Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women (6 page)

Nina gestures at Stuart. Enigma shrugs off her leather jacket, then slides in next to Mindforce to take in Stuart’s injuries. Eager to impress, he chokes back the pain and offers his best roguish smile.

“Hey. How you doin’?”

“Hey there, cutey,” Enigma says. “And what happened to you, hmm?”

“Injured in the line of duty,” Stuart says. “Protecting the public. Fighting the good fight. You know how it goes.”

“Oh, please,” Concorde mutters.

“Pay no attention to him,” Enigma says. “I don’t.”

“Stuart’s invulnerable,” Mindforce says.

“Uh-huh,” Enigma says, her curiosity piqued. “Someone want to tell me who or what did this to him?”

“He got burned,” Matt says, his eye glazed over in adolescent lust. I can’t blame him, honestly, but come on.

“He was blasted by a woman who shot impossibly hot fire from her hands,” I say, and Enigma shoots me a hard look.

“Fire from her hands?” she says. “You’re positive?”

“I’m positive. Not the kind of thing you see every day.”

“Shoulder-length brunette hair, by any chance? Little on the chunky side?”

“No, blonde and slim.”

“Son of a...” Enigma says, mumbling something under her breath I can’t quite make out, something that sounds like “jumped hosts.”

“Then we
are
dealing with someone or something supernatural?” Mindforce says.

“The evidence doesn’t lie. Sorry to break it to you,” she says to Stuart, “but physical invulnerability doesn’t count for jack against magic.”

“And you know who did this?” Concorde says.

“Oh yeah.”

“Suggestions?”

“I want to check a few things first.”

“Make it quick. She’s still on the loose.”

“Ask me nicely.”

“This is part of your job.”

“No, it actually isn’t,” Enigma says with the sunniest of smiles, “so until it’s your name on the bottom of my paycheck, you do not order, you
ask
.”

“...Please, put a rush on this,” Concorde says.

“I will do my best. In the meantime,” she says to Stuart, “apply holy water three times a day until the blisters fade. It’ll help with the pain and speed up healing.”

“Uh...seriously?” he says, but there’s no mistaking her tone; she is not joking.

SIX

It took us until Sunday to get around to gaming, and by then none of us were up for anything too involved; instead of our planned daylong
Arkham Horror
game, we played traditional board games with some decidedly non-traditional house rules. In
Monopoly
, for example, rolling double sixes causes Godzilla to roam the board, destroying houses and hotels.

Matt’s invention, of course. Don’t get me started on how the kid likes to play
Clue
.

School resumed on Monday with its usual post-Christmas vacation mix of quiet resignation, and that weird high that comes with starting a new year. It’s all psychological, I know, but there is with each January first an undeniable sense of renewal that invigorates the soul. Everyone’s like,
All that crap I dealt with last year? So done with it. Everything I never got around to doing? I’m going to do it, this time for sure!

For me, that attitude is usually dead by the middle of the month — and yet, I want to believe this year will in fact be different, better, less strange. No traumatic family issues, no personal upheavals, no near-death experiences at the hands of a murderous mercenary — nothing but puppies and sunshine for the next 362 days.

This time for sure.

“Did you make any New Year’s resolutions?” I ask Sara as I finish transferring my books from my locker into my backpack. God, this thing’s heavy. Mountain climbers tackling Everest probably carry less on their backs.

“I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions,” Sara says. “If I wanted to improve myself, why should I wait until the first of the year? Besides, I’m half-Jewish; my New Year was, like, three months ago. Heads up, authority figure coming.”

By which she means Mr. Dent, the assistant principal, who’s coming straight at me with a businesslike look on his face. “Carrie, good, there you are,” he says.

“Here I am. What’s up?”

“Mrs. Zylinski would like to see you after homeroom.”

I rack my brain to match a title to the name and come up blank. “Mrs. Zylinski?”

“Guidance counselor,” Sara says.

“Ah. Okay. Sure. No problem.”

Mr. Dent smiles, nods, then dashes off to perform other assistant principally duties.

“Wonder why Mrs. Zylinski wants to see me?”

“It’s nothing big,” Sara says. “Every sophomore gets called in at some point to talk about their future plans. You know, what you want to do for a career, where you want to go to college, blah blah.”

“Oh, okay. Did you have your conference already?”

“Yeah, few months ago.”

“And?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I’m not really interested in much of anything I could turn into a career.”

“No, not true. You love to sing and dance, you’re into musical theater, you could go to school for that.”

“A theater degree?” Sara scoffs. “Might as well quit school and start waitressing right now.”

The first bell rings and, after checking in at homeroom, I head to the guidance office and meet Mrs. Zylinski, a heavy-set woman in a sweater one could charitably describe as festive (and, uncharitably, as a visual interpretation of an acid trip). She leads me into her office, shuts the door, sits at her desk, and makes a bit of a show of flipping open a file folder with my name on it.

“Sorry to call you in so abruptly,” she says without looking up from the paperwork she’s pretending to read. “You should have been scheduled for a meeting with me last month, but you got lost in the shuffle because you transferred in after the start of the school year.”

“Bureaucracy,” I say. “Whatcha gonna do?”

She gives me a thin smile. “Hm. Yes. So. Carrie. Let’s talk about your future.”

“Okay.”

“Kingsport High is very involved in helping students realize their full potential, and that involves looking ahead to life after graduation,” Mrs. Z says. It doesn’t sound
entirely
rehearsed. “I know you might think now that you’re too young to plan for college and a career, but believe me, graduation day sneaks up on you.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me, where do you see yourself after high school?”

Good question. I don’t have a good answer. Considering my unusual side interests, I first see myself alive and in one piece, but that’s not what Mrs. Z wants to hear.

“I haven’t thought about it,” I confess.

Mrs. Z quirks an eyebrow at me. She sighs through her nose, flips through a couple of pages in my file. “According to your academic records, you were a solid A student throughout elementary school, and then in eighth grade your performance took a bit of a downturn.”

A downturn? Try a nosedive, Mrs. Z.

“Yeah, I, uh, I guess you could say I fell in with a bad crowd,” I say. “Nothing serious, it wasn’t like I was spending all my time drunk or stoned or anything stupid like that. I started hanging around people who didn’t much care about school, and I let them drag me down, but that stuff, that’s all in my rear-view mirror. I’m all about turning things around and getting back on track, academically speaking.”

There’s a pair of turtle shell-frame glasses nested in Mrs. Z’s hair. She plucks them out, makes as if she’s going to slide them on, then places them on the desk and folds her hands. Her face is very serious. It’s Lecture Time.

“Carrie, you have potential. Your little...academic detour aside,” Mrs. Zylinski says, tapping a finger on my file, “you’re clearly a very intelligent young woman, and I’ve heard nothing but praise from your teachers. I’m surprised and, frankly, disappointed you don’t have a plan for the rest of your life.”

“Life has a habit of not playing along with my plans,” I say, and that gets a smile.

“Life is what happens in-between the plans you make, Carrie. But think how much worse it would be if you let life make all your decisions for you.”

Mrs. Z handed me a bunch of pamphlets, told me to think about my career options, told me to stay focused on keeping my grades up, and to “think about what I said.” Make plans so life doesn’t make them for me? Sure, easy to say, but how I could possibly make any plans so bulletproof they can’t be completely derailed by my side job (which, I would like to note for the record, was never anywhere on my list of things I wanted to be when I grew up)?

“You think there’ll still be a market for web designers by the time we graduate?” I ask Malcolm, who sits next to me in my web design class. “I mean, technology isn’t going to leap forward so much that the Internet all goes right into your brain and makes web design an obsolete profession, right?”

“I don’t think they’ll be wiring people’s brains for the Internet anytime soon,” Malcolm says. Oh, could I prove him wrong on that one. “I guess anything’s possible, but I think web design has a more secure future than, say, newspaper journalism.”

“Maybe. I just don’t want to waste time learning a skill that’ll be useless by the time I hit the job market.”

Malcolm turns in his seat to face me. “You got the talk from Mrs. Z, didn’t you?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Mm-hm. I had a similar anxiety attack after I met with her last year.”

“So you didn’t have any grand life plans when you were a sophomore either?”

“God, no. I wasn’t thinking about that stuff, not until she started hitting me with all these downer scenarios of me flipping burgers or mowing lawns my whole life, then I was all like, ‘Ahh! Must find life’s purpose! Must not toil in minimum wage service job!’ ”

“Oh, you got the Scared Straight version, huh?”

“Big time.”

“Did it work? Are you now focused like a laser beam on your golden future?”

“Hardly,” Malcolm says without any concern, “but I’ve got some ideas. I’m paying more attention to the things I like to do, the things I’m really good at, things I could maybe turn into a job...” There’s a pregnant pause. “I’m re-thinking some of my priorities.”

“Like?”

Malcolm looks around for potential eavesdroppers, then leans over to me and says in a half-whisper, “I’m thinking I might not go out for the team next year.”

“Really?” I say, sincerely stunned. Malcolm is team captain, a killer wide receiver (so I’ve been told; I know jack-all about football), and all by himself, he balances out the bad rep the team gets thanks to obnoxious jerks like Angus Parr and Gerry Yannick. “Malcolm, that’s...that’s huge.”

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “I mean, sure, I’d miss it, but that’s not where my future is, you know? There are better things I could be doing with that time. Hey, do me a favor? Keep that between us, huh? Last thing I need is to spend the rest of the year listening to Coach Fowle or the guys riding me about quitting.”

“Yeah. Sure,” I say. I mime zipping my lip. “Code of silence.”

He smiles. “Thanks.”

And that is the last dose of normalcy for me for the day.

As per what has become standard operating procedure, the gang convenes at my locker so we can plan our after-school shenanigans. Granted, we rarely deviate from hanging out at Coffee E or the Carnivore’s Cave, but it’s the dead of winter in New England. Without snow on the ground to frolic in, build stuff out of, or stuff down each other’s pants, there’s not a whole heck of a lot to do that
doesn’t
involve sitting inside where it’s warm.

“Crazy idea here,” I say. “We could go to someone’s house and get right to the homework.”

“You’re right, that is crazy,” Matt says. “Jeez, Mrs. Z really got into your head, didn’t she?”

“She didn’t get
into my head
, but she’s right, I should be — we
all
should be thinking a little more about the next few years. High school doesn’t last forever —”

“Thank Cthulhu.”

“— and I don’t want to leave high school only to get stuck at a cash register until I’m old and gray.”

“We have jobs lined up,” Matt says like I’m slow. “They involve taking down bad guys and making the world a better place. Duh.”

“That’s not a job, Matt,” Sara says.

“Tell that to Concorde. That’s all he does.”

“He doesn’t get paid to be a super-hero, dude,” Stuart says, “he’s, like, in that guy’s pocket, the tech company guy.”

“Edison Bose.”

“Yeah, him. Concorde’s his corporate mascot or something, right?”

“He’s not a
mascot
. When he’s not a super-hero, he’s, like, a living public relations campaign for the company.”

“Whatever. Point is, Stuart’s right,” I say. “Concorde has a day job, more or less.”

“So does Mindforce,” Sara says.

“And Natalie’s in college so she doesn’t have a job right now; but she’ll have a job when she gets out of school so she doesn’t have to be a super-hero all the time,” Missy says, “unless she goes to grad school, then she’ll still be in college and won’t have a job and will still be a super-hero. Maybe. If she wants to.”