Page 11 of All Superheroes Need PR
I swallow hard and try a new tack. “You have a flight today, Vinny?”
“No, Vanny.” He sets his phone face down on the table and gives me a glare twice as harsh as the rest of theirs combined. So much for solidarity. “Talk.”
“I went out drinking.” I make a stupid gesture with my hands like I’m trying out for cheer squad. In my haste to redirect it, I reach for my coffee. “After the workday I had, I got a little drunk.”
“A little drunk?” Vinny scoffs.
“How’s, um ... the waffles ...”
“The waffles will be ready when the waffles are ready,” my dad answers. “Sunday breakfast is sacred and can’t be rushed.”
I hadn’t forgotten that my brothers all piled into my parents’ house every Sunday for breakfast, but I had forgotten that this week’s brunch had been moved to Saturday because of Luca’s lacrosse game tomorrow. Despite the fact that both Mani and David were in serious relationships, it was rare that any of us missed this. I’d already planned not to attend—and given them three weeks’ notice—because of my meeting with the COE.
I’d been expecting to need to use the weekend to get started on our work for the short-term contract, but that had been voided, our fee was still unpaid, we’d taken on fewer clients in preparation for the COE work, which would have been our largest contract to date, both in costand prestige, and it’s now unlikely we’d get any more work againever, given the fact that my face is currently plastered all over the internet.
My brothers had, bless their hearts, at least had the decency to turn the TV off and take my phone away from me.
I turn to Luca. “So, are you ready for your game tomorrow? Last one of the season and all?”
“Vanny.” Luca might be younger than I am by thirteen years, but he’s just as stern as Charles, who at thirty-seven is the oldest. “Answer the question.”
“I forget the question.”
“Then start from the beginning,” Charles says. Not Charlie—Charles. “How the fuck did you end up beingflownby a fucking supervillain home from a bar drunk as a skunk and sick as a dog?”
“Dios mío.” Elena makes a sign of the cross over her chest, as she does every time someone mentions one of the world’s seventeen supervillains—eighteen now. I shudder.Don’t think about it. Don’t think about how I might have cost the world everything by simply...doing what? Existing?
A fleeting and unfamiliar anger flits over me as I think about how rude Mr. Casteel was to me. And how strange my reaction to him had been. Maybe it’s how everyone reacts to him—that intoxicating smell, the intensity acting so bizarrely as a lure rather than a repellant—but regardless, I don’t like it. It makes me ... want to know him.
Not that Elena would ever stand for that. She was pissed when I told her that my company wanted to bid on the contract. She made the sign of the cross over her chest, just like she does now—just like she does anytime anyone mentions any one of the Forty-Eightaliens.
Me? I pitied them, knowing what it’s like to be alone as a child. After all, they arrived here twenty-two years ago when they were children with no memories of where they came from. Given up by some parents somewhere, they must have been scared, especially when they were rounded up, poked, and prodded. Some, like the Pyro, were kept foryears in governmental facilities—agencies that later became one single entity known as the SDD, the Supernatural Defense Department—before public outcry forced the agency to release all of them and place them with loving host families.
Elena was among the few who quietly thought that they should still be locked up somewhere, that they were dangerous, and I’d always thought it was a poor moral failing on her part to think so ... but after meeting the Pyro, I’m feeling a little less generous toward alienkind and am starting to wonder if Elena was right after all.
I turn to her for help. “It wasn’t that bad. I just had too much day red.” I push out my bottom lip and watch Elena’s face soften. She comes around the table to me and reaches for my shoulder, but before she can touch me, Charlie swats the back of her hand.
“Don’t you dare. And you ...” He points at my nose. “The lip thing’s not gonna work this time. You can make your eyes as big as you want.” He slaps his palm down onto the table, rattling his orange juice glass, bringing back memories that make my stomach revolt.
Elena turns her concerned stare into a glare and thrusts the coffee pot in her other hand in my face threateningly. “You are good, Vanny. Gracias, Charlie, for setting me straight.” She mutters something in Spanish under her breath that I don’t quite catch. Embarrassingly, my Spanish is okay but still not fluent. I’ve never been good at languages, and I don’t really know why. No, I know why. I don’t practice. I’m too scared to say something wrong and sound dumb.You’re such a stupid little girl, Vanessa.
My brothers all laugh lightly at whatever she said, and I feel my face heat. I sip gratefully from my yellow coffee mug, handmade by Mani in his university wheel-thrown ceramics class. Elena loves it. She has artwork all over the house from all her sons. Mine, too, though I didn’t really make any art worth putting up until later in high school. Coloring just reminded me of childhood therapy. I didn’t really like doing it in my free time so much.
“Go on, Van,” my dad says, clomping over from the stove, a steaming skillet in hand. He dishes out eggs onto everyone’s plate but mine, and when I look up into his eyes, he’s got one eyebrow lifted.
“Are you holding my breakfast hostage?”
“You already have breakfast. And you’re not eating near enough to soak up all that wine. It was wine, right? The poor man—alien—was covered in it.” Elena tsks. She also makes the sign of the cross as she settles into her seat at the other side of the dining table. Her gaze moves to me. They’re all staring, and I can’t help it, my lips quirk in a little contented sigh.
Everything here is familiar, and I feel at ease in ways I’m not used to. I can tease here; I can be teased and know it won’t hurt. I can tell them about falling and causing a ripple effect that took out the whole boardroom and about new Jeremy—though I withhold the bit about my boobs—and I can tell them how I was caught, on camera, projectile vomiting onto the Pyro and how that footage has been circulating freely all over the internet in a sickening spiral that’s taken all the top headlines.
The Forty-Eight are rarely caught in anything but heroic or villainous circumstances, and if they are, they’re always looking dashing and elegant, walking down city sidewalks to collect coffee or doing other mundane tasks that prove they’rereallyjust people too. Too pretty to touch, to be one of us, but not too godlike that they can’t be among us. Because they are, by whatever twist of fate, here with all their smoky smells and burning pink eyes and soft promises.I wouldn’t do that.
I tell them about all of it—except that. I don’t tell them about the soft moments. Those ... feel like mine, and I’m strangely loath to share them. They feel too dreamlike. And like a dream, I don’t want to voice it and have anyone tell me it wasn’t real.
I sigh. “And then I actually passed out. I didn’t know he ... um ... brought me home until Luca told me this morning.” The thought thatIflew with a super—uh—person is insanity. I can’t wrap a shred of a thought around it, so I don’t even stop to try.
“Oh mi niña ... corazóncita ... mi amor ...” Elena murmurs sweet things under her breath and shoves away from the crowded circular kitchen table. She comes to me and wraps her arms around me. She gives me a hug that I feel all the way through my soul. She kisses the side of my head and crouches next to my chair. “You must have been so upset to be treated like that. You are so professional, and that creature doesn’t sound like he has an ounce of decency in his bones.” Her cheeks flare pink, and her dark bangs bristle against her eyebrows when she scrunches up her nose.
