Rivals (8 page)

I hate you.
I hate you, you miserable old dried-up piece of—

“I’d like your
help,” Grandma said, and Maggie realized she’d missed the whole speech. A
tight ball of heat and fury was turning and turning inside her brain and it had
blacked out the whole thing. “Brent still has a chance at a normal life. But
if you and I are going to be enemies, then—”

“There’s a
radio in the car,” Maggie said, and jumped up from her chair. She ran to the
kitchen and the rack where they kept the car keys. They were missing, of
course. Maggie spun around and saw Grandma tottering toward her. She had the
car keys in her right hand. On her left hand, she’d already turned her
engagement ring around so the diamond was on the inside.

“You can’t do
this,” Maggie said. She had promised she would try to work this out calmly and
rationally. The problem was she wasn’t calm or rational inside. It was
really, really hard to fake it on her face. “I have just had the worst day of
my life and I need to listen to some music. I have a right to that!”

“There’s a
difference between a right and a privilege. Your generation always has had
trouble knowing where the line is.”

“Please give
me the car keys.” Maggie lowered her head and stared at the floor. If she had
to look at Grandma’s prune face one more second—“I need the car, right
now. I need the car, and I’m going to have those keys in a second. One way or
another.”

“Is that a
threat, little girl?” Grandma asked. She was so close, suddenly. Well within
arm’s reach. Maggie tried to grab the keys out of her hand.

Instead
Grandma’s open palm smacked her on the face.

“Ow!” Maggie
shrieked. She reached one hand up to her cheek and felt the heat there.
Grandma had finally hit her with the diamond, just like she’d always threatened
to do.

Heat and light
filled up her brain.

I could
kill you. It would be so easy.

Instead she
grabbed the car keys. Grandma’s hand was in the way. Maggie squeezed until
the keys came loose, and then she ran for the door.

It was kind of
tricky holding on to Perkins the bully. He squirmed a lot and he knew how to
throw his center of gravity around, so that Brent had to keep grabbing his arms
or his legs to get him back under control. Brent managed somehow to get him up
the hill to where Lucy was sitting with her binoculars.

“Get him away
from me!” she squeaked as they came closer.

Brent dropped
Perkins heavily on the grass and then sat down on him. That seemed to do the
trick—as much as Perkins tried to heave and buck to get free, it was easy
for Brent to keep him from getting away.

“You didn’t
beat him up,” Lucy said, once she’d gotten over her fright. “Because you see I
was thinking that you should beat him up, so that he won’t beat up any other
kids, because—”

“Yeah. I got
it.” Brent stared at the cars in the parking lot. This didn’t make sense. It
should be easier. Cleaner. “Except it wouldn’t work. Do you know why Perkins
bullies freshmen? Tell her, Perkins.”

The bully
grunted and heaved but couldn’t get his knees under him. “Because it feels
good,” he said. “Because I’m bigger than they are.”

Brent rolled
his eyes. “No. It’s not that. It’s because his dad beats
him
up. That makes him angry but he can’t fight back
against his dad—apparently the guy was a football player in college and
he’s
huge
. So that’s what Matt
learned at home. That if you’re bigger than somebody else, it’s okay to beat
them up and take their stuff.”

“That’s messed
up,” Lucy said.

“Yeah. But it
raises an interesting question. Which is what I should do with him. See, if I
beat him up—that just proves he’s right. That just because somebody is
bigger, or, in my case, stronger, then they can do whatever they want.”

“But it’s
different! You’d be helping people! Do you know how many kids want to see him
get hurt? Do you know how much misery he’s caused? You’d be getting revenge
for a whole generation of underclassmen!”

“Does that
make it okay? Should I beat up everybody those kids want me to beat up?”
Brent shrugged. This was getting so complicated. “Who decides when it’s okay
to beat somebody up? Me? You? I don’t think I have the right to make that
decision. And even if I do beat him up, then what? Do I have a responsibility
to beat up his dad?”

Perkins
growled under Brent. “You could. You could take him!”

“That seems
kind of… messed up,” Lucy agreed. “Beating up somebody’s dad.”

“Even if they
are a bad person.” Brent rubbed at his eyes. “I don’t know, Luce. I keep
thinking about
my
dad. I keep thinking
he wouldn’t want me to do this. It wouldn’t make him proud. And I owe him, a
lot.”

Lucy frowned.
“What are you going to do?”

Brent stood
up. Perkins took the opportunity to jump to his feet and try to dash away.
Brent stopped him by grabbing his shoulder before he could escape. “Listen,”
Brent said, “I’m not going to hit you. But if I hear that you’re hassling any
more kids, then—”

“Then you’ll
beat me up?”

Brent shook
his head. “No. But I’ll stop you. Just like I stopped you today. I’ll be
watching you from now on and if you try anything, I’ll stop you. That’s all.
You’ve seen I can do it.”

“You can’t
watch me all the time,” Perkins said.

Brent let him
go. He ran around the side of the school and disappeared.

“I need to get
home,” Brent said. “I need to talk to my sister about this. Maybe she has
some ideas about what we’re supposed to do with these powers. She’s smarter
than me, maybe she’s already figured this out.”

Lucy walked
with him. Normally he took the bus home but it had already left without him.
It was a good half hour walk back to his house, and part of it was along the
highway where there wasn’t any sidewalk, just a narrow little path worn down in
the grass. Cars honked at them as they rocketed past and twice he had to pick
Lucy up and get her out of the way of a driver who was too close to the curb.
With her legs in braces she couldn’t jump away as fast as he could. After the
second time he just slung her across his back and carried her piggyback. She
didn’t seem to mind and her weight didn’t bother him at all.

As they walked
they tried to think of ways Brent could actually help people with his powers
that didn’t get morally complicated. “What if you saw somebody stealing
somebody’s wallet on the street. It would be okay to hit them, wouldn’t it?”
she asked.

“I guess,”
Brent told her, “but when was the last time you actually saw that happen? You
hear about crime all the time but it tends to happen in dark alleys and really
late at night.”

“You could
rescue people who get lost in the desert,” she tried. One of her hands was
absently rubbing his chest. It felt good so he didn’t tell her to stop.

“Sure. If I
could find them.” He thought about it for a second. “I could spend the rest
of my life patrolling the desert, looking for people in trouble. But that
would get pretty boring. I mean, how often does somebody actually get lost out
there? Once or twice a year? I kind of wanted to go to college instead.”

“I guess you
could carry little old ladies across the street. Or carry their groceries for
them.” Lucy laughed. “They’d probably like that.” She leaned her head on his
shoulder and he wondered if she was getting tired.

“I don’t seem
to get tired,” he said, because he had suddenly realized this fact. “I suppose
I could go to the power plant and turn a big crank on one of their turbines and
generate electricity all day. That would use less oil and it would be good for
the environment.”

Lucy chuckled.
“I could bring you sandwiches every day. And maybe read to you while you
turned your crank, so you didn’t get bored.”

Brent grinned.
That was hardly how he’d seen his life going. But it was a cute thought.

“Here we are,”
he said, when they finally got to his house. He climbed up the steps to the
porch and stopped before the door. “Um,” he said, “maybe you should get down
now.”

“Oh, sorry,”
she said, and slid down off his back. “It was just so comfortable up there.”

“I’ll give you
a ride anytime,” Brent said, searching in his backpack for his key. “You want
to come in, maybe have a snack or something before you head home?”

She didn’t get
to answer him, though. Before she could open her mouth to reply they both
heard Grandma screaming for help.

The music was
the only thing that could save Maggie. It was like a prism, taking all of her
anger and her doubts, her fears and frustrations—

your
friends aren’t answering your texts

they won’t
let you play the game you love

you hurt
grandma

you killed
dad

—gathering
them up and bringing them together, like different colors combining to form a
single ray of pure white, narrowing down all the chaos and bewilderment into
one stream of energy she could release by screaming along with the lyrics. It
didn’t matter much what kind of music it might be, punk, metal, industrial,
techno, as long as it was fast and loud and dark, storm winds driving through
her, sweeping away everything that didn’t make sense.

The car radio
was loud enough. The local college station played enough metal to keep her
sane. She drove through town, barely paying attention to the road, singing at
the top of her voice and pounding on the steering wheel to the beat.

When she
arrived at her destination she stopped the car but she just sat there for a
long time, howling out her aggro, until another set of speed metal was done.
When the station broke for commercials she threw her head back against the
headrest and pushed her fingers through her hair.

When she
reached for the ignition key she saw she’d battered the steering wheel all out
of shape. She was surprised she hadn’t accidentally released the airbag.
Whatever. She could just bend it back to normal again later. She grabbed the
keys and pushed herself out of the car, up the walk to Mandy’s door. She rang
the bell and stood there drumming one foot on the porch, craning her head
around to watch everything that moved on the street.

Eventually,
finally, Mandy opened the door and looked out. Mandy Hunt was the closest
thing Maggie had to a BFF. Both of them would have gagged to hear that term
applied to them but they had a real connection. A bond. They’d been together
since way back, back when they still thought it was cute their names were so
similar.

“You’d better
come in,” Mandy said, and pulled Maggie inside. The house was big and airy and
sterile, full of tasteful ornamentation and white paint and austere leather
furniture. The house was spotlessly clean and it looked like no one had ever
lived there. Mandy’s parents had some money, enough that even Jill Hennessey
treated Mandy with a certain level of respect.

Without a word
Mandy lead her upstairs, into the bedroom Maggie had slept in many times back
when they were both young enough for sleepovers. The wallpaper still had a
pattern of Palominos galloping past desert mesas but in recent years Mandy and
her friends had taken turns cutting out pictures of celebrities from magazines
and pasting them on the horses as if they were riding them while showing off
their engagement rings, their trophy spouses, their fashion accessory babies.

“Why are you
wearing that?” Mandy asked, after she’d closed and locked the door. “Did you
just come from practice?”

Maggie looked
down at herself. She was still wearing her field hockey uniform. She’d been
so upset about being kicked off the team that she hadn’t thought to change.
“They won’t let me play,” she said. “God! What a stupid thing to get upset
about, right? But it just totally triggered me.”

“You’re one of
their best players,” Mandy said. “How is that fair? Remember last year, you
were like, what, runner up for MVP? And the coach said—”

“We were
supposed to have lunch,” Maggie said. “We made a
plan
.”

“Yeah,” Mandy
said, reaching for the pearl necklace she wore. She held it out away from her
throat and twisted it nervously. “I guess we did. Well, there’s a funny story
about that—”

“Tell me your
story later. After you have time to make one up,” Maggie said, diving onto
Mandy’s bed. “I didn’t come here to make you feel bad. I came here because
there’s nobody else in the world who can help me right now. I’m in trouble, M.
I’ve got the police after me. Maybe the FBI.”

“I see,” Mandy
said.

“I’m not
crazy. You know what’s been going on with me. What happened to me out in the
desert. You think the government doesn’t want to know more? You think they’re
not looking right now to find out how Brent and I survived when my dad died?
They would put me in a lab if they could. And I may just have given them the
excuse they needed. I can’t go home again. Do you—do you have a top I
could borrow, or something? I can’t even go back to get my clothes.”

“Of course,”
Mandy said, because that was something she could handle. She went to her
dresser and started pulling out tank tops and sweaters. Maggie stared at the
clothes as they piled up on the bed, wondering how she could possibly say what
she was going to say next.

“A while
back,” she began, “you said you wanted to kill yourself. You even showed me
all the pills you had saved up.”

Mandy stopped
with her back to Maggie. Stopped as if she’d forgotten how to move. “They
were just—aspirin. They wouldn’t have even given me a headache. And you
know I got into therapy after that. You’re the only one who knows that, except
for my family.”