Superpowers (2 page)

SUNDAY

Mary Beth dreamed that a springer spaniel in a lime green jumpsuit chased her with a machete until her mother—her real mother—took the machete from the dog's four-fingered cartoon paw and replaced it with a tommy gun. She woke as the springer took aim, its long tongue lolling out the side of its mouth.

She tried to read the clock, but it didn't make any sense. 12:00? But it was light out. And it couldn't be noon, because she'd set the alarm for 8:00 so she could get to the library early. Finals might be over, but she wanted to get a jump on the summer session.

She couldn't stop blinking. No, the numbers were flashing. 12:00 , . . 12:00 . . . 12:00 . . . 12:00 . . .

"Shit!" The power had gone out, she remembered now; how she'd gotten back downstairs and into her own bed, wearing only a T-shirt that she wasn't sure she owned, was a mystery. She looked for her watch, but it was nowhere in the tangle of clothes on the floor. She pulled on sweatpants and stumbled to the door. She squeezed the knob, and it came off in her hand.

Mary Beth tried to fit it back into the door, but the shaft was bent. She dropped the doorknob and tugged at the gap above the door. With a metallic groan the hinges gave way, and the door collapsed in on her. She reflexively caught it in one hand and leaned it against the wall.

Mary Beth took a deep breath and stepped into the hall as if amazing feats of strength were part of her morning ritual, which they were not. She had long ago resigned herself to being small and, if not helpless, at least better off walking away from trouble and making sarcastic comments from a safe distance. She had been the tallest girl in her class in sixth grade, and had for a few short months enjoyed the feeling of towering over the boys. She had imagined herself to be intimidating, though truthfully she was a gawky girl with a mouthful of braces and a wardrobe consisting primarily of sweater sets in pastel colors. Her reign as the tall girl was short-lived. She stalled out at five-foot-two, and one by one the other girls in her class outgrew her.

She was used to it, now. Mary Beth had found her identity in being the good student. They called her Bookworm and Teacher's Pet and other things that ought not to have stung as much as they did. But no one had ever labeled her athletic, or strong.

Her heart beating hard, she gently pushed on the half-opened door to Harriet's room and peered in at the battery-operated clock. 2:08, it said. Half the day was gone.

How much beer had she drunk? It hadn't seemed like so much, and it hadn't seemed to affect her in the beginning. But sometime after the lights went out she had lost track of what was happening. She remembered stumbling down a hallway looking for a bathroom. She remembered Caroline and Charlie entwined and naked on the floor of his bedroom. The thought made her vaguely nauseated.

She went to the kitchen, thirst refusing to be ignored. Her eyeballs felt scratchy and sunken, her muscles stiff and dry. She reached for the refrigerator handle and pulled it right off the door.

She broke into a sweat and set the handle on the kitchen table. She eased the refrigerator door open from the side. Carefully, as if she were handling a thousand-year-old ceramic baby, she lifted a pitcher of Kool-Aid from inside and set it on the table. Then she slowly shut the door and crossed to the cabinet, which she opened with her fingertips alone. She reached for a glass and held it gingerly as she lifted the pitcher to pour.

The phone rang, and Mary Beth tensed. The glass shattered in her hand, and the pitcher handle crumbled in her grip, leaving the body to fall to the floor and shatter, spattering her toes in Kool-Aid and splinters of broken glass.

Mary Beth crossed to the phone on sticky feet and picked it up on the third ring. She said "Hello?" five times before realizing she'd snapped the cord in two. She slammed the receiver down and the entire apparatus fell from the wall, fused into one useless heap of plastic.

When Harriet came home an hour later Mary Beth was sitting on the couch. On the coffee table in front of her lay her doorknob, the refrigerator handle, the destroyed phone, the toilet handle, a TV remote bent at a right angle, the splintered remains of a broomstick, and a cardboard box filled with shattered glasses, plates, bowls, and one pitcher.

"Don't ask me to shake hands," said Mary Beth.

"What's going on?" Harriet stood in the doorway, as if afraid to enter. The trepidation on her face made Mary Beth want to cry.

Instead she picked up a shard of broken glass and jabbed at her wrist with it.

"Jesus, girl!" Harriet moved to stop her but stopped short. There was no blood.

"I can hardly feel it," said Mary Beth. She pressed the glass harder into her skin, and it snapped into three smaller pieces. She held her arm up for Harriet to inspect. There wasn't even a mark on it.

Harriet leaned back against the wall. "I am having the weirdest day," she said.

"You?" Mary Beth waved a hand at the wreckage on the coffee table. "Are you saying you've got something to compare with this?"

"Yes. I was invisible for an hour and fifteen minutes today."

"Invisible?"

"Yeah. As in, not visible. Unseen. Gone."

"But you're here."

"For now I am." Harriet shrugged off her backpack and tossed it into her bedroom. "I went into the
Voice
to finish up an article that has to be in tomorrow. The only people in there were Jake and Darren, the editors. They were sitting on the couch in the newsroom, bullshitting. I came in, we said hi, I went to my desk. I wasn't feeling great after last night, and I was having trouble concentrating on what I was doing. And my eyes were bugging out on me."

"Bugging out how?" Mary Beth asked.

"Everything looked sort of flat. Two-dimensional. And the colors were really bright, brighter than normal. I thought I was passing out, but I could still hear Jake and Darren talking. Then I realized they were talking about me."

"What were they saying?" Mary Beth asked.

"The usual crap. I'm a snob who treats the rest of the staff like no-talent hacks. I don't care about that—they are no-talent hacks, especially Jake and Darren—but the point is that nobody would talk like that in front of me. I started to say something, but then I realized I wasn't there. No reflection in the monitor, no lap or legs in my chair, nothing except bright colors spread across my vision. I nearly puked."

"No one noticed?"

"What's to notice?"

"I don't know. Disembodied tapping on the keyboard. The chair moving around."

"Jake and Darren only notice the rest of us when we're making them look bad. They were still talking about me when I dragged my invisible ass out of the office and hit the ladies' room. It was bad. My depth perception was screwed up, and I banged my knee into the doorway because I couldn't see myself. I thought I was going to pass out, but I couldn't even throw up. I couldn't even close my eyes, because my eyelids were invisible. And then, all of a sudden, I was back."

"Your
eyelids
were invisible?"

"Yeah. Gross, huh?" Harriet moved to the bathroom but halted in the doorway. "You broke the toilet?"

"Sorry. You can still flush, but you have to take the cover off." "What the hell is happening?"

"If I knew that, maybe I'd know how to stop breaking everything."

Harriet shook her head. "I mean, how is it we both start exhibiting weirdness on the same day? Did you put something in the salsa?"

Mary Beth thought about it. "Some of the tomatoes were a little green."

"It doesn't make sense." Harriet picked up the refrigerator door handle and tapped it against her other hand. "I can't think about it right now. Let's go to the SERF."

"I was thinking maybe I should see a doctor," Mary Beth said.

"What's a doctor going to do? Once he breaks half a dozen needles on your skin he's going to be calling Freaks-R-Us."

"Maybe that's not a bad idea," Mary Beth said. "I can't touch anything without breaking it. I'm going home to visit next weekend. What if I go to hug my mom and shatter her rib cage?"

"Exactly why you should get a handle on this now, so you won't hurt anyone." Harriet stepped into her room and started changing clothes. "We'll hit the weight room and see how strong you actually are."

It was a beautiful afternoon, and most of Madison seemed to be out walking dogs, riding bicycles, playing volleyball on the commons outside Witte Hall. Mary Beth kept her eyes lowered, convinced that everyone could see her freakish new abilities. She had searched her image in the mirror for larger muscles, for some increase in mass that could explain what was happening, but she couldn't see it, and Harriet said she hadn't noticed anything either.

"How can you be so calm?" Mary Beth asked her.

"I already had my freak-out session, remember? I spent an hour spent huddled in a stall wondering if I was dissipating into nothing. But whatever's going on with me . . . don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think I'm dangerous. We can worry about me once we get a handle on what's happening with you."

"Dangerous." As frightened as she was, Mary Beth had to smile.

"You can feel sexy about it later," Harriet said. "For right now just don't touch anything."

Across from the Southeast Recreational Facility a crowd of boys were playing basketball on the concrete courts. Mary Beth wondered if she could jump now, or shoot a basket. When she reached the steps to the SERF she bent her knees, and with a little hop she sailed up and over all the stairs, to land and fall on her face outside the doors.

Harriet crouched at her side, looking around to see if anyone had noticed. "Don't do that again, either," she said. "Are you OK?"

Mary Beth bounded to her feet. "Not a scrape," she said. "What do you think that was, about twelve feet vertical? I wasn't even trying."

Harriet clicked her teeth and stepped past her. "I'll get the door."

Mary Beth didn't like the gym. She liked working out, liked pushing herself, sweating, even enjoyed being mildly sore afterward, but she hated the gym. She didn't know if it was a lingering aversion that she'd acquired in high school phys ed—she had vivid and unpleasant memories of boys leering at her in her sweats—or if it was simply a fear of being embarrassed by her own clumsiness and ineptitude. Either way, her dislike kept her from visiting the SERF more than a couple of times a month.

Today, though, she was looking forward to showing off a little. She and Harriet skipped the locker room and headed directly for the circuit.

There were only a few guys on the machines, but just inside, Harriet stopped and swore.

"What's wrong?" Mary Beth asked.

"Hatch."

"Huh?"

"Marcus Hatch," Harriet said. "On the leg press. Used to write for the
Voice
until he went over the edge. Conspiracy theorist. Couldn't write an objective piece about a bake sale."

"The Asian guy over there?"

Marcus Hatch looked as though he spent every day in the gym. He was lean, but his olive skin was taut over well-defined muscles. His hair was cut military short.

"He self-publishes a little rag called
What They're Not Telling You
," Harriet said. "After Jake and Darren fired him, he tried to convince me to work on it with him. Told me it was my duty as a black woman to agitate against the muzzling of the individual voice."

"Is that a quote?"

"Pretty close. Let's go over here. Hopefully he won't see us." Harriet guided Mary Beth to a biceps press. "You ever used this one before?"

"No." Mary Beth usually stuck to the treadmills or the stationary bikes.

Harriet made some quick adjustments to the seat, then looked Mary Beth over. "How much do you weigh?"

"Very funny," Mary Beth said.

"Seriously. Ballpark figure."

Mary Beth felt the blood in her ears. "One fifteen, maybe." If it wasn't in the ballpark, it wasn't further than the parking lot.

Harriet raised an eyebrow but set the pin at 120 pounds and stepped back. "Let's see if you can lift your weight," she said.

Mary Beth settled into the seat and gripped the bar. She had a moment of doubt—what if the last few hours had been some sort of hormonal fluke? She'd heard of mothers lifting cars off trapped children, adrenaline giving them strength they didn't really have. She took a breath and pushed forward gently.

The bar swung forward and up so effortlessly that Mary Beth glanced over to be sure the pin was still in.

"How did that feel?" Harriet asked, keeping her voice low.

"How did what feel?" Mary Beth lowered the weight back into place without a sound. She was grinning again, and she wondered if she was still a little drunk from the night before.

"Put it up to two-forty, then."

Two-forty felt even easier than one-twenty, maybe because she wasn't tense this time. The machine only went up to four hundred, and she handled that without breathing hard.