Page 38 of All Superheroes Need PR
“He yelled at you?” Vanya shouts at the same time that Margerie says softly, “You ... yelled at him?”
I nod.
“What a fucker,” Vanya continues.
“Agreed,” Garrison says. Margerie, meanwhile, says nothing. She just smiles softly at me before turning back to her computer screen while Garrison continues, “Good thing he’s not moving in with you then, huh?”
I frown. “Last I heard, he was supposed to be moving in today.”
“He told the COE he changed his mind, but they’d already packed up or sold his stuff for him. I think tonight he’s staying in a hotel while they get him a new apartment.”
I swallow hard and then shove down the guilt I feel and nod. “It’s probably for the best. Moving in here would have been a tight squeeze.”
“It’s a twenty-five-hundred-square-foot town house. How would it have been tight?” Vanya says on a dry laugh. Her bluntness and dark humor are my two favorite aspects of her personality, but not right now.
“Well, I never really planned on having a roommate, so when I redid the rooms, I didn’t set up a guest room. I tried telling him a couple times, but I kept getting interrupted. There’s only one bed in my house.”
“Oh shit. Sounds like the start of a porno.”
“Garrison!” Margerie scoffs. “That’s your boss!”
“Sorry. Did I say that out loud?” He actually has red in his cheeks, even though his smile shows no contrition at all.
Vanya throws three pens at him at once and a balled-up sheet of paper she’d been scribbling notes on. “Men are imbeciles. Correction—males are imbeciles. Whatever he said when he was yelling,” Vanya says, waggling a pen threateningly in my direction this time, “don’t forgive him right away. Make him suffer.”
“He’s my client, people, not my boyfriend!” I remind them shrilly.
They all smile and chuckle, sharing laughs that I wish didn’t feel so incriminating. Vanya just shrugs, seemingly unaware of how her words turn my stomach into a dreidel, and says glibly, “He sort of is.”
I snort and don’t answer. I just simmer in my blush as I go back to my coffee and my laptop, feeling strangely warm despite the ice on my ankle, and content despite the heaviness in my heart. I should talk to him ...
I open my drafts folder and read the start of my email twice before deciding I’d rather throw myself down stairs than send this off. I’m going to have to talk to him inperson. Ugh. I scroll through my contacts and land on his name. Roland Casteel. But I don’t dare place a call or send a text. The problem is that I’ve never yelled at a man—male ... er, superbeing—before, and while my therapist and I agreed that this could be seen as a small measure of success for me, we didn’t talk about how to proceed. And I don’t think I’m up for another eleven p.m. emergency appointment ...
“Time to go. Ms. Boss Lady needs rest, and so do we,” Margerie says. I sit up abruptly, absorbed as I’d been in my laptop for the past ...fivehours? Good grief. “We’ve been working too hard these past weeks. Five p.m. is closing time. Go, go, go!”
“But it’s just getting good,” Vanya says, pointing up at my TV from the armchair she’s relocated to, her laptop on her lap, a beer in her raised hand. I glance up at the snowy mountain scene and the news reporter covering the catastrophe. “They sent Pele in, but she’s making a damn mess trying to use her laser sight as well as actual lava to get the people out of the snowdrift.”
“Shit, I’m seeing it here,” Garrison says, pointing at something I can’t see on his laptop. “She just caved the areaFemacarved out, trapping thirty-some odd members of their team.”
“Chyort ...” Vanya curses in Russian, her native tongue, before grabbing the remote and flipping through channels, finally landing on48 Today, which specializes in coverage of the Forty-Eight.
“... incredible to see. The scene here in Whitestone Pass is absolutely unbelievable. Lightning struck the peak of Whitestone during a blizzard that raged overnight. The blizzard came on too quickly for the majority of guests to evacuate. While several of the hotels and ski lodges have been able to communicate toFemaand the local police departments that their guests are all accounted for and safe, three hotels near the mountain’s peak have lost electricity and connectivity.Femaand local law enforcement had been working to dig them out, but that’s not where our current concern lies.
“At seven fifteen this morning, the self-service cabin rental management company Northwest Luxury Cabins reported that forty-two guests inside of thirteen cabins have been out of contact since the storm hit and that sixteen individuals, who reportedly rented out the largest cabin on-site, were actually outdoors at the time of the avalanche. They are believed to be trapped beneath the snow directly, most fearing them dead ...”
Shaky footage shows rescue teams attempting to bore holes into the snow to reach a cabin. A man dressed in a massive red coat and labeled on-screen as an executive from the rental management company shouts over the sound of the storm raging around them. “We think that this group of university students was outside trying to evacuate. They must have left too late and gotten lost in the snow. There’s a chance they’re trapped in their cars. All we know is that one of the girls, a Ms. Mallory Zhu, has an SOS app on her phone, and it hasn’t stopped pinging local police since ten fifteen. The GPS on her Find My iPhone app hasn’t moved either.”
Another interviewee, this one fromFema: “We just can’t get to them.”
And then the reporter flashes back onto the screen—a woman dressed in a dark-blue puffer coat that makes her blond hair stand out like a torch against the darkness of the world surrounding her. It’s supposed to be two, the time zone making it only three hours earlier there, but it looks like night.
Wind is whipping her hair about, and there’s still snow falling in harsh droves all around her, forcing her to shout. “TheFemateam was met with another challenge.Femaenlisted the help of world-renowned Forty-Eight Champion Pele, named for the Hawaiian lava goddess ...”
“She’s an ancestral deity,” Margerie corrects.
“... who attempted to use her laser sight to carve a pathway through the snow. The cave that theFemateam had already dug out collapsed, sealing thirty-six members of the rescue team within. Twelve have been dug out so far, but there’s very little hope for the remaining ...”
I cringe. “That’s terrible.”
