Hero (25 page)

"Keep your eyes open, people," Kevin said from behind his binoculars.

This was our third night keeping watch over the apartment, and no sign of anyone looking like the villains yet. We were the only tryout group who hadn't apprehended our targets.

"Maybe they slipped in and we just didn't know it was them," Larry said.

Golden Boy asked, "Is that possible?"

Everyone turned to look at me. I was, after all, the only one who'd been engaged directly in combat with them. But it had all happened so quickly on the bus that night, and God only knew what they looked like out of costume. I didn't want to let the League down now, in its time of greatest need, but how was I supposed to recognize them if they weren't in costume? I peered through my binoculars as someone with a banged-up metal trash can in his hand opened the front door. As far as I could tell, it wasn't Snaggletooth, Transvision Vamp, or Ssnake. The guy dropped the lid of the trash can, and it sounded like a cymbal when it crashed on the cracked pavement.

I shook my head and let the others know I didn't think it was one of them.

"I'm going home." Ruth flicked her cigarette in the gutter.

"We have another three hours until our shift is over," Golden Boy said.

"You have another three hours until our shift is over," Ruth said, and zipped up her pocketbook. "Tomorrow, that's when everything will go down."

Our group exchanged looks. We'd been up all night for three nights in a row and really needed a break.

"Now she tells us." Larry rolled his eyes.

"Well"—Golden Boy eyed Ruth suspiciously—"if you say so."

"I say so." Ruth slung her arm around his neck. "What say you give a tired old woman a lift home. My car's in the shop."

Golden Boy nodded, picked Ruth up, and in a blur they were gone. I didn't like seeing him go, because he was my ride home, too.

"See you tomorrow," Larry said as he peeled off in his Trans Am. He coughed at the exhaust the car spewed out. I shouted for him to wait, but over the revving of the engine he couldn't hear me. There went my other ride.

That left me and Scarlett.

I didn't even want to acknowledge her presence. But I needed a ride home.

"Hey, Scarlett?"

Scarlett's car was a lot like she was. Pretty on the outside, a mess on the inside. It was a gold SUV, one of those cars you'd see on the highway and wonder why anyone needed one that big. She said she kept the outside waxed and clean because it was leased. She did not apply the same logic to the inside of the car, which was covered in a blanket of fast-food detritus and half-empty makeup containers. She pulled over at a gas station and asked me to pump while she cleaned the windshield.

I milked the nozzle for every last drop of gas before returning it to the pump. I found a cluster of dirty cotton balls from inside the car stuck to my shoe, so I pulled them off and noticed that Scarlett was inside paying at the counter. I saw her lean forward by the cigarette lighter display, in her usual flirting mode with the cashier. I carefully screwed the cap back on the gas tank, and suddenly Scarlett burst out of the door, shouting back at the cashier two steps behind her.

"Your machine is broken!" she screamed. "My cards are good!"

The cashier, a dark-skinned, middle-aged man with a full beard but no hair on his head chased her. Scarlett kept shouting as if she could drown out his presence with the sound of her own voice, and hopped in the driver's seat of the car.

"Get in!" she shouted at me.

The cashier pounded on her window as I climbed in. His eyes looked less angry than desperate. The money would have to come out of his pocket, and judging from his job—the graveyard shift at the Pump'n'Fill—and from the size of Scarlett's gas tank, it would probably mean he'd have worked this whole night for nothing. Scarlett screeched out of the gas station onto the road.

"Jesus," I said, more out of shock than out of judgment.

"I didn't see you offering to pay, either!"

I didn't really have a chance to, but I didn't think it was worth mentioning right then. The car started stalling, and Scarlett popped the gearshift into neutral, revved the engine, and popped it back into first, which sent us lurching forward.

"Don't mouth off to me in my own car, got it?"

I stared at my hands folded in my lap and thought about not asking what I really wanted to know. I finally decided I didn't have anything to lose.

"Can I ask you a question?" I said.

"It's your mouth."

"Why do you hate me?"

Scarlett gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles and ground her teeth.

"Why the fuck does everything have to be about you all the time? God!"

The engine began to sputter. Frustrated, she slammed her foot on the gas pedal, but I knew that was a mistake.

"You're going to flood it," I told her.

"Will you shut the fuck up! I'm trying to drive!"

The car conked out completely, and we coasted over broken glass from a streetlight onto the shoulder and came to a stop by the guardrail.

"Fuck!" She smacked the steering wheel as hard as she could, and then buried her face in her hands and began to sob. I studied the sleeve of the pizza delivery jacket that she never took off, how it was frayed at the edges, how the ends of the sleeve were stained with sweat and dirt and sauce. I looked closely at her hands and saw for the first time her fingers up close, chewed down at the cuticles, bright red spots of raw flesh exposed. She always exuded so much confidence, I couldn't imagine her in a private moment gnawing on her hand, much less crying like this.

I tried to put my arm around her, a natural instinct when someone's sobbing, but she winced and jerked away.

I didn't know what else to do. This was someone I didn't really like much, someone who went out of her way to make me feel awful most of the time. And still I Couldn't stand to see her cry like that.

So I reached out and held her hand.

And that's when I noticed it.

There was a color, a swirling of substance all around her body. It was different from the sickness I saw in Ruth. In Scarlett's case it was a mixture of colors, some of them bright. I couldn't tell what it was at first. Her stomach seemed troubled, like she'd been throwing up recently. Her bladder seemed swollen. Her head ached, and hormones raged up and down her tiny frame. Still I couldn't pinpoint the source. I squinted and looked deeper.

There was a darkness, too, a thick blackness. But it didn't go with the color, like they were two separate forces working against each other. I couldn't make sense of it, but I concentrated and pushed my powers as hard as I could without passing out.

A mild electrical shock jolted me. I gasped and pulled my hand away from hers. Scarlett looked at me, and I looked back into her eyes, fierce and wet, and finally understood what it was.

There was something cruel and defiant growing strong inside her.

CHAPTER TWENTY

SCARLETT SAW RIGHT through me. "If you tell anyone, I'll kill you, I swear it." Then she added in a tiny voice, "Promise me."

"I promise."

What else was I going to say? I'd never had a friend sick like that before. In fact, I wasn't sure I would call Scarlett a friend, regardless of her health. Still, I didn't have any plans to mention it.

"How long—?"

"I don't know." She reached into the backseat and pushed away a few empty Diet Pepsi bottles and came back with a cigarette. She pressed it hard against the back of her hand and lit it. "Doctors don't know shit." She inhaled deeply, and the ember glowed against the smooth white skin of her hand.

I wanted to tell her that I didn't think she was supposed to be smoking, but so far this was the most we'd ever talked without any outright hatred, and I didn't want to ruin the moment.

She saw me staring at the cigarette.

"Don't judge me," she said, and took a long drag. "There's some things you don't know." She unbuttoned the top button of her jacket. "You ever wonder why you never see me without this jacket?"

"Once or twice, maybe." Of course I wondered, everyone did. Especially considering the grungy sleeves. I never understood why someone who cared so much about her appearance would wear a pizza delivery jacket with sleeves full of muck.

"You think I'm too poor to buy a new one, I can tell." That thought had crossed my mind, I have to admit, but I didn't say it.

"When I was a little girl," Scarlett said, "I woke up one morning and discovered I had breasts. I was in the sixth grade, and my dad had already left, and my mom resented me because I started to get attention from her boyfriends." She scraped around the floorboards searching for something as she spoke.

"About a year later, I started getting really high fevers, the kind they take you to the hospital for. One night at the emergency room they got worried that my temperature was so high I would die, so they put me in a tub full of ice." Scarlett found what she was looking for, a small plastic disk of blue and pink eye shadow. She adjusted the rearview mirror so she could see her eyes.

"It only took me a few seconds to melt the whole thing. I burned the nurses' hands when they tried to take me out of the water." She dug into the disk of eye shadow with the applicator.

"My mother was horrified; the hospital told her they couldn't do anything else for me, so she took me home." Scarlett carefully applied the makeup to her eyelids. "They wouldn't let me back in school because they thought I'd burn it down. I'd already tried to once, and that was before I even had powers, so I guess I can't really blame them. I spent a lot of time at home." She flung the case of eye shadow somewhere in the backseat and reached down for a bottle of makeup remover.

"Finally I got this scholarship to a special school for people like us, where they train you to control your powers. It was a bunch of spoiled rich kids, but it was okay, I didn't need to stay too long to get the hang of my powers." She reached over down by my feet and felt around. I scooped up a handful of cotton balls and handed one to her.

"I came home during the first Christmas break and found out that my mom was real sick, and she wasn't getting any better. The doctors said that it had been exposure to my high levels of radiation, before I'd learned to keep it under control.

"And then I started throwing up every day." Scarlett doused the cotton ball with makeup remover and began to wipe away the trails of mascara left on her face by her tears.

She tossed the used cotton ball in the back and I handed her another one. "You know how expensive it is to get chemo? Even with government aid, it still costs a shitload. And Mom's too tired to work most of the time because of it. I picked up four extra shifts last week just so they wouldn't repossess her wig."

Scarlett pulled a mascara wand out of a pocket inside her jacket and began to apply it to her lashes.

"What about you?" I asked.

Scarlett stopped with the mascara and turned to look at me. She shook her head. "You still haven't figured it out, have you?"

I scratched my eyebrows. I thought I knew everything, thought I was a smart kid, but there was still more to her story, another surprise. She unbuttoned her jacket all the way and opened it up. I looked at her belly in shock. The bag spread over her stomach like a pouch of colorless Jell-O and rested in her lap.

"It's a colostomy bag," she said.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"It means I won't be winning Miss America this year." She dipped her mascara wand into the tube. I'd heard the term before, but I didn't know what it really was. She could see the confusion on my face and sighed.

"It means I shit through a tube in my stomach, okay?"

Oh. I stared straight ahead.

Scarlett turned her attention back to her eyelashes in the mirror and began reapplying the mascara. She applied countless layers of black on her lashes, trying to make them longer and longer.

She saw my eyes grow wide as I stared at the bag, and I knew I should have hidden my reaction. I thought she'd kick me out of the car right then and there, but she didn't.

"He took me to dinner a few times, made out through a couple of movies, and we talked about our first time being special. But that night we both got out of work early and I started kissing him, working on his neck—he can't resist that, it drives him absolutely crazy—and we couldn't help ourselves. So we went at it right there in the parking lot." She blinked her eyelashes and began to wipe away the excess.

She said that last part wistfully, and it surprised me—that she'd waited a long time for anything she really wanted. It was the first time I really identified with her. I knew what it was like to wait for what you really want.

"The parking lot's full of gravel, you know, so he didn't really say anything when I told him I wanted to keep my jacket on; who wants a bunch of gravel digging into your skin? I told him to take it slow, because he's usually so fast about everything else. I really wanted to enjoy it. "She rested her head against the windshield and sighed. "I'd been waiting such a long time. I was so into the moment, I didn't care that he was getting close to my bare stomach. Maybe I even wanted him to find out." She stared at her eyes in the rearview mirror. "I thought about how the scene would play out when he reached down and felt the bag. I could picture the look on his face, the shock of discovering it." She suddenly pushed the rearview mirror away so she wouldn't have to look at herself. "Then I thought, well, if that's the worst thing that could happen, what the fuck. Better to know now than later. But the more I thought about it, I realized there was something even worse he could show."

"What?" I asked.

"Pity," she said. She turned and stared directly into my eyes. "And I will not be pitied. Ever." She took a deep breath, which made her chest look even bigger.

"So I told him to get his fucking hands off me, got in my car, and went home." She stared out the window.

"I don't even know why the fuck I'm telling you this."

It made me mad for her to clam up suddenly like that, but I thought about what Ruth had told me and decided what I'd do next. I reached out my hand and, without using my powers, squeezed Scarlett's hand, and this time she let me.