, it was off to Lizzy’s. She either got very fortunate with her home’s interior or she got it painted a bright pink the day we got there. Neither would have surprised me in the slightest. Her place had a girly, cozy feel to it with its pink paint and bright lights. It gave me some ideas for Megan’s room, though painting a kid’s room could backfire if they hit a phase of their life where they didn’t like that particular color anymore.
Lizzy still didn’t have all her makeup, and she had none of the great stuff that let her take full advantage of her powers. She drew a little birthday cake on my cheek, saying it was going to give me a cake-baking Anomaly. When I frowned at her, thinking it was just an excuse for her to draw on me, she insisted it would help. It wasn’t just limited to knowing how to prep it. I knew exactly how long to keep it in the oven, the perfect temperature, and right when to start decorating it. Hell, I even knew how to place it in the oven to get the most efficient temperature distribution in it. It was exactly as natural as using my Shimmer powers.
Lizzy’s power didn’t work on herself at all, so she left me there to do most of the work. It was a white and blue triple-chocolate cake, and the white part let me go nuts with just about anything. Instead of trying to make some weirdly elaborate design, I put down little drawings of everyone that Megan had seen with me up until that moment. Her, myself, Lori, Alex, Rebecca, Lizzy, Shelly, Rosie, and I even put Chloe and Ryan in at the end. The top was finished off with a fancy-looking “Happy Seventh Birthday, Megan!” in blue. Even though it wasn’t my own baking skill that created it, I was so happy and proud with how it turned out. So much so that I didn’t even notice that Lizzy didn’t even do anything outside of giving me the desired flavor and the Anomaly boost until I had the cake back home and in the fridge. I reconciled that with the fact that without her Anomaly’s help, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything but stand there like an idiot to begin with. That had to have made us even.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“I’m so nervous about tomorrow,” I said to Rebecca, both of us looking up at the ceiling from our bed. Sharing that had become less of an issue for me to deal with. In fact, I was realizing how much I’d enjoyed her presence when I’d slept. She’d always throw her arm over me when she was done winding down, and to be completely honest, I never felt safer or more secure in my life. I guess her hauling my useless body away from superpowered monsters would make me feel pretty safe when I was around her.
“It’ll be fine. Everything is shaping up to go perfectly. Her gifts are hidden, there’s no rain in the forecast, the cake is ready, and we got everyone we could think of invited over.” She did her nightly arm fling and let out a soft yawn. Her arm was never as heavy as I expected. “You did such a great job on the cake and the weather is going to be beautiful.”
“Thanks, but you guys helping me out with everything is else is the only reason that cake got done.” I was starting to settle down with her soothing presence there before I went stiff. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. “What if it all goes wrong? What if we get some freak March storm? The weather out here can get real nasty this time of year.”
“Then we figure it out if it comes to that, sweetheart.” She gently patted my chest. I could tell sleep was starting to win out against her want to talk. “It’ll be fun, I promise. Megan’s going to have a blast. We all are.”
I placed my hand over hers, shifting myself into an uncomfortable position to do so. I needed something new to look at. The ceiling could only stimulate my vision so much. At least she helped distract me from how nervous I felt about the whole party. She was right, we had planned everything down nicely, and it wasn’t going to be a big affair. Everyone was fond of Megan. She was beyond the best kid I’d ever seen. It was just my paranoia that was making my imagination run wild. The biggest issue that really cast a shadow over the event, and its prep, was that we had no one Megan’s age we could invite. I got Chloe to agree to a video chat so her little brother, Ryan, could talk to Megan.
After a few minutes, sleep finally came for Rebecca in full and she pulled her arm back to her side. She had to wrestle her hand free from my grip and I was pretty sure she mumbled something about me being greedy in her sleep. Funnily enough, my sleep-thrashing issues seemed to die down with Rebecca by my side, so I debated on just trying to hit the sack myself. I was starting to think that guys never really grew into wisdom and calmness, but they just found people that relaxed them simply by being near their side.
It took me three minutes of trying to get relaxed before I realized I wasn’t anywhere close to sleep yet. Galaxies away from it, even. On my nightstand were a few comics that Rebecca had been really enthusiastic about. She still hadn’t quite taken to the “moving pictures”. Most of them caused motion sickness for her, so she stuck to the pictures that stayed nice and still. To her, they were everything great about the colorful entertainment of current times without the difficulty of trying to follow so many moving parts. She was so engrossed reading them that it took me a few tries to pry her attention away long enough to ask her what she wanted for dinner. Still, it was absolutely cute to see her have so much fun with it. She specifically left the first few volumes on my side so I could give it a try.
“The Prowling Monkeyflip,” I whispered, not quite sure I was digging the title. Rebecca stirred again, so I kept my mouth shut, even though she was a heavy sleeper. The title was stupid, and he was a brand-new character, so he didn’t slot in with my limited knowledge of comic books. At least that meant I didn’t have to deal with half a century of clashing continuities, multiverses, and reboots that fundamentally changed the character.
My name is Xavier Connors, but you can call me The Prowling Monkeyflip. That’s what everyone else in Might City does. All right, so he liked to have “The” as part of his name. I could respect that, even if it was tooting his own horn a smidge. Like the overall name of the character, I wasn’t exactly sold on the city name either. And I was blessed with the gift of supreme acrobatics from the bite of a radioactive gymnast. Nah, I’m just kidding. I was born with these powers, but I don’t know why. One of nature’s great mysteries.
The guy’s powers really were just that: enhanced acrobatic ability. He had some minimal combat training, so he would use that and his gymnast prowess to stop street crime for the most part. When the story upped the ante a little, he’d have to use his cunning to help defeat a villain with seriously strong and dangerous powers. It was a fun enough story, and when I saw that he was a single dad with a young daughter, that’s when I started to see why Rebecca was drawn to it. Xavier had long blond hair and blue eyes too, funnily enough. I looked over at my sleeping girlfriend, grinning at her from the coincidence.
I made it to the end of the first—and only—volume when my eyes started to feel heavy. The Prowling Monkeyflip defeated his nemesis for good, at least until the writers needed an edgy reboot or they worked a contrived reason out to bring back the supreme villain, and threw her in prison. In a bit of a twist, she wasn’t just a complete dark reflection of The Prowling Monkeyflip’s personality or powers. Going by Scorched Earth, she had fire-based powers, was a middle-aged small business owner, and had three kids she took care of. That was the only similarity between her and her foe. When he learned of her secret identity, he tried to reason with her. Sadly, not even his pleading to put her criminal life aside and be with her children was enough to stop Scorched Earth.
After gently placing the book down, I rolled over and looked at Rebecca. Reading a new word each night wasn’t really for me, not with how much reading I had to do for school, but the comic I could enjoy. I kept grinning at my sleeping girlfriend. Being interested in her interests was something I was really hoping for, and that gave us something in common. She had wanted to tell me about the storyline for the past few days, but she didn’t want to spoil it for me. It was a comic, so I had a rough idea of how it would go, but I wasn’t going to burst her bubble with something that was brand new to her.
Knowing we had something new to talk about helped ease me to sleep, and more importantly, helped me not have nightmares about the upcoming party. It was Megan’s day and I had no right to be more worked up about it than her.