Superpowers (6 page)

She didn't care about Vincent or snotty customers or busboys staring at her ass all the time. None of it could touch her; it was all down there, and she was up here, out of reach.

After a while it started to get cool, and Caroline looked at the compass again and turned back north. She felt good, cleansed, but by the time she reached the lights of Madison she was tired as well. She passed high over Lake Monona and wended her way to the 500 block of Mifflin. No one was on the street. She saw a few windows lit, but no one framed in them. Safe.

She landed on the other side of Bernard and crossed to her block. Music played from the house next to the Laundromat, but otherwise the street was quiet. She walked swiftly to 523 and opened the front door with her key.

Once inside she saw by the VCR—someone had broken the microwave, which she usually used as her clock—that it was nearly 3:30. She groaned. She had to work a double shift tomorrow, ten to ten, and she was going to be doing it on less than six hours sleep. She was back on earth again. She couldn't wait to leave.

SATURDAY 

It was so late it was early, and Harriet hadn't slept yet. She'd covered the Difficult Love show at the Barrymore, and she was trying to type up her review and the interview she'd done before the show. The show had been disappointing, and she was trying to say as much without trashing the guys in the band, who had been funny and charming without trying to get into her pants.

Harriet didn't mind doing interviews, but doing reviews and interviews both felt like a conflict of interest. There was always a tinge of guilt any time she had to trash someone she'd met and liked, and when she interviewed jerks it was even harder to be objective about their music.

In a perfect world she could either write the reviews or do the interviews, but during the summer the
Voice
was always understaffed, and as the arts editor she had to shoulder most of the burden for her section. She didn't mind the work. Music was all she'd ever been interested in—she'd learned the violin, the guitar, and the piano as a child, and been terrible at them all. She couldn't play, but she got good at listening. She found that the further into a good song she went, the more the music expanded. It enveloped her, cradled her, shook her up. It changed, depending on how she listened. That was what she wanted to do with her life, listen to music.

From her bedroom she heard the apartment door creak open, and she looked at the clock: 4:47
A.M.
Mary Beth was in Milwaukee visiting her parents, so that left Caroline.

There was no reason for Harriet to spy on Caroline. She told herself she was just bored and restless, that it was insomnia and procrastination. Her own privacy was important to her, and she would never, under normal circumstances, invade someone else's.

She shut her eyes as she went invisible. As soon as it was done she saw through her eyelids anyway, but the shift in her vision that accompanied the change—from soft color to bold two-dimensional splashes—tended to make her nauseated.

After the night at her dad's place, she'd been determined to control what was happening to her, and after a few tries she had discovered that it wasn't difficult at all. Ever since that first time she had been putting so much effort into not changing that she'd created a mental block for herself. It was a terrific relief to find that when she wanted to disappear from sight she could do it with a thought.

She hesitated before opening the door, remembering that she was in her underwear. But it was warm, and no one would see her anyway. It made no sense that her clothes should go invisible with her—she hadn't even thought about it until Mary Beth had mentioned it the other day. Mary Beth had said something about the woman in the Fantastic Four, how she had an invisible force field that surrounded her. Harriet didn't have a force field as far as she could tell, but she'd tried dressing and undressing while she was invisible; clothes she put on disappeared with the rest of her, and clothes she took off suddenly appeared.

Maybe it didn't make sense. Harriet was no science expert. But she didn't see how an invisible naked person was easier to explain than an invisible person with clothes on. Mary Beth could research the question all she liked, but it wouldn't change anything.

Harriet opened her bedroom door, careful not to make any sound. She slipped out of her room and shut the door behind her. Light came from the open bathroom, shining a flat bright yellow against the deep sky blue of the hallway. Humming came down the hall.

Harriet groped forward, trailing her hands along the wall, until she stepped on something sharp with her bare feet. She hissed involuntarily and froze.

The humming stopped, and Caroline popped her head out of the bathroom, hair blue-black against the yellow light, hot pink toothbrush held between her enamel-red lips. She looked around and then disappeared into the bathroom, humming again.

Harriet crept up to the bathroom and peeked around the corner. She had to stifle a gasp at what she saw.

Caroline was floating in midair, brushing her teeth. She rested one hand on the sea green Formica of the sink, her fingertips spread, as if she were steadying herself. She looked into her own eyes in the mirror, smiling around the toothbrush. Her bare feet hovered over the ground, purple polish glittering from the nails of her wiggling toes.

Harriet took a step back and leaned against the wall.

Caroline spit into the sink, rinsed her toothbrush, and poured water into an orange plastic cup that she kept by the sink. Then she spun in midair, her red pajama bottoms a blur of color, and laughed softly.

She started to floss, and Harriet retreated down the hall. Super strength, invisibility, flying. She tried to decide if she'd been cheated.

The party. This had all started on Sunday, the day after the party. Could Charlie or Jack have put something in the beer? That sounded crazy, but all things considered, Harriet wasn't willing to dismiss it. Maybe the party was a dead end, but she had to check into it.

She got into bed and lay awake, wondering if this was all somehow deliberate. Jack worked in a chem lab, she knew that. But how likely was it that he'd developed a formula that gave people superpowers? Then again, likelihood and probability had gone out the window the moment she looked in the mirror and saw nothing there.

She tried to sleep for an hour or so, then got dressed. She was going to be invisible again, but there was a difference between wandering around half-naked and invisible in her own apartment and running around half-naked and invisible in someone else's. She left the apartment and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

Unfortunately, being invisible couldn't get her through a locked door. She sat down on the landing and looked at her watch, but there was nothing there, of course. It must be six o'clock by now. On a Saturday. What was she doing here so early? She should go back and finish typing up her review. She should get some sleep.

There should be a hotline for things like this. Some nonprofit group. "Objects burst into flame at your touch? Can't urinate without shattering the toilet? If you've found yourself gifted with superpowers that you don't know how to use, call the Super Freaks Hotline, and we'll get you back on your way to becoming a productive member of society. Meet others like yourself. Get help with costumes and code name selection. All in a discreet environment safe from prying government agents."

She woke herself up with her snoring, and blinked at the cracked white wall of the stairwell. She was too tired to keep this up. Maybe she'd just call the boys later and ask them if they'd been going through any changes lately. Or possibly something that sounded a little less like the sort of thing a child molester might say to a sixth-grader.

She stood up just as the door opened. Jack stepped out wearing a scarlet backpack, a bright yellow T-shirt, and a pair of mercifully sober khakis. He locked the door, turned around, and vanished in a rush of air.

Harriet's breath was sucked out of her, and she struggled to breathe while the front door fell quietly shut.

Superspeed. Why did everyone else get the cool powers?

There was no point in going after Jack, but she didn't want to wait here all morning either. She squared herself in front of the door, her fist poised somewhere in front of her. She wondered if she'd left normal life far behind her already. Maybe she should simply go back to bed, pull the covers up around her head, and pretend that she was just like everyone else. Other people had mood swings, asthma attacks. She could just be the girl who disappeared every once in a while.

She knocked. When Charlie opened the door she would slip past him into the apartment while he was still trying to figure out who'd been knocking. She'd watch him for a while and see if he did anything strange. She didn't think that would be breaking and entering. It was something her father would arrest her for if he ever found out about it, she was sure of that. But she wasn't going to get caught.

She knocked again. Her heart pounded. She wasn't a sneaky person. She minded her own business. She knocked again.

She began pounding on the door in a rumba beat. The sound reassured her that her hands were still there.

When Charlie finally opened the door she reacted too late to slip past him. He crowded the doorway, squinting through her. He had grown a patchy beard since she had seen him last. He wore a tattered blue bathrobe and held a Twins cap in his hand. The inside of the cap was lined with something that looked like tinfoil.

"It's six-thirty in the morning, Harriet."

She glanced down at herself, wondering if she had become visible. She hadn't, but he wasn't looking at her—his eyes wandered, looking through her.

"It doesn't matter. I was up anyway." He sighed. "I guess I'm not the only one."

Harriet swallowed to clear her throat. "Are you reading my mind?"

"Yes." Charlie put the Twins cap on. "This helps muffle it some." He stepped back from the door. "Maybe you should come inside, so we can talk."

MONDAY 

On the bus back to Madison Mary Beth finally relaxed. All weekend she'd sat on her hands to remind herself not to touch anything. When she couldn't avoid using her hands she had been tentative and clumsy. Her mother asked if she was sick, and Mary Beth had let her believe it. It was a good excuse to avoid a potentially disastrous trip to the mall; Mary Beth hated to think what might happen if she tried too hard to fit into a pair of designer jeans. As it was, she had put a dent in the roof of the Jeep when she bumped her head on it. Her mother had been too relieved that she was OK to think about it much. "You always did have a hard head," she had said, after checking for blood.

She had played the sick card with her younger brother as well. They wrestled all the time, and until recently, when Peter had hit his growth spurt and started to get big, they'd been evenly matched. But Mary Beth didn't trust herself to keep her strength under control, so every time he punched her playfully in the shoulder she had to tell him she wasn't up to it. Besides, Peter was getting to the age when grappling with his older and not-blood-related sister might not be the healthiest thing.

She was tired of keeping secrets. She had read all the comics she'd bought, and she was overflowing with ideas that she couldn't wait to tell Harriet about. She had taken voluminous notes, even made some sketches. They were bad sketches—stick- and balloon-figured superheroines in unflattering costumes. Caroline was a better artist, but she wasn't in on the secret.

The secret was starting to feel like a box that she was trapped in. A box she could move around in but couldn't leave. A box on wheels, maybe. On Saturday her dad had struggled to drag his new grill around the house and onto the back patio. Three years before, at the age of fifty, he'd had a heart attack. Mary Beth wanted badly to go out and carry the 180-pound grill around for him, but she had read enough
X-Men
in the past five days to be afraid of how they would look at her afterward.

Despite that, Mary Beth was so excited about her new plans that she almost resented the fact that she had to be in class tomorrow. Almost. She still wanted to be a doctor. This other thing wouldn't be a distraction from that. She wouldn't let it be one.

"Bet you can't help it." Her birth mother sat in the aisle seat beside her. Wanda Benson was about ten, had pigtails, and wore a dirty T-shirt and jeans. "Doctor or superhero? That's pretty easy."

"I can do both." Mary Beth had learned back in elementary school to say the words silently to herself. Maybe her mother wasn't really there, but sometimes it was easier to talk to her than to think things through on her own.

"Bet you don't want to," said Wanda. "You didn't study for your lab at all. You read those comics all weekend."

"Nora must have thought I was losing my mind." When Mary Beth was speaking to Wanda she always referred to her adoptive mother by her first name.

"You know those people in the comics? Like Daredevil? That's not real."

"I know that."

"I'm not talking about powers," Wanda said. "I'm talking about being a lawyer and a superhero at the same time. That's totally unrealistic."

"Well, it won't be easy. Managing the time will be a definite challenge."

"Yeah. 'Specially when you become a resident and start working fourteen-hour shifts and being on call all the time. You can't just run off and leave all the sick people every time the world needs to be saved."

"Maybe."

"If I was superstrong I wouldn't be a stupid doctor. I'd make money lifting heavy stuff for people, and I'd have a secret base nobody knew about, and I'd put the bad people in a big jail in space so they wouldn't hurt any kids."

"How am I supposed to get into space?" asked Mary Beth.

"What?" The boy in the seat ahead of her turned.

Mary Beth acted like she had just woken up and told him she must have been talking in her sleep. She closed her eyes and pretended to doze off.

"I can be whatever I want," she told Wanda without saying a word. And then she did doze off, to dream of a hospital filled with balloon-figure doctors and stick-figure patients.