Rivals (18 page)

“It’s going to
happen eventually,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “Why not now? Kiss
me. Please?”

“I’m not sure
I’m comfortable with—”

“Brent! It
only feels awkward because you’re not doing what you’re supposed to. Kiss me,
and if it still feels weird, then I promise I’ll let you go home, okay? But
first we have to find out. We need to know if we have chemistry.”

She
was—she was right there. She smelled great. She was a beautiful girl. Brent
was a fifteen year-old boy. He spent all day, every day, thinking about how
great it would be to kiss a beautiful girl. Well, kissing wasn’t the only
thing he thought about doing with girls, but it was a good place to start. He
leaned his head down, just slightly, and let his lips meet hers. They were
ridiculously soft. He pressed a little harder and felt her lips open a little
bit beneath his.

“There,” she
told him. “That feels right, doesn’t it? It feels exactly right.”

He kissed her
again.

It felt
good
. It made his head spin, in a good way. It made his
whole body tense up, in an amazing way. Whether it felt right or not suddenly
felt less important than it had before.

On the other
side of town Maggie stopped with her finger over a doorbell and wondered if she
should even announce her presence. Maybe it would be more effective to just
tear the door off its hinges and storm inside.

No, she
thought. That might attract attention. By the look of the houses on either
side, with their dying lawns hemmed in by chain link fences, she doubted any of
the neighbors would want to get involved. But they might call the cops. So
she leaned on the doorbell until she could hear it buzzing inside, and didn’t
let up until he opened his front door.

It was almost
worth coming all this way in the middle of the night just for the look on his
face. The color went out of his cheeks and his eyeballs quivered in their
sockets. His jaw fell open, as if he wanted to say something but was too
scared to breathe and form the words.

“Just let me
in,” she told him.

He recognized
her. He knew her all too well. From the day she and Dad had driven out here,
when she’d been so intent on confronting him, on demanding answers. And from
the night she and Brent had stood outside and she threw the empty liquor
bottles at his wall. The guy who killed Mom knew exactly who she was, and what
she could do to him. He probably thought he knew why she was there, too.

Maybe he was
right.

He stepped
back and flattened his back against a wall. She closed the door behind her,
then walked into his living room. There wasn’t much furniture, just a patched
corduroy couch and a tiny little television set with a cable box on top. She
flopped down on the couch as if she owned the place and just stared at him for
a while.

“Are you going
to kill me?” he asked, in a small voice.

Maggie was a
bad
girl
. Maggie was a
villain
. It turned out there wasn’t a lot to be said for
villain as a career choice. But you did get to hurt people, even people who
deserved it. It was expected of you to get revenge. She could kill this guy,
and it would be easy. It would probably feel a lot better than when she hurt
the policeman. Or even when she broke Grandma’s arm.

“I want to
talk, right now,” she told him.

“Talk to me?”
he asked.

“Duh.” She
stared at her nails. The paint on them had mostly chipped away but they were
smooth and round. They didn’t seem to get any longer than they were when she
got her powers. That was weird. Thinking about stuff like that was safer than
thinking about what she was actually doing in the guy’s house. Sighing, she
said, “Look, if you’re honest with me, if you answer my questions and you don’t
lie, I promise I won’t actually kill you. That’s the best offer you’re going
to get tonight, so I think you should take it.”

He nodded
readily.

“You live
alone?” she asked. He nodded. “Anybody coming over tonight?” He shook his
head. “That’s a good start. You killed my mom.”

He paused,
then, as if thinking of the best way to answer her question. Finally, he sat
down on the floor next to the television set and said, “Yes.”

He wasn’t a
big guy. He didn’t look like he was all that smart, either. What had his life
been like, she wondered? Since the accident. “You went to jail for a while,
on a felony charge. I guess it’s tough to come back from that. Hard to find a
job.”

“It’s been
difficult,” he admitted. “Plus, you get a parole officer who comes around at
random times. Checks up on you, makes sure you aren’t breaking any laws. It
can get pretty intrusive. Look, Margaret, I regret what I—”

“Don’t say my
name,” Maggie told him. “Especially that name. Only my grandmother calls me
that name anymore. Do you remember what my Mom looked like?”

“Yes,” he told
her. He put a hand over his mouth, then took it away again. “I only saw her
the one time, of course. After the—the accident. I went over to her car
to see if she was hurt, and, well, she was. But she was beautiful, just like
you. Even with the blood and the steering wheel jammed into her—”

“I didn’t ask
for gory details.” There was no way Maggie wanted to know what
that
had looked like. “How can you remember what she
looked like? That was over a year ago. And you only saw her for a minute,
right?”

“I’ll never
forget. You don’t.”

Was this what
Maggie had come for? To find out what it felt like to have killed somebody?
But she already knew that, didn’t she? She’d killed Dad. Just as certainly as
this guy had killed Mom.

“You keep
thinking that maybe, today, it’ll be better,” he told her. “You wake up in the
morning and for a second, just a second, you’re a normal person. A good
person. Then you remember what you did, and that the woman you killed had two
kids. You think long and hard about why you lived through that accident and
she didn’t. You wonder if maybe there was some reason for it, but you know
there wasn’t. It was just stupidity, your stupidity, and a dark corner of a
road that was a little too narrow. You go over the accident in your head,
every little detail, all the ways you could have avoided what happened, you
obsess over those chances, as if you still had them, as if you still could stop
it from happening if you just imagine it hard enough. But you can’t.”

“No,” Maggie
agreed.

“It’s like
glass. Time is like glass. Once it’s broken, you can’t put it back together.
It’s always going to be broken. You get stuck, reliving the same moment for
the rest of your life, and you can’t ever fix it.”

“No.”

“Is
that—what you wanted to know?” he asked her. “Why you came?”

“Maybe,” she
told him. She was still having trouble identifying her motivation herself.
Unless—unless she’d come to see if there was any hope. Hope for herself,
hope that things could get better again.

Or maybe she’d
just wanted to talk to the one guy in town who might actually know how she
felt. The one who understood that for her it was too late, that she’d crossed
some dark boundary and now she was a bad guy, and there wasn’t anything she
could do to change that. Turning herself in wouldn’t make the cop better, or
heal Grandma’s arm. Going to jail wouldn’t do anything, except ruin her own
life.

But in the end
talking to the drunk didn’t help her feel better. Because he still had one
thing she didn’t. He could remember what her mom looked like. Maggie
couldn’t.

It was tearing
her up inside. She couldn’t remember what Mom’s voice sounded like, or what
her birthday was, or what clothes she used to wear. All those memories had
drained right out of her. She could see Dad’s face just fine. It was like the
drunk had said—she would never forget Dad’s face. But Mom was a hole
where memories used to be.

There were
pictures she could look at, back at the house, but she couldn’t go there. Her
memories of Mom were broken, just like her innocence, and the pieces didn’t fit
together anymore.

She got up off
the couch. She didn’t want to be there anymore.

“What do you
do for fun?” she asked the drunk. “You have a girlfriend, or any friends you
hang out with?”

“No,” he told
her. “Mostly I just come home from work and watch TV. It helps, kind of,
watching TV—your mind stops working, and you just focus on the pictures
in front of you. You can forget, for a little while.”

“Hmm.” She
strode across the room and put her foot through the glass screen of his TV set.
He threw his hands over his head as glass and bits of wiring crashed all over
his carpet. “That’s for my family,” she said.

She left
through the back door.

When Lucy came
over the next day after school, Brent was getting Grandma’s dinner ready:
minestrone soup and chicken salad just the way she liked it, with plenty of
mayonnaise. Normally he didn’t like cooking but he was bubbling with
excitement and when Lucy came into the kitchen he grabbed her up in his arms
and swung her around the room, her leg braces clanging off the legs of the
table and the chairs.

“You’re in a
good mood,” Lucy said, laughing along with him. “Which is very good, I wanted
to give this to you when you were feeling good about things, because you might
take it the wrong way if you were feeling down, and—”

“What are you
talking about?” Brent asked. Then he noticed that she had brought a cardboard
box with her. It was tied up with green ribbon. “A present? For me?”

She nodded
bashfully but couldn’t keep from laughing again.

“Hold on, let
me just turn this down. It needs to simmer a while anyway.” He left the soup
bubbling gently on the stove and headed up to his room, pulling her along by
the hand.

“What’s got
you so happy?” she asked, as he pulled the door almost closed behind him. He
was careful to leave it open a full foot, as per Grandma’s rules. “The last
time I saw you, you looked like you were going to start an emo band.”

“Huh?”

“You looked
like you felt pretty sorry for yourself,” she explained.

He picked up
the box and shook it. It made a soft rustling noise. He had no idea what was
inside. He wanted very much to open it but first he had to tell Lucy what had
happened. “I think I have a girlfriend,” he told her. “I wasn’t really sure,
at first, but when I kissed her, it all kind of came together and—”

“You kissed
Dana?” Lucy asked. Her face was expressionless, as if she was unsure exactly
what he’d meant and was waiting for confirmation before she started to react.

He bit his
lip. Maybe this was something he should keep to himself—you weren’t
supposed to kiss and tell, after all—but he really wanted to talk about
it and Lucy was his confidante. “Yes,” he said. “I kissed Dana.”

“Oh.
That’s—”

A laugh
bubbled out of him. He paced around the room, not in agitation but just
because he had so much energy. “Several times.”

“Okay, well,
the details probably aren’t—”

“With
tongues.” He went to the window and glanced outside, looking for newsvans or
reporters, then pulled down the shade. “And then she let me touch her… well…
her…” He turned around. He couldn’t see Lucy anywhere.

He looked at
the door but it was still open the mandatory one foot. She hadn’t gone out
that way. He opened up his closet but it was so full of stuff even Lucy
couldn’t have squeezed inside. Finally he looked in the space between his bed
and the wall. She was there, curled up with her knees tight against her chest.
She wasn’t looking at him. He squatted down in front of her and smiled at her
but she just looked away.

“Too much
information,” she told him. “Okay? I don’t want to hear the grotesque
details.”

“I thought
you’d be happy for me,” he told her.

“You thought
that, huh?”

Brent stood up
and went over to his desk where he’d set down the box. He couldn’t understand
what the problem was. They had talked about sex often enough before—both
of them had been surprised to realize the other one thought about it so much,
they’d wondered together what it was like, and they’d even confessed all to
each other, pooling what little experience they had on the subject. She’d even
told him once about the boy she’d fooled around with at camp the summer before
he met her, and the details then had been more graphic than anything he could
have said about Dana.

“Okay, change
of subject,” he said, figuring if she was suddenly going to get squeamish he
could at least be sensitive about it. “Let’s see what this is, shall we? It’s
not even my birthday!”

“Maybe now’s
not the time,” she said, but without much force behind the words.

“Nonsense!
There’s never been a better time.” He pulled open the box and pushed back a
piece of tissue paper that hid its contents. Underneath was a carefully folded
suit of clothing. It was sage green. He pulled it out, thinking it was a
shirt, but more and more of it kept unfolding and he realized it was a kind of
jumpsuit. It zipped down the back and had a high, stiff collar of a much
darker green cut in a pattern of flames that ran down the shoulders and part of
the way down the chest. Underneath the jumpsuit, inside the box, was a pair of
gloves of the same darker green color, ending in more of the spiky flames, and
a pair of soft boots to match.

“Holy cow,” he
said, holding the jumpsuit up against his body. The fabric was soft but felt
very strong. This was why she’d been taking his measurements, he realized.