And there was Woolworth’s. The venerable “five and dime” store, long an American institution. It was, Charlie thought, like what McDonald’s was becoming, or CBS, or the PLATOnet terminals she’d seen last time they’d visited the University. But it was older, and whether or not it was dying she still liked it here. You could, if you were so inclined – and she was – grab a cold RC Cola out of the fridge and read a comic book. Maybe two or three, before you had to pay for them.

Dying. Old. Fading. These were things she’d never thought of, and it was her childhood teddy bear who had put them into her head. Silently she paid for her cola, and silently she stood alone with her thoughts, not even reaching out a hand to rifle through the racks and look for the latest Doom Patrol. Not yet.

She’d told herself she was here to clear her head, but she found herself fulminating, boiling over with all of the things the last few hours had brought. Magic – real! Not just a thing for girls to play pretend with. Not some trippy diversion. A loaded gun in her hand, just like Robin’s Model 19. What did that mean, though, for magic to be real? You did not often see a Magical Girl doing her thing, whatever that looked like – and it looked like Robin, didn’t it? She’d seen it. A teenage girl in a gunfight was not an everyday sight.

Stories were magic, she supposed. The first stories certainly had been. Gilgamesh, Odysseus, David – their stories made her feel things. They were also all boys. Had they been magical girls, despite that? Was that even possible?

She squeezed Bentley, in her pocket. He was lying to her, she was fairly sure. Scooter might be lying to Robin, too. That was a worry for another day, though. Because it had occurred to her that this business of “magical girls” was just a little…hm, what was the term. Sketchy?

Because, you see. History didn’t hinge on teenage girls. That was not even a little true. Anyone who told you it did probably had a weird fetish, or something wrong with their brain otherwise. It was beginning to hinge on women, a little. But that was going to take time. History didn’t really hinge on Great Men, either. People said it did, but it didn’t. Stories did. The stories that had already been told, that got retold, that influenced new stories. Look at David and Bathsheba, John and Yoko. People wore stories out.

This was, she thought, her real problem. If what Bentley had said about the changes only happening after you weren’t around anymore was true, then her story would wear her out. Nobody would ever tell it right. That would be why history didn’t hinge on girls like her. It might, really, but it didn’t appear to. It never could. You could only tell that, maybe, something huge had been through your part of the world in the distant past. Like Paul Bunyan and his axe –

And there she went with stories that boys were the heroes of, again. It was inescapable. She couldn’t even think her own thoughts for five minutes without them. Bentley was almost certainly either confused or leaving out something important. But she wouldn’t want to be a talking teddy bear in a busy Woolworth’s, either. She didn’t actually blame him, this time.

Another question. Head boiling, steam coming out of ears. She hadn’t figured on how angry she’d been lately. This was making it all come out, all kinds of feelings, all kinds of energies. What Bentley had done had popped so many questions you could run a moon rocket off them. And this one – if stories were magic, if she was a story now: was the magic in the telling, or in the ending? If it was in the ending, she could live with that, she guessed, but she wouldn’t be around to see it.

This was the real issue, the sticking point that kept her from hearing Bentley out fully even though he was a magical talking bear and they were contracted, somehow. He had explained to her, it seemed, the meaning of life: that you fight and die, and people remember you afterwards. She was not ready for this knowledge, really, not even a little bit. The idea that she didn’t get to decide, even if she did – even if her wish shaped worlds, no one would know – it didn’t sit well with her. Wasn’t fair. She wanted to enjoy her success, have her cake and eat it too.

Was that what he meant by living well? Was that about like, great deeds? Many scalps, or a lot of cattle, or – vulgar male shit like that, right? – was that all it was? If she had many cows she would write much history? Did the tantalizing dream of the puella potentia reduce merely to the Sanskrit word for war, “the desire for more cows”? Or was it about meaning well? Intent couldn’t be the only factor. After all, the last thirty years of history showed full well where intentions lead. Intentions, Charlie thought, were a kind of evil all their own. Or, a third possibilty: was the entire goal of her life now to set a stage for the ending? A great suborbital trajectory, leading to a fiery swan dive?

Bentley hadn’t told her any of these answers. He was a teddy bear, after all. He spoke in fortune cookies and storybook nonsense. She was a girl. A real, human girl. She could figure it out.

It all made her think of the Apollo 4 guys. They’d been supposed to be the first humans on the moon, and now they were in danger. Deadly danger. She didn’t even know what kind. Hell, if it had been sudden they might not even have known. How did they feel? Did they have time to feel, like she did? Did test pilots have feelings like girls did? She wanted to think they did, that it wasn’t all equations and vein-ice and what-not. How were they dealing with a stomach-churning revelation that the rest of their lives weren’t going to go as planned, and might be very short? Were they the only people that happened to? Test pilots and Charlie? Or was that just some kind of “growing up”?

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

It was like someone gave you a test in school, except the questions were all blank, so were the answers, and you seemed to get scored on how you felt about it, she thought. That was life. They had that in common.

She didn’t want Doom Patrol comics today. She was the Doom Patrol. This was all very morose. The Apollo 4 guys would be focusing on their problems, right now. She should do that too. But she had so many – and they were all the same one: little thing about four foot nine, red hair, blue eyes, name of Charlie Foxtrot. Have you seen her? Hell of a mess, that girl. Doesn’t even know the meaning of life. She laughed, and decided to distract herself some more. “Mendez,” she called to the boy behind the counter. His name was Jose, but everyone called him by his last name. “Turn on the radio, see what’s up with the Apollo mission.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I heard them guys were in troooouble~” he dragged this last out in a sing-song lilt. He didn’t mean anything by it, Charlie knew. It was just how he talked. Mendez thought everything was funny. Or maybe he decided it had to be? She was thinking deeper now. Mendez followed the same narrative rules, then, that she did. There weren’t separate sets for boys and girls, that was silly.

Mockery was a weak kind of courage, and not Charlie’s speed. She nodded absently as Mendez did whatever he needed to do, and one of the local AM stations finally crackled to life. “-- an explosion in the service module, during a routine operation involving stirring the liquid oxygen tanks, has resulted in what NASA is calling a ‘free return abort’. Emergency measures are being taken to use lunar module Eagle as a lifeboat, and Armstrong and Muldoon will not be walking on the Moon as planned. The important thing is the survival of all three members of the crew, still uncertain. NASA’s efforts are focused entirely on this. More updates as we have them, here at –” Mendez switched the radio off.

“There you go. Another Coke?”

She shook her head. “They’ll be fine. They’ll have to be.”

Mendez nodded. “I know how important the space stuff is to you, kid. Say hi to your Mom for me.”

She nodded in reply. Then, without a word, she turned and headed home. Her legs felt heavy, and her head was now cottony with worry. She was too tired to boil. What good was power, if she couldn’t save people she cared about, even if they didn’t know or care about her? What good was power, if she couldn’t be a little selfish and enjoy it now?

Maybe the Apollo 4 astronauts were having the same thoughts. On the one hand: what good is all this training if I can’t fly my way out of a jam? And on the other: down there, on the good earth, it must feel to some teenage girl like she has bigger problems than we do.

Maybe, Charlie thought, they were all in this together, even if there was nothing anybody could do about “this”. Maybe if Bentley wasn’t right about girls like her, she could find a way to prove him right. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe the important thing was to just get through the day, get home and get to sleep. She really was tired. It had been a long day.

The feeling of a nearby enemy had faded, anyway. The world was bigger than her beef with herself, which is what it really amounted to, metaphysics aside, and being out in it had reminded her of that. It was just the anxiety that fueled her night terrors, seeping into waking life. Some kind of frantic puberty business, to be sure. “Are you there, Bentley? It’s me, Charlie.” Had she said that aloud? Aw, hell.

“Very droll of you,” he growled. He stuck a paw out of her jacket pocket, and she squeezed it gently. Then, avoiding a spectacle, she picked him up and held him in both arms like a baby. She knelt down to kiss his forehead, to which he growled wordlessly. “This is undignified,” he said.

“‘Course it is. That’s the whole point.” She grinned.

They came to a busy intersection. Charlie had navigated it many times, with no trouble, but it was particularly busy today. She could see, on the other side of the street, not near the crosswalk at all, a girl about her age. Probably trying to jaywalk.

“Bear witness,” Bentley said, a tone of hushed urgency in his voice.

“To what?”

“Another like you.”

The girl began to run, trying to beat the cars in front of her. She had plenty of room, Charlie figured, if she kept her pace, and if –

Nothing happened –

Time slowed. Her stomach lurched and knotted, cold with horror, as –

Something happened –

A fire engine had not turned on its sirens yet, after it pulled out from the station, just down the street. It was proceeding at an incredible speed, come what may, into the intersection. WIth a stoplight it was good to go, but the girl was “come what may”, and –

She looked away, feeling sick. The truck kept going, finally coming to a stop. Her throat burned. Her eyes were watering. She wasn’t sure if she ought to be sick or furious, or both, but she was – oh god, she was –

The firemen stopped and tried to help. One bent down to offer CPR, but gave up once he saw the abstract sculpture the girl had become. There was nothing for it.

There was nothing for Charlie, either. Her stomach cold with horror, she ran. Taking a long route around the block, anything to avoid being useless and feeling useless to the now-dead girl –

“One like me?” She finally found the words. Her fingernails dug into Bentley’s rotten hide.

“Yes,” he said, sounding as if he was in pain. “Annelise Rosenberg, puella actualis. Whatever she wanted, she got.”

“But that’s so fucking senseless, Bentley!”

His voice was a hiss, and the static was more prominent. “Can you live with that?”

She didn’t answer.