The Villain's Daughter : Act 02 : The Future of the Icon

Brad had filled Natalie in the night before. She made sure to be up in time to fix her a good hangover cure. It was an old friend’s recipe –essentially an omelet with the density of holiday stuffing. It used enough butter and bacon fat to kill a lesser man, but it supercharged the body with carbohydrates and protein, which would do them both some good.  She was still going to punish the girl, but in due time. There was a part of the mother that had been waiting for this moment since she was the daughter; a test of herself as a matron to handle Valerie in a more progressive way than her parents had afforded her at that point in her life. Brad had already resolved to go heavy, which Natalie didn’t necessarily mind. Regardless of her own youthful transgressions, what Valerie had done was inexcusably dangerous. The important thing—as Natalie saw it thus-far—was for Val to always know that they were allies. Brad had expressed that it might be worth his time to visit the station and follow up on how much of the entire event was going to be reported on, do the media kiss-ass thing that had become so much of his life after the last lawsuit, etcetera. It was work. Natalie’s job was to call up Aubrey’s mother and compare notes. If that went anywhere, then she could use the social networks to track down Origa and her mother, whose number was long gone from her phone. It was a moot point. Her responsibilities were to help Valerie first, and make sure Brad never lost his perspective second. She trusted Brad absolutely to have Val’s best interests at heart, but she’d seen him crack under public relations pressure before, and how over-eager to please he’d become since that humbling.

A stirring of guilt snaked its way down her spine. Valerie had a very difficult streak as a toddler, but seemed to level out in her early teens. She leaned towards the moody end of the spectrum and wanted nothing to do with her parents, but that dissociative behavior had been gold to them while they were laboring under the sudden demands of the entire planet Earth. Experience gained and the relentless, time-spurred evolution of culture had ebbed their public lives into something manageable, but now she had to contend with the possibility that her daughter and husband were about to enter ‘that phase’ of their growing relationship. There was a long-overdue talk in their future—all of them, but that wasn’t the talk currently loaded and cocked.

She sizzled and flipped and seasoned, mulling and mucking about in her head all the while until her daughter slinked down the stairs in a fashion not entirely dissimilar to a concussion victim who had acquired said injury while attempting to sling up four broken limbs. It was the stilted movements of a child who was being thrust into the entire concept of a ‘morning after’ for the first time, compounded by impending punishment. Natalie couldn’t help but giggle internally, just a little bit. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked suspiciously like Valerie had dressed in a palette that could conceivably be termed ‘domestic camouflage.’

“Morning sunshine.”

“I don’t know if I can do sarcasm right now.”

“Don’t trip too hard kiddo.”

“I have a name.”

“Don’t get sharp. You’re still going to have to answer for last night. I’m offering you a recuperative break.”

“You mean answer to dad. I don’t want to do that either.”

“Do you think you’ve got any grounds to be indignant?”

“What do you have to say about it?”

Natalie was not prepared for such a direct approach. Determined not to surrender control of the conversation, she responded immediately –off the cuff, using cadence to maintain momentum.

“Who was supposed to drive you home?”

“Origa.”

“Was she sober?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lying.”

Valerie stammered over her plate, but lost it. Composure fractured, the girl surrendered immediately. Her tone became stiff; unwavering and unapologetic—mechanical, but sincere. She told her mother the truth, minus both Aubrey’s involvement and the earlier traffic incident. She had either forgotten that the officer had already informed Brad of both of those facts, or she didn’t care. It was the standard compromise of the busted teen, as Natalie remembered it, so she let it go there and switched gears.

“You know it’s going to be a while before we let you out, right?”

“I guessed.”

“Val, when you were born, the doctor-“

“-I know. You guys worry about me.”

“It’s more than that, babe. There are sick people out there. And you not being able to defend yourself like we can—I mean, you’ve got that stick up your ass—we need to know that in—any—situation, if you need help, you come to us first. Your safety is number one with a bullet.”

“What did the doctors say?”

“They said, ‘Eat up. You’re still going to school.’”

Natalie watched her daughter and Aubrey meet up in front of the school office buildings, and returned promptly to her home and office. After a second cup of coffee, she managed to complete the task of opening the text file off of her desktop over the course of visiting six websites across two hours. Bomb goes off during halftime in Nicaragua. Critics psyched. Station to air series reboot premier immediately following finale. Nineteen dead, dozens injured. She was evaluating her performance as a parent while her eyes were distracted with these things.

Composure, weak.

Support, strong.

Fairness, yes.

It was impossible to tell. Valerie had always been the bottle-and-blow type, whereas she had always been of the ‘bottle’ and ‘blow’ persuasion. She wasn’t going to know how well she’d done until the next time something happened. In the meantime, Natalie utilized a parental control feature to turn off her daughter’s cellular internet and text capabilities. The girl was still being punished. She knew damn-well why it was such a risk.

There was no greater fear in her heart than to lose her baby. A distant second to that though, was a fear only marginally less tangible, if very much more abstract in consequence. What if she became as out of touch as her parents had been and she were to discover that Valerie was the Paris Hilton of the city –only one slip-up away from bringing a whole charade crashing down, mutilating the good faith of the world at large? Much as she hated to admit it, even quietly to herself, Valerie’s safety—just as her and Brad’s—was dependent on public image. Her mind tooled and toiled over that thought, the way you float mucus in the mouth before you spit. It was a thought that she refused to let settle and steep, lest it rip her away from the task at hand.

War, of course, meant something a little left of center for us –and it’s only with the utmost humility and respect for all soldiers that I impart my experiences to you, readers. I’ve never been in a fire fight. I haven’t even picked up a gun since I was twelve years old, and that was only when my friend Natalie (we were Nat and Talia, respectively) invited me to a range with her and her father.

What’s more, it would be dishonest of me not to say upfront that my only instincts walking into this first skirmish revolved around my own survival, rather than anything nobler. It was a far cry from my previous brush with mortality: a botched, inebriated leap off of a bridge during a spring break trip to California. The acrophobia I’ve developed since is how I learned that fear and trauma are dissociated between the adrenaline spike of the moment, and the ripples that emanate off your reflection, out of your dreams, into your future.

Appropriately, the world around our chopper was blinding. I had no feel for the time, but the sun over the ocean created an utterly blinding glare, uninhibited by anything taller than a restaurant or two along a pier dead ahead. We stood there, vision adjusting, hands and faces registering a chilled coastal breeze, and I realized that I didn’t know where we were actually going. The crew offered their luck and their blessing, before high-tailing it out of sight.

Once the scene finished loading, there were two patrol cars parked ahead with a rifle-equipped officer scoping the still-threat-less-looking shoreline. The thrum of helicopter blades was supplanted by distant chaos. This specific area seemed to have been pretty successfully evacuated, but as we ran towards the officer I could look down any intersection and see the police and Special Forces busy keeping the entire populace of Santa Cruz under control. This had two effects: one, there was a whole mess of sirens and screams and the occasional gunshot –only far away. The entire world had the volume turned down, like it was background noise for film footage that hadn’t had the foreground dialogue added. The second effect was the unmistakable notion Brad and I were alone in this.

I know.

Believe me, I know.

I know, because this is what happened next.

We approached the officer, who was expecting us. His shuddering, iron grip on the rifle betrayed the kind of stress level that I’d have normally used to justify taking a personal day, but at that point he was the only help we had, and he saved our lives. Just as Brad made to introduce us, he immediately asked if we were ‘the guys who could do what they do.’ Halfway through our meek affirmation he cut us off again: ‘Then why aren’t you doing it!?’

The three of us exploded into color. Brad and I were enveloped in the reds and blues of excitement and terror. The officer (whose name I’m withholding according to the wishes of his family) was overtaken by a solid wall of brilliant gold. The next second, the wall thrust from him to us, from its origin in the shoreline surf beyond—through—the buildings and squad car a hundred yards away. Through our own energy, the force was concussive on impact, but left me with a feeling like I was being eaten alive, through each individual layer of skin, across the entirety of my right side. The armor did nothing, just as the buildings and cars did nothing to save the officer—

[with respect to sensitive readers and family of any lives lost, the following will be my honest and graphic recollection of the effects of the Model’s aggression on the body of the man who saved our lives the moment our feet hit the ground. Please skip ahead if you do not wish to know. I’m recording this for reasons of full-disclosure and it is not information strictly necessary to the events I am relaying]

The light that eats was mitigated by our radiant displays, but I know that before, with Shepherd, and multiple times since, I had been struck unaware. It almost always knocked me unconscious immediately, so I can honestly say that I don’t believe he suffered through what his remains suggest happened. The unshielded equivalent of the burn Brad and I had endured was an exponentially—and excessively—deeper wound. While the wall of light extended both from, and to, beyond the scope of my periphery, it was the side of him that took the brunt of the strike that looked as if he had been eroded through. Like a great stone is worn down to a pebble on the beach across time beyond human comprehension or ambition, so was the body of this man instantaneously reduced to a gradient of gore-to-flesh –bore through like a welding torch digs through a steel vault. I was captivated by horror –the image permanently affixed to my identity by its sheer unnaturalness. One end of the body was still intact enough to have hair and identifiable features, while the other was a buffet of red and black and bone that smelled of rust and puss and bile.

The fact that his relatively untouched uniform was still preserved so well around the mess only added to the psychedelic dissonance that my senses were being flooded with.
[end disclosure]

A hail burst-fire went on somewhere just behind us as the wall rescinded back into the ocean. My stunned state was interrupted by Brad literally shielding my eyes from the pile of man in front of us –which turned out to be exactly what I needed to let the adrenaline kick in. We ran down the nearest cross-street. Another two cars were lit up nearby –their officers both at the doors of nearby shops trying to keep people inside. Mark Strong’s voice kicked in from a speaker somewhere on our necklines, asking us for our statuses and informing us that they were re-calibrating our suits based on—criteria, I assume. Brad wanted to help the police with the crowd control efforts because that’s what they do in the DC Universe (his words). I was about to follow him until another wall of light phased blindly through the block, separating us from each other, as well as the coffee from my bladder. I leapt back as it lurched towards me for its duration, deciding mid-stride that I needed to see this thing for myself. The wall was no louder than my own aura, but speaking into the air worked not only to communicate with our support team, but each other, so I turned into an alleyway and made my way towards the beach. My thoughts and feelings were overloaded and overcrowded, but I remember that instant well, because, while the scope was comically outside my range, forcing myself to do something that scared me (I refer you again to a bridge I jumped off once) was a feeling I understood.

And then I reached the beach.

There was a boardwalk down the shoreline from me, and a pier the other way. I didn’t actually see them though, because I was distracted by the single most beautiful thing I ever killed.

A small sun was walking out of the ocean.
What I had initially perceived to be a morning sunrise or evening sunset, was in fact a semi-transparent layer of the light that had been assaulting us around an obscure, gigantic silhouette. The weather, incidentally, was a thick blanket of featureless cloud that did nothing to help. The Model noticed me immediately, but as the light intensified between us (the water waiting patiently in accordance with the field) I remember being stunned by how sapient it looked. I don't know what I was expecting at the time. Godzilla, perhaps. A dragon. I was not expecting something fucking clothed. 
So the wall hit me square in the dumbstruck, energy-shielded entire front half of me and things were going black as I collapsed. The last thing I registered that wasn't being-eaten-alive-feeling was a sharp stab in my back, near center.
And I passed out.
Again.
But then I woke up. 
It turned out that the prick in my back was my suit, newly re-calibrated, injecting twelve thousand dollars worth of the good stuff straight into my spine. Everything after that moment became simple -not in effort, but morally. My fight-or-flight lever had been kicked into Kill and broken off at the base. The heat that pumped through my veins made me feel like I was actually on fire. The Model was completely ashore now, and it's glittering bubble began to focus all its radiance into a single point. I wanted to try shielding myself again, thinking I was getting the drift of concentrating it in other means than over my hands, but my 'something is different' instinct prevailed and I leaped blindly to the side as a sliver of something more tangibly audible than physical exploded a measure of parkway beyond me.
The noise (to say nothing of the whole 'exploding lasers' thing) should have cleared out my bowels, but the cocktail I was running on assured me that every cell was at full attention. Nothing was going to out-fight me. Not even a nine foot tall humanoid exaggeration in space-Spartan-wear with a sun for a force-field. I charged, hand engaged and straight ahead of me. I was going to find out real quick whether or not I could go through that field.
I could. 
He still hit me. 
It took both arms to keep him from breaking me in two, but he just exerted -more- force when I cushioned and sent me back three feet into the surf. It readied to wall me again as I scrambled up, but turned it at the last second towards a thrumming I hadn't consciously registered, but turned out to be Mark Strong's chopper advancing. The blast went blindly between us, at which time opened automatic fire from below the cockpit. My ears started ringing, but I watched as a burst of bullets the size of my hand poured through it (him, in case you were wondering) like streaks of boiling water through butter. Literally, the bullets brought chunks of gore with them in round rivulets that just slowed, flickered, and appeared back where they belong as the bullets exploded into the sand and bore their way to hell. For five seconds it's entire anatomy was spilled out before me and re-positioned like a clipping graphic. No one had specified to me just how conventional weapons 'didn't work,' but just watching it happen churned my stomach into such knots that I thought for a moment that I was going to vomit and pass out, in no particular order. 
And then I felt the prick of dose number two.
While that kicked in, the Model tried to swat the helicopter (which had ceased firing once it had its attention) again, which freed me up to see Brad running towards me, as fast as he could manage. For everything these suits had to offer us, they did precisely dick to ease running in dry sand.
So the helicopter was a distraction. I tried to verify this, but no one answered. 
So I winged it, and tackled the Model before it was able to retrain its attention on me. I didn't have enough force to completely topple it, so I wrapped myself around it as best I could and started stabbing it frantically wherever I could manage. A wail of deep base that's felt more than heard, and an elbow came down hard on my back, sending me straight down. 
I knew I had to move, but sand went in every hole in my head, and I was still nauseous. I bong-coughed and rolled, hoping against hope that my skull wasn't about to be crushed. Instead, a crash, as Brad, seeing how well it worked for me, also opted for hurling himself into the giant. They hit the sand next to me and I lunged over the sand towards the pile. Brad was taking his turn at stabbing near where my light had begun eating him already. I found myself face to face with it. Its headdress had fallen off somewhere, and it's over-sized eyes with their shifting, amoeba-like iris' focused on me like a camera lens with strange lids that blinked inwardly to submerge the eyes. I blasted it in those eyes with as much power as I could still muster, and its mouth revealed itself in another vibrating roar. Without discernible lips, the mouth sealed when it wasn't reacting. I couldn't tell what was further down the rabbit hole, but it gave me an idea. Brad landed the next blow on its chest. His fist stopped at the bruised and wet skin, but his sky-blue aura was digging, burning, inspiring it to scream -at which point I shoved my red hand down it's throat. 
I didn't expect to go so deep. I -should- have expected Brad to take a knee to the back and be sent hurtling into me. If I had, the bones in my forearm wouldn't have snapped like a veteran at a fireworks display.

That warranted two more pricks, but for the next sixty seconds I was yelping like a dog. Brad saw my forearm buried past the wrist and managed a few expletives as I pulled out. The bones were snapped, leaving the hand (my favorite part of the arm, personally) to hang limp –my fingers occasionally twitching from my free-floating tendons. That was the good part; the part that told me that my arm was still being held together by more than just a sleeve. The bad part was a little higher up where blood was slowly, but steadily seeping out of the frayed and sawed-up threads where his teeth had managed deeper than I was comfortable with, all the way around too, like those aperture eyes. Even as numb as I was, the eating was still present. Vibrations were slowly digging into me from the shoulder that took the brunt of hit number one, now compounded by all the teeth and throat damage of this latest one.

It was about this time that either the second wave of drugs kicked in, or the three of us all seized this moment to take a breath. I know it was the former, but I prefer to think it was the latter. I looked at his face again, and remembered that Richard had once described them, rather flippantly, as human perversions, and he was right. All of the core relatable features were accounted for: eyes, mouth, penis, etc. I don’t remember seeing nipples under the vestiges of clothing, and the appendages reminded me more of owl talons than my own hands and feet, but fuck if I wouldn’t have watched a movie about these things. In that moment I was compelled to try and feel sympathy for it (I know, it was the drugs).

I tried, but I couldn’t.

I was going to kill this thing, and after three doses of federally-approved PCP, I could do it. Brad moved to straddle his chest and dig into his head repeatedly. It grabbed his head with one monstrous hand and pried him off. I saw the agony on his face and went for its lower spine with my good arm. I was told later that my aura was an inferno by now. I don’t know if the drugs were acting as a catalyst for it, or if it was a tangible expression of the love and empathy I have for my then-future husband. I know it was, but I prefer. Either way, my blow went deep. By the time my fist made contact, the light had already eaten past a few layers of skin.

He felt it.

Brad dropped, (medicated), and came back swinging, taking advantage of its attentions and holy glowing fists being directed at me. I moved as well as I could, but eventually had to brace for a hit, confident that a direct hit to the head would end me. Sure enough, I couldn’t dodge in time, but by the time contact was achieved, most of the momentum was absent, because the Model was dead. The limp corpse persuaded me into the sand, pinning me under its dead weight. Brad came down on top of that, his hands still clenched around the innards of the throat that he had burned out.

That seemed as good a time as any to give her wrist a break. She lifted her bad arm up from her lap and used it as a prop for her typing hand while she cycled through a series of exercises that would purportedly stave off carpal-tunnel syndrome. It also couldn’t hurt to clean her customized, one-handed keyboard. In building up her typing proficiency to just under her school-day, dual-handed speeds, Natalie had grown to suspect that she was also shedding skin at an equally-accelerated rate.

The withered, paled-to-gray vestige needled under the weight of her dancing fingers. After fifteen years feeling was finally beginning to creep back in, so she ran through a short burst of finger-to-thumb taps to gauge progress. It didn’t take long for the pin sensations to begin their steady ascent towards her shoulder, forcing her to quit, lest she get the remnants of her bicep locked in a tense state of agony again. Still, it was a positive sign. A tedious, laboriously-slow sign, but nonetheless a hint of potential. She pondered as much, absently fingering the wedding band hanging from her necklace with her good hand. The damage had initially worked its way up from the point of injury, weakening the muscles, constricting the blood vessels, outright killing the skin cells. Fear of alien poisons had almost led to complete surgical removal from the shoulder down, but then it stopped –its appetite sated with just the arm. Fifteen years ago the assault had ceased, and fifteen years later, the healing process seemed to be beginning –the internal process having manifested more in dreams and moods, because of neural and chemical processes that Natalie was just too disinterested in to research herself. She made a mental note to tell her mother, who was always interested in these things, but elected to do so later. By now she had learned that the spread of good news did nothing to mitigate the tedium of her mother’s ‘theories.’

Perhaps she would tell her if/when it became healthy enough to put the ring back on.

*

What was already going to be a long day at school became an obnoxiously drawn-out exercise in autonomous isolation. On the one hand, Janice and Sean were predictably absent, but distressingly, so was Aubrey, and since Valerie’s mother had turned her phone into a brick, she was effectively alone.

All day she kept her eye out for anyone she recognized from the party –someone to talk to about it. None of the few others that the girl was casually friendly with had heard about it, which made sense. They didn’t exactly travel in the same social networks, so she refrained from bringing it up, instead electing to spend her lunchtime catching up on her history homework and taking snapshots of it, just in case she re-established contact with Aubrey later that day.

She did not.

Instead, her evening was composed of equal parts her mother’s ellipsis-laden lectures that were tantamount to “look, we get it, but come on,” and her father’s low-intensity, Snake-Plissken-as-Ben-Kenobi “the world is a dangerous place” speech, which always struck her as incongruous to their insistence of keeping her in public school. It was the kind of evening that made her think that maybe she was taking care of herself, because she was still at an age where words like ‘bills’ and ‘debt’ required a conscious effort to remember, or perhaps because kidnap, rape, and death were still things that only happened in media –within the parameters of a screen.

Once she had escaped to her room, her options were still limited. The guitar wouldn’t be worth the argument, but without the wireless or anything new to read, her choices included prime-time television and window gazing. The lack of a follow-up with the girls was boiling under Valerie’s skin.

But then tomorrow came, and she had Aubrey again. Poor Aubrey, whose mother had kept her home whilst she scoured her bedroom with an inconsistently-skewed understanding of the word ‘consent.’ Lillian’s parenting technique was torn between her daughter’s modernity and her own mother’s Catholic fundamentalism. By that same rule of coin-toss chance, Aubrey at least had her phone. Apparently the Sea Scouts were an obligation, rather than a hobby.

Lucky or clever;

Sometimes both, never neither;

Was Valerie’s Bard;

Her father had said that once about her.

“So, she really thought you were trying to jump her claim? That’s beautiful –says so much about her.”

“Like what?”

“Like, she thinks he’s actually hot. He looks greasy.”

“It’s bottom shelf hair dye.”

“It’s bottom shelf, period, but let’s not forget about the cunt attached to that asshole. What are you gonna do about Jan?”

The only time that either of them had seen the two that day, they were sneaking off-grounds at the same busted fence line as the other smokers at lunch. Valerie never saw them in class. Aubrey had seen Sean in geometry, but had uncharacteristically elected not to intervene in her friend’s problem. That restraint told Valerie that her friend considered the affair to be—that—important, but what was she going to do? Fight her? Get suspended and then wait for the bitch to exact her vengeance? Something told her that she’d lose an arms race pretty quickly, as the dignity of restraint had never been one of Janice’s strong suits even when they were friends.

When the band had decided to “Jett up” and straddle the metal end of rock and roll, Janice proposed that they get matching tattoos, but they were twelve, so the plan devolved into heating the metal top of a lighter and burning smileys into their legs. Janice went first, and to the extent of Valerie’s knowledge, she still had a small, smiling scar on her left calf. Valerie couldn’t work up the nerve, so Janice took the initiative and, armed with the element of surprise (always a dangerous combination), struck her leg while the metal was hot. That was the most literal of a series of burns that severed the two. Aubrey, in her pre-“fuck it, I’ll do anything” lifetime, made an attempt –so as not to be blind-sided the same way, only to succumb early enough to be the only one to walk away without a permanent mark.

And in typical fashion, what had started out as a productive mental exercise quickly abstracted into Valerie’s next question.

“Do you think I could pull off a Mohawk?”

“You want to shave your head?”

“God no, I was just thinking I could layer the top into something I could spike up. It’d be like something I could do for shows?”

“We have shows now?”
"No, but I know Dave Sibly's band played at the billiards club-"
"-Pool hall."
"Snooker pub."
"Burn in hell-"
"-and all they had to do was wear under-eighteen wristbands. I just thought about it and it made me kinda want to 'Jett up.' What do you think?"

Aubrey stopped in her tracks and looked as if she were tasting her next words on their way out.

"We have to write our own songs then. At least a few."
"Fair. We also need a formal name."
"I already told you my last idea."
"We're not calling ourselves 'Killing With Kindness.'"
"No, not that one. But really, 'Kay-Dub-Kay' -don't knock it til you try it."
"Like lesbianism?"
"Or heroin."

The next day dropped both Janice and Sean back into frame, but it was easily more awkward than tense. Janice had a visible twitchiness about her that Valerie suspected was a heightened defensive trait on the off-chance that she took a swing at her, but she had no intention of taking that bait with or without the slimy schizo being ready. Her revenge still needed prep-time. Also, a plan.
Later, Sean made one of his rare appearances in class. He didn't address her, but she was vaguely nervous that he would try to talk to her again and keep the shit stirred. In a decidedly paranoid fit, Valerie decided that he was definitely sneaking glances at her, but that could have very likely been a reaction to her own unverified subtlety.
Days went by. Just before 'weeks,' he approached her. Whilst his attendance had slightly improved, Valerie and Aubrey had been practicing, mostly. Her parents could only hold an angry posture for so long, since Valerie's anti-social habits voided the targets of traditional admonishment. Once they caved on Aubrey's welcome, life had resumed its old functions -like a stagnant pond. Movies and internet deprivation had only served to make focusing on their instruments that much easier. All was quiet on the horizon. Then Sean said this:

"You punched Jan square in the chest for telling a bunch of bible-thumpers you were a witch."
"Their parents picketed the school!"
"It was seventh-fucking-grade."
"But one anonymous bastard lies that I did something—magical—and four kids got to stay home for three weeks?"
"Four fucking Catholic cunts–"
"–thought I was a demon."

She brushed past him, because that seemed like a cool exit, wondering whether or not she should have said 'fucking demon' –eventually deciding that he had sworn enough for both parties. What the hell was his angle? He kind of postured himself like he was above her and Janice's mutual hatred. He approached Aubrey next, but the two got side-tracked talking about musicals, of all things. Then Janice showed up, didn't say a word, then the late bell struck.

"Musicals? Really?"
"Yeah, the classics."
"How do you have an entire tangent –let alone conversation, about musicals?"
"Woman, you say I can't appreciate art–"
"–I said you had no appreciation for subtlety."
"You are gonna become such a slut."
"Subtlety is not prudish!"
"Seriously, like, you're gonna have an asshole like Holden's fucking catchers mitt."
"Am I flinching?"
"Poetry and all."

Valerie was just about to correct her friend on the type of glove she was referencing, and give her shit for it being such a reach in the first place (she had probably been saving that simile since they finished the book last semester), but then the smell hit her. Aubrey was stoned out of her mind.
At home, the song-writing had come to a dead halt. Fed up with writers block, she felt it was time to get creative –to take steps. These steps were pretty precise, and included:
Four shots of her father's "hidden" brandy (mixed with a fuck-ton of cranberry juice),
An old German gas mask with the straps missing,
A specific playlist (four days in the making), and
Total darkness.
As a bonus, the weather had been getting chilly lately, and icing her room seemed like it would suit her purposes nicely, but she had never tried this before. She compartmentalized the entire exercise as a 'trial run,' the ever-vigilant defense against high expectations. So that night, an hour after her parents turned in for the evening, Valerie crept her way down to the kitchen, and then to the study to mix her drink. Then back to the kitchen for more cranberry. Back in her room, she downed the glass as quickly as she could manage and shed her two excessive layers. Sure enough, the room was terribly cold.
Perfectly cold. To finish, she discarded her remaining articles, put in her ear buds, turned out the lights. Lent speed by the setting goosebumps, she teleported under the sheets, which the cold had deigned to give the texture of a full-body razor blade, and pressed the mask to her face until it settled roughly where she wanted it.
As track number one began its practiced ooze into her ears, filling the crags and cracks of her brain like a gelatin mold of cold infinity, her limbs stuck to her ribs for heat, and the pepper-minty fog of her breath snaked under the folds of Yuri, her space face, and the boundless black of space sauntered into her bloodstream for a dance. Valerie tried her best to meditate –which was more of a physical imitation than a mental process, but that was what the brandy was for.
Space.
Infinite space, with infinite spaces.
Valerie's space had infinite colors. She had been so let down when she learned that colored space photos were precisely that. This construct was her improvement on the universe. Herds of orange and yellow meteorites trailed in every direction, trekking sunlight to regal and crimson galaxies beyond the ancient-copper and ocean-rich constellations that mingled naked and freely for moments of eternity. It was cold, and calculated, and beautiful in the way that only nature knows how to be: efficient.
This was the space that Valerie chose for herself, and it was there that she began the infinite gesture of transcribing what the Universe meant. Surely there'd be a song in that.
There wasn't that night, but somewhere in the middle of "When Doves Cry," the girl accomplished the task of transiting Her Place seamlessly into Her Dream. This had advantages –not the least of which being her own space pod, which she kept in a comfortable orbit parallel to the emerald ice rings of of a truly heavenly body –decidedly purple, but that really undersold the breadth of the spectrum on display. The penumbra of the rings began to expand, and suddenly her vessel had gone from skirting the surface of the rings, to aggressively outmaneuvering the mountains of ice like a three-dimensional game of Asteroids.
As is the fashion of dreams, what had started out as an overly-simplistic task rose in aggression like a climbing temperature. She started taking scrapes and hits from the charging glaciers, and it occurred to her that she didn't know how to drive anything more complicated than a bicycle. Her new objective became to dive below the belt and land safely on the planets surface, but the tides rose in direct opposition, finally knocking her spinning off like Darth Vader at the end of "A New Hope."
All systems failing, she could only watch as the ice developed intent -deviating from their orbital paths into a uniform dot-matrix across the entire surface area of the planet's atmospheric layer. The scope of the mineral army created a brilliant contrast of colors -greens and violets composing a texture that Valerie could only describe as 'evolved,' or 'symbiotic.'
Then the debris collapsed inwardly, exploding against the surface of the entire body so that all the lonely astronaut could glean was mountainous boil-bursts of smoke -the particles of which may well have been entire mountains, and over the next thousand years the planet settled, and the stains began to set. As the chaos became history, the geography braced for the futile war against the future.
The thousands of years that was the change were as the sand granules from an hourglass shattered on the beach. It's magnitude was dwarfed by the functionally-infinite expanse of time, which, by the wisdom of utter neutrality, made the entire event feel horrifyingly sudden, in a sickeningly fair way.
But it was beautiful to gaze upon this new body. The blue-violet continents waged against the steady consumption of the invading yellow-green oceans that had once been the loyal satellites. Valerie didn't know whether she had caused this to happen, or if it mattered, but it was too much to answer for. She didn't know what was going on, and the passive role that she had been assigned embittered her to almost the same degree that she felt obliged to watch. It was maybe ten years into the thousand that she had decided that she owed the star her attentions. She could decide how she felt about it later; this is what was happening, and she wasn't going to miss it.
Perhaps this was the birth of Her Earth in Her Universe. Was the preceding transition the end of Her dinosaurs?
Her civilizations?
Did it matter –any more than her role in it all? Does creation warrant ownership?
Valerie felt the tissue of her heart swell thick and harden. The panic was setting in. Her breaths began to labor, and for the first time since the systems failed did the girl consciously taste the carbon dioxide and farts of her steel audience ball. She was nauseous, the newly settled world in the window didn't matter anymore. Abstraction became abstraction and she abstract- a ~`'
She woke up with a headache.
Valerie's evenings started to open up as Aubrey slowly morphed into 'Aubrey and Andrew.' Somewhat ironically, her mother seemed pleased that her social circle had expanded by two entire units, which was a gyp. Andrew and she didn't really have anything in common; the conversations were completely autopilot. He was really more of a status effect, or an accessory, than a unique identity. As a couple, they shared a strange way of communicating. A verbal rendition of the otherwise-associated mental or physical notion of pressing really hard into one being. They weren't finishing each others sentences, or anything similarly alarming, but maybe this was how those things began? She didn't feel all that necessary sometimes, but it seemed to be a fine enough thing.
Josh, meanwhile—while still not an established identity of his own yet—had become an activity. After an initial awkward period, the two found a common ground in online multiplayer games, so they exchanged ID's and interacted with each other that way, rather than in person. Definitely the better option. He still had a tendency to press her about her parents in real life. Dude could rock a physics puzzle though.
But still, her physical presence had fewer places to be, and boredom made it harder to ignore how empty her day was without the guitar, video games, or friends. She couldn't focus for too long on a movie without at least Aubrey , and she refused to go to the theatre alone for implicit reasons. One of those restless nights Valerie resigned herself to the fruitless thought loop that was 'dating.' Origa couldn't get up this way too often anymore, for more and more dubious reasons. Aubrey and she just assumed that she was with one of those two guys she was—always—with. And now Aubrey was doing the Andrew thing.
For the most part, Valerie considered herself more bored than unhappy, but that was certainly being exacerbated by more and more of her social network devoting more and more of their time to more and more of each other's surface areas. All of which she had no problem with, save for the fiery elephant that followed her into every social situation. It didn't help that her parents had become pretty shameless about milking it. For all her mother talked about returning to her "studies," she still seemed to spend most of her time at home, or with her father at business parties. Supposedly, they were more social and less "business"-orientated years back when, but then they stopped being able to relate. This, to the daughter's mind, explained both why she was lonely, and they weren't. It was the 'they' part –and what they shared: discretion. She used to think it was subtlety, and that the money was what made them different. Eventually, she came to understand celebrity. Outside, they did whatever they could to please –which probably explained why her mother finally agreed to write a book. The movie had simply been in production hell for reasons that were explained to her once, but forgotten –because it rarely came up.
They talked about normal things at home: local events, colleges, whatever was on the paper's website. Lately, her mother started bringing up her drivers license again, having seen a glimpse of fun in her daughter's life as a result of the cop ride home –which was in itself frustrating, if only because it kept Janice's accusations fresh in her head. So instead of looking at this as an opportunity to broaden her options, her attitude towards her parents bittered.
Then synchronism took effect, and Valerie decided to talk to Sean, instigating a vicious thought experiment: perhaps she could be an 'other woman.' Could that potentially solve both of her problems? Sean was smarter than Janice, but still dumb enough to date her in the first place. Maybe his sudden interest in their past was an opportunity. Discretion came with the territory of cheating, and she could probably forgive Janice a little more readily with an ace like that up her sleeve.
Suddenly Valerie wasn't bored. Her imagination took a turn for the noir, as she mentally indulged scenarios around her room. She was fully expecting to lose wind from her sails via logistics or a general confidence-deficiency, but on paper it seemed like an alarmingly valid option. What actually knee-capped her fantasy was a family vacation photo on her dresser. Specifically, it was her father's 'fuckin' hero' shirt (that he no longer wore outside) that gave her pause. She was hero-spawn, after all, and an already, arguably, despicable thought like that was unarguably unbecoming of such prestige. Fuck.

Public Urinal

Damned are the rebels with their cigarettes and coffee.
Damned are the lovers with their wine and their toffees.
Damned are the poets with their pens and guitars.
I bless their dreams, and their fears, and their scars.

To rest lay the workers, calloused and cold.
To rest lay the designers, their realities sold.
To rest lay their pets, their affairs, their television sets.
I bless their sweat, and their tears, their regrets.

Break free of the laws, of men and of gods.
Break down the walls of the eve and the dawn.
Break everything near you and build something new.
I bless the attempt, the ascent, the purview.

I implore you don't settle for the comfort of touch.
I beseech you don't miss anything in the rush.
I beg you don't surrender to the wills of the dead.
I bless the deepness, the speed, and The End.

Together, we'll build with the tools in your shed.
Together, we'll forge the new world from my head.
Together, our home will be a place where we could
Bless, instead of love, and do any good.

A Watch Without a Face

I wind it every day and put it back in my vest pocket.

I smooth out the kinks in the chain.

I can hear it’s every beat

But it can’t provide me stead.

Watches are like people.

They need faces to be read.

People tell me that I keep not-dying

Like it’s a prize that I keep winning.

I keep ticking, though

My usefulness has been stripped.

It lives in an old vest pocket.

The hanger that it sits on knows

About the watch without a face.

My body is composed of cogs

And tiny metal things.

If you prod them they will misalign.

No amount of winding will replace

The precision and magnificence

Of vest-clad engineering.

The tinkering and crafting

Via snapping and the winding of

Every steely nerve inside the casing

Bears the stamp of their production.

I do not own the pieces.

I just tick and tock at meaning

Until the day the winding ceases.

Who Aren't You?

Every empty eggshell must be painted
Every empty Liquor Bottle shines
God saw fit to give her all his Glory
Her hollow body cracked and smelled divine.

My senses were betrayed by my own ignorance
Inarticulate, again
I'm hostage to the whore
I wrested all the contents of her stomach
For she was far too weak to tend to mind.

I can taste her cigarettes in every tear
That traces every scar that she's too scared to show to God
Lest she lose His love
His grace, the longing gazes
Of the Men Who Tip in Hundreds at the door.

I used my same old key to store my guilt inside her precious borrowed time
And time again I'll come inside and leave behind my crime

And I'll ask her why she paints her empty eggshells
In the fractured light of seafoam bottled lines.

A Toast

Pull out every word by wire
My throat is a foot-long scar

Less and less willing to fish for bricks
When every breath is a pregnant pause

My sincerest thanks for my dearest friends
Compose my immodest wall of stone

Heavy, heavy furniture
For my inarticulate cell
In my unsung home
On this nondescript planet
Of wet and heavy rocks

Let's break our finest china
And all the honest glasses
For our friends, dear, dead, forgotten
We'll pour our wine in something rotten

There's far too little mud left
To keep hidden from the heat

And there's far too few around me
To utilize as meat

Wet, smacks, red and raw
Protein kisses keep me strong
Devour holes of teeth and gnashes
The honest truth from filthy gashes

The Villain's Daughter : Act 01 : Instruments and False Idols

The history class was winding down for the year. Having finally made it from the early eighteenth century to the mid twenty-twenties, Ms. Briar was relieved of the abused, dated textbooks and could finally catch up on her crime novels while the sophomores of King’s High watched news footage from when they were still nursing. Four of the twenty-two students were absent. By her estimation, two of them were getting stoned on the outskirts of the school grounds, along the river somewhere, like she had done all too-many times while she attended. They were absent because their futures were already forfeit. Educators develop this intuition after as long as she’d taught. Valerie was probably ducked away in the school library until the bell rings, and Aubrey would be there because the two never entered or left the classroom without each other.

               

“-the month-long engagement ended in America, freeing Bradley Pencheck and Natalie Beatrix to join Shuya Takami and Jurgen Faire, fresh from their respective victories in Busan and Linz, in Novoaltaysk, where the last assailant, dubbed by Beatrix as a ‘Model of Light,’ was exterminated after a stand-off that prolonged the engagement by almost another full month.”

               

Briar dog-eared her paperback and made sure that everyone’s eyes were open. Most of them were engaged in unsubtly texting each other, but the footage consisted of mostly well-circulated photos, so she turned the brightness of her computer down low and did a quick web search for details about the movie that was supposedly in the works. Having seen this footage for the last four years straight, she piqued just before the audio queue that switched to footage from the Geneva Convention, where the eight war heroes and baby Valerie were receiving their medals from a world in the denouement of the “Electric Fires.”

               

“The world is grateful to these men and women, united to each other only by their strange and enticing abilities, and we here at Bay Area News are proud to say that three years after the Electric Fires, Brad Pencheck is here in the studio to give a candid interview to our own Donald Kalgren to answer your questions.”

Briar internally groaned –a knee-jerk reaction to hearing anyone say “Electric Fires” out loud. It was perhaps the most undignified and blatantly marketed term for warfare since World War I, but at least “The Great War” didn’t sound like the name of a college band.

               

“We join them now.”

                 

The anxious bustle of an entire class waiting for the lunch bell rose, so Briar threatened to quiz them tomorrow to shut them up. The room got noticeably darker as about ten cell phones shut off in unison. While she understood why Valerie would opt out of attending today, the rest of the students might have pretended to be more attentive if she were at her desk and Briar could’ve been more attentive to her book. As it stood, she was going to have to re-read this chapter tonight before correcting the stack of papers on her desk. She had tried to read after grading a few times, but critiquing the passionless efforts of sixteen year-olds had escalated over the years from being merely depressing, to headache-inducing.

“Thank you again for being here tonight, Brad. I trust everything is well with Natalie?”

“Yeah, yeah, Talia’s fine. She’s taking care of the kid though; cold.”

“Of course. Our best to her, and the little one.”

“We appreciate that.”

This is the point where she typically tuned in. From three years after the war, Brad had relaxed from young and well-muscled into a more refined, family man. Lean and just casual enough to make it seem effort-less –though, he hardly looked comfortable in the interview itself. It was charming to see the man react to being dropped into instant celebrity. More recent interviews and appearances kept her informed that he was aging well, though Valerie’s grades precluded her from any excuse to arrange a meeting. Sophomore high school history classes hardly had medal ceremonies.

“And speaking of young Valerie, many of our viewers are curious: Is it true that she was born ‘on the field of battle’?”

“Not quite, no. Because of the circumstances, Talia was almost two months along before we found out that she was expecting, so Jurgen and I moved her to the local hospital in Novoaltaysk.”

“Where the last stand was made?”

“We hadn’t realized that the Models were hunting us yet, so yes. Unfortunately, the fight was brought to the inner-city.”

“And we all know how it ended from there-“

None of these students were old enough to remember the incident. Movies and the more sensational news stations referred to it as a war, but Briar, as a history enthusiast and teacher, couldn’t bring herself to agree, or particularly care. She was still in college fifteen years ago, and the situation was too ‘present’ to be worth her time. That part of her life was encased in glass, and to peer into it would require looking beyond the grimy streaks and stains of every love, death, depression, job, orgasm, achievement, and resignation that led her to this desk.

Or, possibly, the romantic nature of eight men and women fighting beings from Beyond Reason, while she was trapped between bills, boyfriends, and purpose, had left her bitter at how unnecessary she was to the historical event of her lifetime. Brad and Natalie were only two years older than she, and soon the movie will be out, and she won’t have a part.

“-One of the other most-asked questions we’ve received from viewers is one you’ve fielded before.”

“We don’t know where they came from, or why we can do what we do. I know it’s frustrating, but trust me, it’s infinitely more frustrating to us.”

“You’re daughter-“

“-Valerie.”

“Yes. She’s almost four now?”

“That’s right. Four in two months.”

Valerie is fifteen. Fifteen, with an ‘A’ in U.S. History, and her mother’s nose and hair. That’s really about as much as Briar could offer of the child. Quiet, thin, and almost as pale as the ginger that never left her side. Briar was very keen on meeting the little thing when she first found out that she would be seeing her -but unlike her father, Valerie displayed little of what could be called an identity. Even the other students seemed to have grown used to her. Nowadays, they don’t even stare all too much.

“Has she exhibited any signs of the same abilities?”

“No. She’s a bright kid, but so far, no. Whatever the greater context of that war may be; it seems to have—mercifully—not passed to her.”

*

Valerie and Aubrey were in Bocco Burger while the film played. Aubrey was enjoying her meal. Valerie, indulging. Her eating habits had changed when she figured out that no meal would fill her out the way it did her friend. Still, today was a day for side-stepping her prerogative in favor of avoiding the gossiping masses. If people were going to talk about her—and they were—she preferred not to witness. Unexpectedly though, she was quite happy today. The mid-morning sun was right on their table, making the grease off their trays glimmer as the two chatted amicably between mouthfuls. The only offense to the girls’ deep-fried serenity were the two other boys violating the social contract by taking the booth right next to theirs, despite the utter emptiness of the building, doing whatever delinquents do, just behind Aubrey’s head.

Still, it was a good moment. Valerie fetched a water bottle out of her satchel as she composed a proper summation:

“This is kind of gross, but I love it anyway.”

“Aw, that’s how I feel about you!”

“I think that says more about you than me.”

“Hell yes. You’re greasy, and smeared in ketchup, and I love you regardless.”

“So, then, you should…”

Aubrey paused while she decoded the insinuation. Valerie stole the beat to wipe her mouth, in case there really was ketchup. There wasn’t. Other things that weren’t: noise from the boys behind the red-head, subtlety from the cashier staring at the back of Valerie’s head, a band called Noise From the Boys.

“Shit, I soft-balled that one on in.”

“I’ll let you pass this time.”

“Let me pass? Bitch, I’ve got a season pass. Speaking of which, there’s still twenty minutes of

fourth period, then lunch, so, wanna sneak into a movie?”

“Even if a bus comes by in five minutes, we’d never make it back in time for fifth.”

“Aw, I thought we were avoiding class today?”

“I’m avoiding fourth today. I can’t watch another one of those documentaries about my parents. It’s not like we were actually doing anything.”

“You are such a pussy.”

Perfect unison between strangers involved in separate conversations doesn’t happen very often. Indeed, it had never happened to either Aubrey or the boy before now. Both spun around to face the other, reflecting amused grins while Valerie and the second boy stared awkwardly at each other, then their friends. Their shared moment of being respectively chastised was happily dropped. The four exchanged names and schools. The one Aubrey spoke to was Andrew, a sixteen year-old of Jamaican heritage. He played the cello and insisted that his parents were nigh-unintelligible through their accents, which Joshua—not Josh—seconded, saying little about himself. He insisted that he could be efficiently encompassed by the words Metal-Head (not evident), Stoner (not evident), and Kinda-Jewy.

A vote was passed and Valerie found herself on another city bus, trying and failing to telegraph to Joshua that he was grating her patience. There are only a few feats capable of making an awkward conversation worse. By far the most intimate to her, was to have this conversation for the sixth time.

This week.

“So, you’re really Valerie?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s cool. Hey, listen, can you-“

“No.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“That’s still fucking crazy. You’re—hero spawn—!”

“Or, I could be an artist.”

“Like a painter?”

“Or a sculptor.”

“Do you sculpt?”

“No.”

“Paint?”

“No.”

“Well, what do you do?”

“I play guitar.”

This would mark the intermission of the conversation. Sometimes this is the part where Valerie would talk about the kind of music she likes to play, or listen to. Pink Floyd and Joan Jett. Sometimes the conversation would branch out from there into fashion trends of the era, or other artists that were inspired by the classics that she would look up later. That was how she discovered Mike Patton and The Black Keys. Who hasn’t seen The Wall? The Yoshida Brothers are touring the U.S. soon. Sometimes this is the part where Valerie makes a new friend. Today, she met another fan who was struggling with a realization that she had experienced a long time ago:

She hadn’t done a goddamned thing to earn his admiration.

“That’s cool. I play a little drums. Really heavy stuff.”

“Megadeth heavy, or Ammon Amarth heavy?”

“You listen to metal?”

“A little. Not much.”

“Hey, can I ask you something different?”

“…What?”

“Have you ever seen your parents do that… that thing? The fire thing?”

Before ‘The Electric Fires’ had been stuck by the media, her parents never had a name for it. The first time she had ever experienced it, she was terrified. Brad and Natalie were going out to dinner. She was four, and Brad was holding her because she would incessantly tug at her mother’s earrings. These were the days when paparazzi were a daily occurrence, and a night when they were particularly bold. Upon exiting the car, camera flashes rained down on them in a blinding fervor, and it took only minutes of this before she had to bury her face in her father’s coat. Brad is well-known today for his willingness to compromise with the media. He will gladly acquiesce to questions and cameras and smug mustaches if it will allow his wife and daughter their privacy, but this was the first of two instances where his patience with the salivating cameras broke. At that age, Valerie was well acquainted with the warmth and darkness of her parent’s clothes. Spotlights and bright flashes had engendered a Pavlovian response to hide even before exposure, in the psychological sense, entered the equation.

It was inside this haven, while waiting for the residual sun-spots in her eyelids to fade, that she first felt the surge. It started in her fingertips around his neck, a jolt of adrenaline not unlike the falling sensation that wakes you after an epiphanous dream. Instead of occurring all at once, it rippled down her arms and into her spine, where her nervous system re-directed it in every direction. It seized her heart, and left a beat of emptiness when it shut down and re-booted her brain. This was how she would describe it to Aubrey and Origa, at least, years later. After that moment she experienced a second, enduring wave of nothing. Numbness. The grey, third dimension of the proverbial coin of white purity and black irreparability. All of these feelings were alien to the child. The trauma didn’t come from the new sensations, but from experiencing them in her father’s arms. This is Valerie’s earliest memory. It is one of the many that still haunt Brad. Today, Valerie only implicitly remembers what her father lived with for nearly two years: she would only let her mother carry her after that, until she entered kindergarten and the flood of new experiences would begin to sedate, and eventually drown that instinct.

“They don’t really like to do it in front of me.”

“Oh. I just heard that it’s a lot cooler looking in real life. I’ve seen pictures and videos and stuff, but it doesn’t really show up well on film –you know, muted. You’ve gotta see it in person.”

“Can’t help you. Sorry.”

“I know, I’m just curious. I mean, you must’ve seen it. I don’t really think it’s a weapon like everyone says.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They killed those angel-looking things when no one else could even touch ‘em. But it was really more like they were using their own… will?”

“Sure.”

“-against them. There was a purpose. Holy, or, cosmically, or something.”

“Okay. Are you going somewhere with this?”

“It’s just so fucking cool.”

“…Thanks.”

As Joshua continued to monologue at her, Valerie slid her focus to her right -into Aubrey and Andrew’s conversation, to keep from recessing into her own head. She knew that today was going to be one of those days, but if she had known that she would have been having this conversation regardless, she would have simply gone to class.

Eventually, a film began. Shortly after, Valerie begrudgingly left her friend behind in favor of class. Aubrey had hissed ardently that she was going to stay, and against her better judgment, Valerie acquiesced. She didn’t have any serious reservations about the boys, and the longer the bus took, the more relieved she felt about returning to her designated parameters. The actual guilt for bitching out on what was technically her idea, to ditch­, only settled in as she set foot on the campus pavement. The late bell has already passed, and the remaining students were running or lagging according to their assigned social circle.

It didn’t take long for Valerie to find her way to the classroom. The school had dedicated buildings for each genre of study. Her conscious train of thought was interrupted by a nagging sensation that she needed to figure out the origin of the term ‘bunny’ and how it applied to ‘rabbit.’ It was used primarily as an adjective, but went unnoticed as a synonym for the noun itself. Little things like this had a tendency to syphon her attention. It was while debating whether compiling a list of such words would be worth her time or not that she rounded the corner between the math and science buildings and stopped short. Just in front of her intended door, a goth-colored ode to burgeoning sexuality of children separated, re-joined, and separated again, completely, as Sean D’arbo walked off in his loudest ‘not giving a shit’ stride. Janice Melte employed her mastery of the attitude in the simple act of opening the door. If Valerie were in a more charitable mood, she would have deigned to dwell on the nuance required for such an act, but that would imply an accreditation to someone as wretched as Janice, for something as stupid as opening a door. At least her boyfriend’s walk was something that could be paraded. Why you would want to draw attention to a drugstore dye-job and a made-to-look-vintage Dark Side of the Moon tee was beyond her, but she couldn’t fault the tasteless berk for thematic incongruity. She technically had two classes with him, but that was stretching the definition of ‘with’ a bit. The memory that stood out most to her was an incident where the teacher called on him to answer a question he wasn’t paying attention to, only for him to stare emotionlessly back at him for well over a minute. By the end of that minute, the entire class was waiting for one of them to blink. Pragmatism dictated that the instructor move on, but Valerie admired the tension that the punk had built, quite literally, effortlessly. He only occasionally showed up to that class thereafter.

From there, her thoughts naturally drifted to Janice, but that instinct was compartmentalized according to a postulate that stated that her day would suck more if she acknowledged it. No, instead of analysis, Valerie opted for her usual course of action under this circumstance: she waited for the door to slowly hiss close, counted to five, and proceeded. Most people that the girl avoided, she did so out of awkwardness. More often than not, silence and evasion proved to be an easier alternative to confronting the expectations of others. Janice, on the other hand, she avoided for a very specific reason: the girl was a fucking psychopath.

Unfortunately, she was a psychopath with a flair for mathematics. Valerie attempted to enter the Honors Algebra 2 class as nonchalantly as possible, but that still entailed lurching open a large steel door and listening to the aforementioned hiss of the slow-close compressed air mechanism. Eyes locked on her desk, she darted for her seat while the class collectively skipped a beat. By the time she sat down and pulled out her things, the door had not yet exhausted its snake-like alarm and final, petulant slam. Normally, the hiss-slam made her think of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the air-locked compartments, which was useful when she wanted to feel isolated, or like she was doing something important. No such luck today. When everyone returned to their business, Valerie realized that she hadn’t devoted any efforts to preparing an excuse, so when the teacher made eye-contact with her, she gave her best ‘assertive’ nod, and hoped for the best. Mr. Prynn received the nod and continued with his lecture, altering only his proximity to his desk to mark the attendance roster.

A practiced, disgusted scoff echoed snaked its way to the front of the desk herd. Everyone’s eyes leaned toward Janice, except Valerie, who shut hers just long enough to see if she could will away whatever the goth might do next. No such luck.

“Give her a fucking detention!”

“I’m about to give you one, Janice.”

“You just did. For being late. The princess showed up after me.”

“I’m going by week totals.”

“It’s Tuesday!”

“Interesting, that. Stop annoying the class with your problems, or leave, and settle them. Either way, be back for practice.”

Valerie didn’t bother to observe Janice’s reaction, but settled for the clunky shift back into routine. It took her a moment to mentally roll past unintended memory resurgence, because of course. Prynn was also the track coach. She had tried out for the team a year ago, and Janice openly competed out of spite. At her mother’s insistence, she stuck with it –until she quit, after Janice, in a parallel hurdle lane one sunny day, pulled just far enough ahead of her to leap over her hurdle while kicking the one in Valerie’s lane so that it pegged her thigh and sent her head-first into the dirt. She considered it to be one of the higher-ranking humiliating experiences of her life, and no amount of parental guidance could keep her going. No amount of friendly guidance from Aubrey or other track runners could convince her to try and convince Prynn, whose attentions were elsewhere, to take any kind of action.

It took a split-second for this thought to squirm its way through her head, and then she was in space. Prynn’s voice gradually retrograded into an electronic, rhythmic buzz, and the girl drifted off toward Jupiter, taking notes all the while that she wouldn’t remember whatsoever until she studiously reviewed them after dinner. It wasn’t NASA yet, and Valerie’s future was uncertain, but the benchmark of accomplishment needed to be set high if she wanted to establish her own legacy. Besides, she had an advantage: her parents had killed space aliens.

After school let out, she caught up with Aubrey by the bike racks. The plan was to have her over so that she could vent the way the two usually did –with rock and roll, but it was Wednesday and the drummer had a Sea Scout meeting. It figured that of the twelve California-based ships, they had to live near the one girls unit. Every once in a while Valerie would tag along and hang out, but, nice as the other girls could be, it was a little too ‘hick’ for her tastes. They also had a strange penchant for throwing each other over the side of the ship, and a reputation of making whores of themselves whenever a state-wide event was held, so Valerie met her mother in the parking lot and faked her way through the small talk until she made it to her bedroom.

The first order of business was to collapse onto her bed. The second was to will herself to sleep for a while -but that only occasionally worked. She was horny, but not enough to make the effort, so the second-point-five order of business eventually became to plug in the Epiphone and lull herself into a more focused frame of mind. Ever since she had first picked up her father’s old guitar she knew it was one of the better facets of life. These were categorized according to their capacity to wretch forth her subconscious and point her in the appropriate direction. What started out as ‘Wish You Were Here,’ for example, eventually became ‘The Call of Ktulu.’ Before she knew it she was on her feet—her new mission to get a perfect play-through.

The decision not to masturbate turned out to be correct. After rechanneling the energy through a few complete runs her fingertips were beginning to feel raw, but she was on fire. As a climax, she turned on her computer and cranked the song up as loud as the speakers would cleanly allow, and had a nine minute concert in her head. The rhythm memorized, she experimented with slides and at one point was inspired to elbow the lights off and yank the blinder cords with her teeth so that the computer glow in the dark would give this accomplishment the atmosphere it deserved. By the time the song ended, Valerie was reasonably certain that she could have opened for Trent Reznor back in the day, at one of those concerts her parents liked to reminisce about.

The final notes hummed out of existence. Endorphins running high, she triumphantly put down the guitar, had a proper orgasm, and fell asleep.

*

Natalie’s first order of business upon getting home was to sit dead-eyed at her computer and ruminate on whether a tell-all book was really worth her time when it meant that she couldn’t include all the highlighted paragraphs that everyone was interested in. Ever since the end of the war, her life had become a carefully constructed blanket of romantic false composure, tightly wound over an anemic child, medicated by abstract stress. As a girl she had always fancied herself the rebel at the mouth of Plato’s cave. When she was Valerie’s age, growing up on the corner of Left-Behind and Nobody-Gives-a-Shit, Nevada, her libertarian ways had always ostracized her in a queer fashion from the political extremes of America’s third favorite red state. On paper, hating the government was par for the ecosystem there, yet her steadfast refusal to actually blame the racial, liberal, or atheist minorities compelled her conservative peers to dismiss her as nothing more than a polite contrarian. The liberals despised her lack of interest or compassion for the ‘oppressed’ states of the same. It was loneliness that spurred her self-inferred place outside of the Cave, because she didn’t really read all that much then, and fundamentally missed the point.

Today though, she really was peering out into the sunlight, though she never did research the allegory enough to appreciate it, on paper or otherwise. It didn’t really matter to her anymore. If it did, she might have been able to write about it. It might have helped. Helped what exactly, she wasn’t sure. The projected sales were based around the war, but the publishing representative that eventually won her over had insisted that it was her—entire—life that mattered, and she yearned to believe that. The longer she sat in front of the keyboard, the harder it was for her to remember her radical opinions or why they ever seemed to matter. Politics and philosophy used to be so important to her that she would easily surrender the kinds of relationships that facilitated success in their favor. When she was accepted into Yale, she was victorious over her childhood –her parents specifically. Brad and Rich and the rest of the ne’er do wells were her support in a story that was her own. Complete. The sequel was going to be a law-based political career. That was when she should have been writing a book.

Instead, she’s writing this one. This book didn’t want her childhood. It didn’t want her aspirations. It didn’t even want the sex, drugs, and Depeche Mode. It wanted the war. It wanted to know about her affiliations with Bradley and Richard –the hero and villain. Churchill and Hitler. Mario and Bowser. And she was the Braun. The Peach. The woman.

The woman.

The Woman.

Well, at least she found a working title. Still not ready to make her final editing decisions about the highlighted paragraphs —the secret paragraphs—she jumped forward to the meat of what was going to be published and re-read her final word on the subject:

When Richard called me, I hadn’t actually heard that the giants had appeared. I was studying for exams pretty much 24/7 and could barely keep my cell phone charged, let alone watch any T.V. I think I heard a woman on the streets raving about monsters as I biked to the school library, but a few days earlier, she was begging for loose change and folding dollar bills into various proofs that the government was dumping sodium pentothal into the water supply. Perhaps knowing that I’d be too busy to stay up to date with the news, or just that I’d simply not believe it, he made up a wild story about Brad being hospitalized and near death. That was, in fact, the only thing that could have convinced me to drop what I was doing and hop the first flight back to Nevada. What neither of us knew was that Brad was actually in Nevada, tending to his sick father, James, who had suffered a reaction to his chemotherapy. Brad and I were arguing constantly then, because James’ diagnosis a year ago had not yet dissuaded me from my smoking habit. So I made it back home just two days before all civilian flights were grounded, and met Richard at the gate. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, which I attributed to worry over our friend.

Normally a bit of a show-off as driver, Richard’s cool veneer was utterly shattered as we hard-shifted our way to our secret party spot in the hills just past the middle of nowhere outside of town. As I questioned why we were going so far out of our way (there wasn’t even what a civilized person might call a ‘road’ to get as far out as this was), instead of straight to the hospital, he started babbling all kinds of things that made me very suddenly decide that he had gone insane, or taken something far beyond his normal drug capacity. It was too much to take in all at once, but I caught fragments of portentous dreams and beautiful demigods –things that I was well-invested in not believing in. I was scared. Scared that he was driving, and scared that Brad might still somehow be tied to this in some way. When we finally arrived at the old Inn (we believed it to be the forgotten remnants of an over-night for travelers of the horse and cart era, but never did enough research to detract from our teenage purposes) Richard parked the car and forcefully confiscated my phone, music player, and laptop computer –though neither of the latter could achieve a bandwidth connection, and led me inside. All the while he interwove fragments of his intentions, which, while steadily becoming more comprehensible as sentences, were still unrestrained by my now-dated preconceptions of reality and possibility. He had done a fair amount of work to the decrepit, heavily-vandalized historical site. I had never known Richard to own so much as a screwdriver, but there were clearly new bits of wall, and shreds of carpet and bedding that I can only imagine were salvaged over a long period. Food was stored, clothing, and several gas generators served to frighten me further than I already was. I had still been holding out hope that this was an LSD trip gone horribly awry (hallucinogens were my personal line, so that hope was rooted in simple ignorance of extent), but clearly this was planned. This was manifesto-written-in-blood planned, and airline security had confiscated my mace.

In total, I spent five days with Richard, though I was only conscious for a few of them. Three, I think, but I don’t remember sleeping for even a moment. He certainly never did. We talked nearly every minute. What follows is everything I remember. I can’t verify any of it, any more than science and religion has attempted to thus-far, but I feel obliged to the history books to put as much of it down on paper as possible.

From about five years ago until now, every night, Richard Shepherd had a single, recurring dream. It wasn’t a recurring dream in the respect of narrative, but of theme. A human avatar whose name was Phander, whose title was Straw Man, acting on behalf of three other—apparently higher-ranking—avatars—King, Queen, and Knight—visited him and explained the world we know as one of many simultaneous existences. Richard never used the term, but it made sense to me in the science fiction sense of alternate dimensions. These four beings, who insisted to him that they were gods only to us, were tasked with fixing a disturbance in one of the other worlds before it became a catastrophe for ours. More specifically (and I apologize up front for my limited understanding of the ‘specifics’), something that Richard was shown, but unable to translate to me, caused myself, him, and Brad –along with Jurgen, Angelica, Kim, Minh, Shuya and Quinton, to all be utilized as vessels for the misplaced souls of our counterparts in another reality (I recall that Shepherd disliked my using the word ‘soul,’ only because he insisted that it was more complicated than that, but his having five-plus years of translation over me, this was a point that he conceded for convenience sake. I suppose I understand, as no mythos surrounding the soul, as I understand it, came with a superpower so misplaced in our world).

Where all of this started to lose me, was in the titles. Straw Man, King, Queen, and Knight –these are all terms that I (and, I assume, most of you as well, readers) are familiar with. And having never seen these entities myself, it’s relatively simple for me to compartmentalize them as chess pieces, or other, more nebulous archetypes. The eight of us—humans—also had titles. Richard claimed himself The Wizard. That title came with the specific duty of facilitating these other-worldly events, and his failure to achieve those goals in the manner dictated to him may in fact be why things got as out of control as they did. Brad was a Prince, with a regiment of six Soldiers, tasked with securing their borders from the very same enemy that hunted us here. I was a Princess, whose value was of the vaguest importance in all of this.

The amount of detail that Richard attempted to convey convinced me only of his conviction. I was essentially a hostage, though our rapport made it a little unconventional. I had a beer while I watched him sabotage his own car. I think it was around halfway through day two that he started to explain the next phase of his plans and my place in them. I was to be phased out of our dimension and ‘back’ to theirs, lest the giants come here and hunt me down. Obviously, Richard missed his deadline –which I like to believe was out of his affection for me, though at the end of the day there really was nothing gained.

He wasn’t very good at all this.

I was told that it didn’t take the world very long at all to figure out that the twelve giants (Models of Light, as Richard explained them to me) were closing in on a specific location. That location was me, but this entire event was still no bigger than the two of us, as far as I knew. Richard allowed me a last phone call to say goodbye to my folks before he killed me, which I used to call Brad. This place was our spot—the three of us—and he seemed the most capable of getting here and assisting with the minimal amount of information, which was “Shepherd’skidnappedmeattheoldfortathomebringpolicepleasehelpgodpleasehewantstokillme!” Richard intervened at that point, and then he engaged his power and instantaneously knocked me unconscious.

That moment before I went cold changed everything. I knew the boy intimately. While there was no sexual history between us, I had been witness to –or been privy to, every major event of his childhood, as it was adjacent to my own. Brad and I helped him pick out his first pair of glasses when he was eleven. He lost his virginity to an arch rival of mine when he was fifteen. We were arrested together at sixteen for smashing pumpkins the night before Halloween. We thought it was hilarious, because we were listening to Smashing Pumpkins while we did it, and we were easily amused. These and a thousand other incidental memories were my context for him up until that exact moment when he exploded into orange light and turned me off like a light switch. I think that my first reaction was to assume that he was suicide-bombing us –which by this point wouldn’t have surprised me at all. My mother believed very strongly in auras (because a crisis of faith had pushed her from a mainstream religion to a fringe one, and the closer you get to the left side of the religious spectrum, the more goodness you’re allowed to feel for the barest of efforts –which as far as I could tell, in her case, meant ‘acknowledgement of’), and for a while afterwards, I was seriously considering the notion, despite the fact that I was the only one of us with any foreword on these events—I remind you, readers, that this is only a recollection, and that Brad and I, as husband and wife, still argue about what happened and why, just as much as you could imagine –and that our opinions differ from the other Soldier’s as well, in many respects—and I still think that what most people would visualize as an aura –perhaps, a more—aggressive—aura, is the most fitting description of the visual spectacle that it is. The texture and transparency always made me think of fire, while the erratic, even whip-like nature of its movements around him could easily have been described as electric (that being said, please don’t ever refer to that period of my life as the ‘electric fires’ around me. My lexicon may preclude me from being more unique with my adjectives, but I have a very ‘if it walks like a duck’ attitude towards description. The period itself deserves far more consideration than I could pretend to offer).

So, while I braced myself for what I thought was a life-ending explosion, Richard put his hand to the side of my head and over-loaded me with sensation. I’d been both burned and electrocuted in my life, and feel reasonably certain that neither time (my friend Jenny bought a taser when we were in college, so it was a lot more than ‘neither’ times) did I ever get such a flood of mental stimuli as I did when he touched me that way. I didn’t receive any thoughts or grand epiphanies, like I felt then and feel now that I deserve, but something inside me was tapped. I don’t know if that supposed, free-booting soul was woken up inside me, or if it was nothing more than an unfamiliar chemical reaction in my head, but I do know that I pissed myself before everything went dark.

This next part is my dictation taken of what had to be relayed to me, in pieces, after it happened. Bradley has been handling the bulk of the communication with the Hollywood suits about the movie, so since both that film and my information come from the same source; consider this a spoiler alert for next summer:

Despite our childhood habits of recklessness and general contrarianism, Brad was always the one who ever-erred on the side of caution, and he didn’t let me down. When he made it to the old fort, he brought the law with him; three cars, two officers each, two dogs. I guess he was allowed to come along because we really were that far from any main roads. I said a few paragraphs ago that I had watched Richard sabotage his car. Now, I don’t know shit about cars. Never have, never will. I think this must have been done after I was knocked out, but the way I was told –and, in fact, the way the police report was filled out, the car exploded, killing one of the dogs and injuring one of the officers. The other officers opened fire, and we’re not entirely clear how, but apparently not a single bullet hit its target. Brad and I have speculated that the emitted energy may have allowed him—and potentially us—to somehow deflect the trajectory. It’s just a theory though, since none of us ever decided that it would be worth testing out. Maybe everyone just missed. Either way, Brad had his moment to shine at some point after the police decided that they were only wasting their ammunition. The way he described it happening that first time is considerably more organic than my own experience. A stomach pain, which he had previously attributed to anxiety, culminated in an orgasm of wild blue passion. The police report is tragically bereft of adjectives, but the fight continued on into the house, where the police learned that in this instance, they were tragically impotent to help. I was laid out on the floor, on a thick rug. I guess I was glowing—which fit, aesthetically—as well as disappearing. One of the officers, who attempted to tend to me while Brad and Richard continued on, said that I seemed to be flaking away in illuminant ashes. Whatever the conversion process was to be, it was very slow. I don’t know if it was a favor to me, or a limitation of his wizardly options, but I experienced only peace for the duration of the fight.

When Bradley did what he felt he had to do, the spell wore off, and I woke up.

I’m sorry to say, dear readers, that I brought back with me no eldritch visions of a space beyond space, nor anything so substantial as a new philosophy. Perhaps no part of me actually went anywhere. It would be comforting to assume that only my unsubstantiated-but-deeply-unnerving ‘second soul’ was removed, like an appendix, or wart. Maybe Shepherd was successful in his mission, in an utterly unappreciable way. Maybe everything he said was real, but it was all a lie, told to him by fallible—or mischievous—gods-only-to-us. There are many maybes –that is to say, there is still an improbable capacity for all the things that the world asked of us: holy truths, alien answers, philosophical certitudes, etcetera.

I recognize none.

It pains me to say that. I’ve had the better part of two decades to ruminate on these events and imbue them with some measure of value, but I was more-or-less the same woman who woke up from a state of magic stasis as the girl who woke up from a .401 BAC in the hospital at seventeen. The graduation from absolute blackness to coherent wakefulness wasn’t entirely unlike fading sound and video from zero to one hundred percent. There wasn’t even a sense of relief, because I didn’t dream. Every morning that I’ve ever woken up, my emotional state adjusts from what I thought I was experiencing, into what I experience with the rest of the world. I feel safe in assuming that it’s about the same for all of us. Waking up from such an ‘off’ setting is what I imagine a computer would feel like upon activation. All the hard drives and circuitry were still intact. They were just getting current again. But if you melted those components down to their basest elements and then re-crafted them into a whole new computer, would it actually be a different unit? There would be a percentage of new pieces there, but mostly, it would at least resemble something older. Immaterial, but perhaps of value? The hard drives would have to be built up from scratch, but maybe a tangible effect could still be interpreted. Could a soul evolve the same way, across identities, over time? Do we have any right to claim ownership of a soul, or do we just have disposable identities?

Natalie’s impending panic attack was interrupted by the muffled sounds of her daughter’s guitar. She couldn’t say where she had picked up typing again, but couldn’t bring herself to delete the gross tangent. For the first time in longer than she cared to deduce, she felt like she was on the verge of an epiphany. The muffled rock chords thrummed into her brain and she focused on the rhythm, confident that it would massage the idea into the foreground of her consciousness. Eyes closed, fingers poised over the keys, she tugged at the steel wire down her throat, aching for the words.

I am composed of sand, and the wind is my soul.

And suddenly she was livid; furious even, and on the verge of tears. For over a decade she had tried to find a comforting idea to subscribe to so that she may finally move on. If it weren’t for her family, and this book, she’d be empty. There were off-and-on attempts to go back to school and continue where her younger goals had left off, but she couldn’t concentrate on them with the same veracity. How could she settle into the search for truth in law and governance when the principle foundations that she thought she understood even then were now permanently called into question?

Suddenly she missed her husband -his tongue, specifically. An amorous distraction sounded lovely by this point, but he was still in his meeting with the Fringe guys, discussing a commercial for their vodka. It was his turn to cover the bills, since she had just finished a year of shoots and interviews and other obnoxious-but-easy paychecks. Valerie used to take up more of her time, but she’d finally hit that period where talking to her was almost impossible. It was unnerving to her maternal instincts, but her grades were exceptional, so she was trying to exercise a trust in her daughter that her own mother had never afforded her.

In lieu of her family, she had a drink. They had two boxes of Fringe, and someone had to keep it away from Aubrey. Part of her hoped that Val was only covering for her own age-appropriate impishness, but that probably wasn’t true. Val wasn’t even all that interested in learning to drive, so she probably wasn’t partying like Natalie always had.

Halfway through pouring her glass, Eri called her; because it took marginally less time to call than to simply walk up the road to her door. Erianna Storm (formerly: Erianna Martin, formerly: whatever-her-ex’s-last-name-was, formerly: Buttes) was recently promoted to a Lead Design position with Legace [leg-uh-see –of course] Outfitters, and after befriending Natalie some time ago, called upon her every so often for design feedback. Natalie would have felt more humbled by the artist’s faith in her critique, if she had ever once actually utilized it. To be fair, Eri never marketed the fact that they would work together, so presumably Natalie’s opinion did go somewhere other than the circle file. Either way, she was fun –and, the only single woman in the neighborhood, having built her career entirely from scratch. Sure enough, a schedule was made to get high and talk design in the coming days.

After that interlude, and half of her drink, Natalie’s mood had shifted yet again, and she felt ready to continue her original proof-reading task:

The worried faces of Brad and more police than I’m ever comfortable around met me all at once as I eased back to life, like Dorothy after the tornado. After listening to Richard babble for days on end, their story didn’t—exactly—surprise me, but the next real shock came along shortly. When we returned to the station, Brad and I had our first private moment –after several hours of exhaustive statements. We were in the women’s bathroom, and Brad showed me the power (I refuse to call it ‘electric fire’). It startled me, as would be expected of anyone. What came as complete surprise however, was that when he initiated, my own reacted immediately. It—responded—to it, supplanting the yelp I had released at his with a full-on shriek of terror. I thought I had exploded.

Neither of us left the bathroom for quite a while. We learned several things over the next half hour. Firstly, that if we’re both engaged and make contact, it has virtually no effect, so long as we’re not aggressive. If we moved too quickly though, then the effect rose exponentially from mentally neutralizing, to a kind of hyper effect, sending our nerves into a state of shock –not entirely different from how ecstasy intensifies your natural emotional state (I know what you’re thinking, and yes, we tried once. It knocked both of us unconscious within seconds. We haven’t tried again).

The second note taken, was that we each seemed to have a different –if arbitrary, color (I later learned that Minh and Kim share the same forest shade, but we generally assume that it’s genetic, or otherwise connected to their relationship as sisters –a fact that annoys them both, incidentally). I’ve seen video feeds of us while active, and that same muted quality is about what we see ourselves. If I look down at my hands, the red is much starker than what’s actually in front of my face, which is good for my vision, but kind of baffling when I think about it too long.

Eventually, we were asked to come out of the bathroom and file addendums to our affidavits, detailing further that not only was Brad previously unaware of this condition, but I was as well, even throughout my time spent as a hostage. After answering every conceivable question in every conceivable fashion, we were tantalizingly close to leaving when the CIA showed up –and by CIA, I mean one guy, with a fake name; Mark Strong, I think. It was he who finally explained to us what the rest of the world had already found out over the previous few days: that alien creatures had appeared randomly all over the world, and were wreaking havoc in response to military interference with powers not unlike our newly discovered ones. It was initially terrifying. Not for the obvious reasons mind, but for shamefully self-interested ones. I had seen enough movies growing to know that the next thing to happen was that we were about to be black-bagged and bussed to some remote black site and tortured for information that we didn’t have.

What we actually did, was get coffee. Mark Strong showed us footage and satellite feeds and other bits of once-confidential media surrounding the aggressors, and the other out-of-the-woodwork soldiers holding them off. He was terribly efficient, in that haggard way that twenty-four-seven job types tend to be—always towing the line of being rude, without ever really crossing it—and he drank his coffee black. We spent the next three days in a “secure location,” visited every six hours on the dot by our CIA host, coffee in hand, when he would outline an operation to send Brad and me overseas to assist in Western Europe. When we weren’t doing that, his guests were crash-coursing us in basic military practices, in case we were ever cut off from the support units that we were assured would be omnipresent for medical purposes. Apparently thus-far, under similar conditions, the other soldiers had been fighting for days on end. Several attempts had been made to lure the monsters (the Models of Light, as Richard had put it) away from populated areas so that more extreme measures could be considered, but the giants could not be swayed from their courses. It was assumed at the time to be a deliberate tactic, though in hindsight it probably should have been a little more obvious that if the military-grade weapons already employed had zero effect, making the explosions bigger probably wouldn’t have done the trick.

In the precious-little free time we did have, we talked. We didn’t have any other options. All phones and computers were brought in and out with Mark Strong and his cohorts. They also provided our food, the scraps of which were piling up in and around the mini-fridge. So we talked, primarily about one issue: Brad didn’t want me to go. Always the most virtuous [read: traditional] of my friends, he was extremely reticent to acknowledge that I had always been the more aggressive of our circle of friends. Even after catching up over our time spent in different states, under these absurd conditions, we slipped rather quickly into our old molds. He in that way teenage boys get when they’re not sure whether or not it’s appropriate to take an alpha stance on an issue and me in that I utterly failed to articulate my feelings in any clear fashion. The burst dam of new rules to reality and exceptions to the previous ones had me in a very compromised state, both physically and emotionally. I was throwing up a lot, and downing aspirin like after dinner mints. Brad wasn't fairing a whole lot better, but he was a lot more health-conscious than I was; boxing, fencing, cross-country. He needed a girlfriend.

Mark Strong had made it clear that things were getting worse in terms of damage and casualties, though progress had been made. Shuya Takami and the Meng sisters had defeated two of the Models, but our Intelligence still had no hard numbers for how many there were, or whether or not they were still coming –let alone where from. It was that lack of information that led to the surprise appearance of the Model on the Santa Cruz beach. Brad and I were woken up at four that morning (I think I crashed at about two, because the vodka and whiskey samplers in our mini-fridge had been replenished) and told that we had to answer the call then and there. Now, I don’t read as much as I should. I’ll admit that. But I watch enough movies to know who Joseph Campbell is (even if I tend swap ‘Joseph’ for ‘Bruce’ in casual conversation). I know how the story is supposed to go. I should have refused. Make no mistake readers, I was pants-shittingly terrified, but I’m not a cunt. I was the first one inside the chopper.

Natalie made it only a few words further when Brad quietly entered the room. Had she not been leaning back on her chair, his sudden wrap may not have elicited such a startle. After that jolt, the two listened for any responsive noise from Valerie. The house remained quiet.

“I didn’t hear you come in.”

“You never hear me coming.”

“Yeah, Grim, and you call me vanilla.”

“I call you ‘glorious.’”

“Only when you’re coming.”

Still from behind, the husband raised and kissed her. He was drenched in that distinct shade of hell that often coats a person who spends their days with marketing types.

“How’s Val?”

“Sleeping, I think. She was rocking out earlier. Probably exhausted herself.”

“She might just be exhausted from running around town.”

“Stirring the shit?”

“I got a call today. She missed one class and showed up late to the next.”

“Good. I hope she had fun.”

“Fun? Think she’ll have fun if some guys throw her in a van and mail us one of her fingers?”

“Oh, Aubrey’d take a bullet for her.”

“Aubrey?”

“If Valerie went AWOL, so did she. Besides, that girl is strapped. I don’t know what those maritime girl scouts do that calls for a folding knife—and—a taser, but the thing is like a plucky little body guard.”

“That just might be for the boy-scouts. Navy guys, and all that.”

“True.”

“So, you don’t think we should talk to her?”

“I don’t know, maybe later.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“I’m typing, aren't I?”

“I’ll make dinner. Carb-heavy, so you’re not hung over when I fuck you tonight.”

“No carbs. Carbs bloat.”

“So does alcohol.”

“Bleh. Go make dinner.”

“Love you too, Red.”

*

Around ten o’clock, Valerie elected to stop reading her English-assigned book and picked up one that she actually felt like reading. Halfway through the first page, Aubrey messaged her phone.

“Wanna go to a party? Like now? Im at the end of the block”

“Right now? I’m in bed.”

“Pleeze??? Ive got a surprise for you”

“What is it?”

“Its in the car. Come”

“I don’t want to push my luck. I think my parents know we ditched today.”

“Don’t be a bitch. It’s a good surprise”

“You’re going to get me killed… Give me fifteen minutes.”

“^_^”

Fourteen and a half minutes later Valerie made it to the sidewalk in front of her house. A car she didn’t recognize started up and flashed its headlights, which Valerie cautiously made her way towards. The passenger door opened up and Aubrey got out meeting her, a shit-eating grin plastered across her face as she motioned the girl towards the driver-side window. The descending window curtained Aubrey’s freckled self-satisfaction and supplanted it with the sharper, blonder features of Valerie’s oldest friend.

“Origa!”

“Surprise!”

“What are you doing out here? Isn’t the drive back to Vintage like an hour?”

“Not if I haul ass. Ready to roll?”

“Is this car yours? It’s nice.”

“Mom’s, and yeah, German, but nice. Hop in doll. It’s great to see you, but we’ve gotta utilize our time.”

The ride across town was filled with the chatter of old friends. It started with each girl cycling through the standard bullet points of news that occurred between now and the last time –even though most of the big ones had already been covered across the social networks. Still, there was no substitute for trading oxygen with loved ones. The only break from conversation came to sing along to Stevie Nick’s ‘Edge of Seventeen’ –Origa’s favorite song of the moment. Aubrey was the odd-woman out in musical tastes, but even she made enough of an effort to also not notice that the blond was going fifty-five in a thirty-five zone. Cop lights went on, the radio went off, Valerie swore successively under her breath, and the two in front took to the necessaries in that tone of controlled panic unique to, even the unburdened-by-guilt, children when peace officers loom unexpectedly from the shadows.

“Fuck. Are everyone’s belts on?”

“Yeah. Val? Yeah. You don’t have anything we should know about in here, do you?”

“Just in the trunk, but that’d be fine, right?”

“Yeah, sure, but it’s right on curfew now.”

“Damn. Damn. Can you pull your neckline down a bit?”
“What?”

“You’ve got the biggest breasts in the car. Put ‘em to work.”

“No, I mean, you want me to jail-bait—a cop—?”

“Are my eyes red?”

Aubrey’s pitch went up several notches as she worked to iron out both her composure, and Origa’s. Valerie simply sunk into the leather seat as her cheeriness and ease melted down into a puddle around her feet. So much for salvaging the day. Origa started off the actual dialogue with the officer by conspicuously fidgeting when his flashlight scanned into the car. Aubrey only moved faintly –having the most experience of the three at answering for transgressions. Valerie moved the least, not because of a practiced skill, but because under-emoting was fifty percent of her modus operandi. The other half her mother pinned as being melodramatic, which she supposed meant over-emoting, but Talia’s go-to evidence for the adjective was still an incident when Valerie cut most of her hair off when she was nine in protest of a hair-cut. It wasn’t a story she typically shared.

Origa had all of the paperwork on hand, but the officer (Buchols, according to his uniform tag) was ready with not only the speeding, but the curfew, and a busted passenger tail light, because of course. The stakes rose quickly to involve a tow truck and a police cruiser cab home, when Buchols elected to run Aubrey and Valerie’s identification cards. But a minute later, an alternate ending to the scene was edited into the proceedings.

“Ms. Pencheck?”

“Yes sir.”

“The very same, eh?”

“Eh—aye.—Yes. Sir.”

“Can you do the electric fire?”

“No, sir. Sorry.”

“So you’re just… normal, then?”

“’Fraid so.”

“’Ain’t that something.”

“I’ve only seen it once or twice.”

“Well, I bet then that ‘no news is good news’ with the heroes’ daughter, huh?”

Valerie nodded slowly, not sure what the correct response to that could possibly be. Officer Buchols seemed nice enough, and in fact deigned to save both her and him a fair bit of ‘paper work.’ Three minutes later, they were back on the road with nothing more given than a promise to head home, and nothing more received than a fix-it ticket and the aftershock of adrenaline. It was more than a reasonable trade-off.

Out-voted, Valerie continued en route to the party. Origa took to sputtering her appreciation into the rear-view mirror, whilst Aubrey took to a verbal paradox dissection.

“Doll, you just saved my ass. I am—so—glad you’re coming.”

“So wait, did you just get rewarded for being normal?”

And so on.

Like most high school parties, this event was predicated on absent parents. Valerie expected lights, and music, maybe a handful of smokers on the porch. Perhaps an angry neighbor or two peering through the blinds, phones at the ready. This house had none of these things. An empty lot across the intersection served the parking needs of nearly thirty cars, which only made the setting more suspicious, in a zombie movie kind of way. Aubrey too seemed to be looking for any sign of a teleporter that might beam them towards wherever all these drivers were. It occurred to Valerie to ask whose party this actually was, but elected to follow Origa, who had assumed the role of tour guide. They walked through a side gate and began to feel a vibration in the air. The weed-coated path sloped steeply downwards until the three found themselves in front of a heavy basement door that had presumably found itself here after retiring from barricading a Scottish castle. The entire basement level was uninterrupted cinderblock. Not even a window.

Origa knocked. A second later, the door budged, and a force of industrial light, smoke and bass, under-towed by the smell of beer-soaked wood, a community bathroom, and hollering teenagers whipped the tone of the scene from quiet and unsure, to thunderous and alive. They were greeted by a shaggy, thin boy that Valerie and Aubrey had never met. Older, maybe twenty, with a red afro and a sharply-trimmed soul patch looked the three up and down, before greeting them neutrally. The leader de-facto tensed a bit, but continued in stride.

“Hi. Is Dominic here? He gave me this address.”

“Looks like he gave you the right one. Gotta hand it to the fag—he said he’d bring girls. He brought some lovely girls.”

“Uh, thanks. I’m Origa. This is Aubrey, and Valerie.”

“Come on in, Origa, Aubrey, and Valerie. Grab a beer. Weed is around the couch, cigs outside. David.”

“Cool. I’m gonna grab some things from my car.”

She turned, and left, promising to be right in. Aubrey proceeded with some confidence into the party fortress, and Valerie followed suit, until David caught her arm and held her up. Suddenly, the three were separated.

“Know any party tricks?”

“Not really, no.”

“Aw. Okay then, follow up: Dom told me the blond was gay. Is that true?”

“Not that I’m aware, no. What’s it matter?”

“That prick. Mmkay, well, make yourself at home.”

The interlude was; of course, just long enough for Aubrey to disappear into the packed basement. Eager to not continue this line of dialogue though, Valerie followed the boy in. A few people turned their heads, but nothing came of it, and there were enough people so that she didn’t feel like she was distracting from the proceedings. A large table had been set up for beer pong, and the crowd seemed pretty engaged. One member of one of the teams she vaguely recognized as a school-mate, so she defaulted to rooting for the pair. It was a passive way of being social, but it felt like progress. Flickers of bodies danced around her as people moved in and out of interest in the game, so she didn’t notice Sean to her side until he offered her a beer and ambushed her into conversation.

“We have classes together, don’t we?”

“I don’t know. How often do you show up?”

“Haven’t been expelled yet.”

“Congratulations.”

“…So, Jan would kill me for this, but, can I ask you what’s going on between you two?”

“You can’t just ask her?”

“I’ve heard her side. I think I get it too, but you seem to get so deep under her skin; I’m not sure I’ve ever pissed her off to the same extent you do.”

“Are you jealous of that?”

“It’s just weird –an intimacy thing. We’ve been dating for almost a year, and yet whatever happened in your math class today pissed her right the fuck off for the day. She was supposed to meet me here, but I think she got word that you were coming, because suddenly she ‘doesn’t feel like coming out.’”

“Good to know.”

“See, that there: that spite. Why? I get what her problem is with you, so—“

“—What’s my problem?”

“…You get special treatment.”

“Fuck you. I know I’m not better than anyone…”

“But you get treated like you are.”

“What am I supposed to do about that? Do you think I like people acting weird around me? You know, if you decided you didn’t like people shying away from you, you could just stop dressing like you’re gonna bring a gun to school one day. I’d have to murder my parents. And then I’d just be the psycho that killed a quarter of the world’s super heroes.”

“Hey, I’m sorry. I just wanted to get a better perspective of my better half.”

“Trust me, you’re the better half.”

“You don’t drink much do you?”

“Why?”

“Your bottle is gone, and you just insulted and complimented me within a ten second span.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be. Opinions are good. Honest ones are even better. Having them makes you better than most people.”

“You’re trying to trick me into saying I’m better than everyone else, aren’t you?”

“I’m just trying to learn. This has already been worth it to that end.”

“And what have you learned about me?”

“That you and Jan are a lot alike –when you’re annoyed, at least. You’re a lot alike, but where she gets detentions, you get free passes.”

“I didn’t get in trouble because I keep my grades up and I’m not a bitch –no offense.”

“You two hate each other. There’s probably not any need for ‘no offense.’”

“I meant to you.”

“Thank you.”

The worst part of it all was that this is the first first-interaction she’d had with anyone in a long time that had anything resembling an organic component to it. Her desire to stop talking about Janice with the guy that she’s probably sleeping with kept getting kneecapped by her internal monologue telling her that this was the only out of the ordinary thing to happen to her in ages. This was only the second real party she’d ever been to, and maybe the fourth time she drank, so she was feeling the beer warm her slightly. At least, she assumed it was the beer. She—was—in a smoky basement with thirty other people.

Two of those other people were her friends, and the girl decided that now would be a good time to find out what happened to them.

“I’m gonna grab another beer. Want one?”

“Sure.”

Or not.

“So, this band that you and Aubrey and Jan were in –did you guys ever get a new keyboard player?”

“No, it’s just my guitar and Aubrey’s drums still.”

“Who writes the music? Jan said that was mostly her job.”

“Yeah, no. Actually, yes. In middle school she was doing most of the pen and papering.”

“And now?”

“I tend to do lyrics. Aubrey sort of directs our sound.”

“So why don’t you two play, at like, these things?”

Then Aubrey showed up, and before she knew it, Valerie was with her friends again, plus Andrew, plus Dominic –who was introduced to her as a mutual friend between Origa and Andrew. Aubrey apologized for not being around to bail her out sooner, and gave the Cliff’s Notes to Origa, who offered to put Janice on her ‘list,’ which only started a separate argument between her and Dominic that completely lost everyone else. It was about then that Valerie realized her friends were all stoned. Caught up, she made small-talk, and kept it simple. Despite being new to drinking, she understood its benefits. Most of her favorite novels were written with the guiding hand of alcohol –and that’s what it came to mean to her: a means to slice atwain the complexities of life and find the emotional through-line of it all. Watching her friends smoke weed was like watching them be parachuted into a maze. Sure, sometimes they found poetry or a good movie, but it seemed a comparable struggle just to remember why they had priorities in the first place. Furthermore, she could understand the perverse joy that could be ascertained from over-analyzing every facet of the mundane (she even managed to vent her earlier thoughts about the word ‘bunny’ –which was discussed as ardently as would have been had she brought up the Treaty of Versailles—should any of them know what that is. Origa would), but she needed to keep focused on bigger things. At the very least, pot probably wasn’t on the road to NASA. Another beer couldn’t hurt though.

She was halfway into the cooler when Janice appeared next to her. These gothic types must go through some kind of training. Instinctively, she knew what was coming.

“What were you talking to Sean about?”

“AP US homework.”

“Lemme re-phrase that: what—the fuck—were you talking to Sean about?”

“Am I not allowed to talk to him?”

“No, you’re not. You’re in my life too much already.”

“Is that so? Maybe I was just telling him that if he kissed me, he wouldn’t burst into electric fire. Or, maybe you could tell that to Bobby, because I’m pretty sure he—still—thinks that’s true.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself Princess. That was in eighth grade. This just happened twenty minutes ago.”

“What, I don’t get a warning for all the good behavior I’ve racked up, putting up with your shit for the last three years?”

“Sure. Here’s your warning.”

Janice popped her can up, squeezing it just enough to splash only some of the beer into Valerie’s face. This got several peoples’ attention, to which Janice looked shocked and apologetic just long enough for everyone’s eyes to settle on Valerie while she slipped into the crowd. Aubrey, again just a little too late, was on Janice’s tail before Valerie could even finish processing what just happened. Origa and company were right behind her with somebody’s sweatshirt to pat down her face and top, but the ginger—in sheer defiance of the amount of weed she smoked—tore through the crowd right up until Officer Buchols opened the door and, despite the blaring music, the sounds of aluminum and glass hitting the cement, and a cacophony of profanity, all went silent.

Origa’s first thought when this happened was to disappear. Unfortunately, her second thought was to push Valerie to the forefront of his attention to see if his leniency was a) still applicable, and b) extended to forty of her closest people-standing-in-proximity-to-her. Had this plan not been questionable-at-best already, Valerie now smelled like a microbrewery. Buchols was not pleased with the girls, but called out for the host without budging from the only entryway.

After two more officers arrived as back-up it still took over an hour for the lot of them to triage who was getting written up, who was free to go, and who was getting escorted back home in the back of a squad car. Unfortunately, Buchols took Valerie alone, while her friends were doubled up in the second car. She wasn’t cuffed, but her purse and other affectations were piled on the front passenger seat, while she sat on unyielding, featureless plastic of the wrong side of the safety glass. While her blood was pumping faster, and her thoughts became slightly more erratic, the lawman seemed relatively laid-back. He’d clearly been through this before.

“You know, I’ve met your father.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“This was some years ago, when the three of you first moved into town. You were still being carried everywhere. Your mother had you on in one arm when I went out of my way –not for an autograph, or anything. No false idols.”

“False Idols?”

“You lot are unique, but I never saw a one of ‘em walk on water.”

“Fair enough.”

“No, I had to shake your father’s hand because he saved my brother from an early death down in Santa Cruz. He told that story for years; seeing your father in that fiery blue shit, like an instrument of The Lord, a big blue shield that he needed to finish pulling that kid out of his Jeep.”

“Was he also a cop?”

“Was, still is. So’s our sister, up north.”

“That’s a good story. You don’t hear enough about good police. Law and order, and all that.”

“Law and order is The Lord’s work. Your folks and all those Europeans and Asians and whatnot aided us as soldiers on the front of peace-keeping –Order, at least, if not Law. And he kept my brother alive long enough to get his act together and settle down. Gave me two beautiful nephews. You hear me? That’s why I’m saving your parents the embarrassment of seeing your name on the local channels.”

“I appreciate that. I know my parents will, too.”

“I think you said that the last time. I’m gonna call this ‘strike two.’ Try me a third time though, and I’ll hit you with the whole book. That’s a promise young lady.”

Valerie elected not to say anything else for the last few minutes. Janice and Sean’s words started to creep into her mind, but she decided to chalk it up as part of the rest of her day, and explaining this to her parents became priority number one.

Brad answered the door wearing a bathrobe and an expression of fatherly concern –dampened by the confusion and irritation of having been jerked out of a deep sleep. Buchols gave him the gist of what happened, and Brad did a better job of conveying gratitude than his daughter. After the front door closed, Brad cut off her attempted rationales and promised her that all would be settled after school the following day. That was good. That was time for her to put her case together, which hadn’t gone so well in the car. Once in bed though, events began to replay in an increasingly less linear order, until her thoughts became so knotted that trying to sleep became a futile endeavor. She tried to message her friends, but received no response from either girl, which only added to the mounting tension headache.

The cursor icon on her phone blinked at her until another course of action occurred.

The last thing Valerie did before falling into a terrible sleep that night was vomit out a draft for a potential song.

Instruments and False Idols

Damned are the rebels with their cigarettes and coffee.

Damned are the lovers with their wine and their toffees.

Damned are the poets with their pens and guitars.

I bless their dreams, and their fears, and their scars.

It was a working draft, but a start.

END