True Heroes (53 page)

              “Is there room next to you?”

              Her voice seemed closer again. “I have no idea. I can make some.”

              “I don’t want to force you into a corner. What is this stuff anyways?”

              Caleb closed his eyes and gently pushed boxes a little further away from his shoulder. “Stuff from my old house. You can come over if you want.”

              “Your old life? And are you sure?”

              “Yes to both.”

              She moved without touching him until her back gently hit the same wall as his. Her shoulder gently fit into the hump of his left tricep. “You were talking about Carol before? The girl whose life you think you ruined.”

              “How did you know about her?”

              “I met him the other night, and we talked. Well, I talked. He threatened. He has a stern face with no care in his eyes, cute hair, and stands as though a bear may tackle him at any moment.”

              Caleb looked ahead and down. “It’s not worried about a bear.”

              “You don’t talk to him much do you?”

              “Not on friendly terms.”

              “You should.”

              “What did you two talk about?”

              “He really must not like you….”

              “Is that what it talked about?”

              “Well, kinda.”

              “Kinda?”

              “He talked about Carol.” Alice turned and looked up to him. “About what really happened.”

              “The fine print…then you know it’s my fault.”

              “No, no, no, Caleb. That’s not your fault. You lived, she lived, and you guys just couldn’t live together.”

              “It was me. I always tried to make her perfect.”

              “Nobody can be.”

              “I thought I could be.”

              “You can’t push yourself that hard.”

              “See? You don’t know a thing about me. I can do anything.”

              “You were depressed because you couldn’t earlier.”

              “I remembered that there was still a chance for me to learn.”

              “Learn what?”

              “How to be perfect.”

              “I don’t think you can be.”

              “Why?”

              “Because….”

              “Nobody has been?”

              “Well, yeah.”

              “I’m not nobody.”

              “What’s wrong with nobody?”

              “I can do more than a nobody could.”

              “Like what?”

              Caleb stood and gently lifted the gate. Alice rubbed at her eyes as he reached down for her hand. “I’ll show you a little of it. This place is a cramp.”

              “Where isn’t cramped?”

              She took his hand hesitantly, but grasped hard. He pulled her up gently, and entwined their fingers once she was sturdy. “Tons of places. Where would you be right now if you could be, say, around the city?”

              “This is nice right here.”

              He looked down at her again, feeling her thumb brush across the back of his hand, and smiled. “Do you feel like flying with me?”

              “We aren’t now?”

              “Heh, only on one level.”

              “I can see your face now. I like this more.”

              “Me too. Pick a place.”

              “Even with the light like this I can see your whole face. Your hair keeps getting longer. I like it like this, though. We were listening to a baseball game earlier and do you know the average length of a baseball player’s hair? Like two inches. You could be a baseball player.”

              “Baseball stadium it is.” Caleb knelt down. “Piggy-back ride?”

              “To where? The stadium? There’s a game there now, but it’ll be over by time we get there.”

              “Do you want one or not?”

              “You’re going to carry me to the stadium?”

              “Do you want to get to the stadium before it closes?”

              “I told you I’m fine here.” Her other hand closed around theirs. Caleb looked up slightly and smiled warmly.

              “Trust me. We can have this anywhere. I want to show you something.”

              “Trust you?”

              “If you can, yeah.”

              She pounced on his back. They both fell forward laughing a little. “Don’t drop me.”

              “I think I can carry a Chihuahua like you.” She laughed into his ear. “I might go a little over the speed limit, so make sure you cling to your seatbelt nice and tight.” She hugged around his neck tightly as he stood. His eyes brazen blue torches seconds before his legs churned, and Alice’s gasp was lost. He held her arms around him as they ran. His feet pounced and landed upon roofs, the night sky flew endlessly before the skyline until Caleb’s mammoth steps landed them across the street from the stadium. “Look at that. We made it after all.”

              She clutched his neck still and dug her face into his skull. “Still can’t get us in.”

              “Oh, you Negative-Nancy. Are you okay?”

              “Terrified. Scared. Heart beating a lot.”

              “Yeah, I can feel it. Do you still trust me?”

              “Are you asking if scaring me to death is a good enough reason to not trust you?”

              “That would be the gist of it yeah.”

              “You didn’t drop me. I hung on and you hung on and we were going so fast.”

              “Don’t let your mind get overloaded yet. Like you said, we still have to get in.” A radio broadcast of the game blared from down the street, equivocating the collective groan of the crowd with a foul ball that would’ve been a homerun. “Hold on.”

              They jogged across the street and to the front side of a large building with a step-design at the top. “People are staring.”

              “They do that for me, not for you. Don’t be afraid.”

              “I trust you. Not them.”

              “Don’t let them carry you.”

              “I won’t.” Caleb looked around his side of the walkway. A bus passed on the road, and they shot up to the lowest of the imitation stairs. “It’s cold up here.”

              “It’ll be colder in a minute.”

              He turned back toward the stadium and gently walked across the glass until cement was under foot. The edge offered enough footing for his energy to gather, and the uncoil sent them both soaring at a controlled angle back across the street, into the stadium, allowing one foot, then the other, to land safely on the left field foul pole. The roar of the crowd engulfed them immediately as the land coincided with a homerun to the opposite field. They both looked around, Alice still clung and Caleb smiled widely. He felt her quickened breath on his ear. “I can’t see the scoreboard. How do I know whose winning?”

              Caleb let a low laugh out and shouted back to her. “Listen to the crowd. They’ll almost always tell you who’s winning. Wait, you don’t think this is crazy?”

              “It’s happening, so it’s obviously not crazy. Nobody would believe this.”

              “Yeah, that guy must be really something. He’s all you talk about.”

              She laughed again and brushed her hand against his cheek while leaning her head forward onto the nave of his neck. “Now you’re definitely not so arrogant.”

              From beneath them, a group of eyes wandered upward with pointed fingers and flashing cameras. Caleb saw them and quickly flexed into a missile, shooting down to the riverfront and back across into the neighboring state. They landed again and again, then a half block from Alice’s apartment, before she finally relinquished her grip and set her feet back to solid ground. She stepped away with a furious mumble resounding and her hands behind her back. He stepped forward, but nearly ran into her as she quickly stepped forward with her cheek to his. “I was blushing, a lot.”

              ‘She’s so…she’s here, but that wasn’t the best I could do. I could take her anywhere. She has to know that. She has to be thinking that right now. How I didn’t take her exactly where she wanted.’ He listened to her mumbles next to his ear. “So many faces, I didn’t look at any of them. I imagined his. I passed them all up for his face. Over, and over, and over. It’s his smile, then his serious face, then any face. No other face.” ‘She had a blast. But how? I wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t the best…I wasn’t who I was before. I’m still not. What is, then? Something else was perfect. Had to be.’

              “Did you have fun?”

              She pulled her face from his ear and shook her head wildly, her hair flying across her nose and lips. Caleb carefully reached up and brushed it back, suddenly feeling a petrifying core forming in his stomach. “I told you, I’m fine just being here.”

              “I don’t want you to be fine. I want you to be perfectly fine.”

              “I don’t know what that is.”

              Caleb suddenly didn’t quite know what to say. He could’ve been romantic, or arrogant, or contemplative, but his words suddenly couldn’t choose the right avenue to travel. Some avenues wandered to his fingers, making them twitch and itch, while others travelled to his feet, making his legs jittery and ill-complacent. In the end, his mind could only allow one sentence to fly into the open air: “You deserve to be perfectly fine all the time.”

              She recoiled until her head was straight enough to balance on the end of a top. “Someone will have to teach me.”

              Her voice was barely loud enough to pass the night wind’s test of endurance into Caleb’s cochlea. She had a lightness in her tone that made her seem breathless, and yet a glow from her dark eyes projected a field of zeal that engulfed further than the artificial light above them. “I’ll keep an eye out for a good teacher.”

              “Why wouldn’t you be the one to teach me?”

              “I wouldn’t make a good teacher.”

              “Why not?”

              “I don’t know my own lesson plan.”

              “Oh, you seem pretty good at learning.”

              “Not lately I haven’t been.”

              “Well, you could take some time.”

              “I was going to, but I can’t miss this chance.”

              “What chance?”

              Caleb smiled and leaned in closer. “We’ve gotta whisper when we talk about this.”

              She smiled and leaned her head a bit. “Why?”

              “It’s a very fragile thing, what I’m talking about.”

              “Tell me, then.” Her whisper was excitable and alive.

              “There’s a chance that you’re not like everybody else.”

              “That’s it?” She mocked.

              “That’s a big deal, believe it or not. Tell someone they’re not like everybody else, and they can start acting like everyone else.”

              “I couldn’t if I wanted to.” She leaned back to focus into his eyes again. “Would you sleep over? And maybe we could go do something tomorrow?”

              “Sleep over? Are we in high school?”

              She giggled. “No, but I like talking to the blue version of you too. Not as much as you, but still. It’s kinda cool, you having two sides.”

              “Not as much as you think.” He stepped back and looked up the building that grew darker by the second. “But yeah, sure. A couch beats the floor any day.”

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              “What do you mean?”

              Power sat Caleb’s body into a relaxed position. “I mean he has an annoying damper on his mind that I don’t. He said that you weren’t like anyone else, but what he meant to say was ‘You may be the girl that saves the world,’ or, more to the point, ‘There is a chance, a tiny, insignificant chance that you’re the girl that I’ll always love,’ and, apparently, that’s the difference between you and him talking and me gaining control. Percentage points.”