Page 60 of All Superheroes Need PR
“In the meantime, you are going to heed my words. You like him. He likes you. Try to poke holes in it, if you want, but don’t sharpen your knife when you find that the fabric doesn’t tear. Go talk to him.” She gives my shoulder one final little squeeze, and I nod, my throat all clenched.
“I’ll ... try.”
She rolls her eyes but still smiles and says, “And you’ll succeed, because I’ve never seen you fail at anything. You got this.”
“I got this.”
“He’s in design now. Go get him.”
“I’ll go get him.” I stand up, and Margerie slaps my ass.
“That’s my girl!”
I laugh, feeling strangely giddy at the prospect of confronting him about our lack of sex, and follow Margerie out of our temporary offices in one of the COE domes and into the larger COE tower. We split at the elevator. She goes up to the Wyvern’s floor, and I continue across the atrium, planning to grab Rollo a coffee.
I cross toward the coffee shop in the center of the open space. The line isn’t too long as the lunch crowd hasn’t hit yet. I’m feeling optimistic and excited-nervous as I slip between men and women in power suits, some couriers, and delivery people.
One such delivery person in a generic brown uniform is walking toward me. I’m not focused on them but register their uniform coming closer and closer in my peripheries. I try to veer out of the way, but they counter, moving into my path until I’m forced to place all my attention on them. I trip. “Ooph.” They’re staring straight ahead, not looking at me at all, as they clip my arm with their shoulder.
“Sorry ...” I start to shout, but the word is taken—the world is taken—smashed into a ball and shoved back down my throat as my body spins, colliding with nothing, and I free-fall.
My stomach lurches up into my mouth, and I swallow it into place, and when I blink next, I’m still. I open my eyes, and I know the smell of this place before my eyes even register it. I know where I am.
I can taste the age of the house on my tongue. I can feel the wind from the open window letting in a draft that claps greedily against open cabinet doors. They’re all empty. I don’t need to look again; I already know.
My whole body has been immolated. I can breathe, but I can’t move. I’m not sure if I can’t or if I don’t, but the result is the same. Tears well in my eyes, ready to join the ghosts of tears already in this place.
How am I here? Am I really here? What if this is just ... a dream? A nightmare ... standing in a place I never want to remember and can never forget. In the kitchen of my childhood home, where I was left ...
A rattling grabs my attention, like the hair on the back of my head when she used to shake me for being too slow. I choke. The sound of a flushing toilet echoes down the short hall that connects three small rooms. A tiny bedroom my ... those people who birthed me used, a tinier bedroom that doubled as the place I slept and her closet, and this room. An empty kitchen with a view of a beat-up couch covered in trash and clothes positioned in front of a TV with a big crack down the middle.
The couch is bare, not covered in anything now, and the TV is gone, but it’s still the same couch. The same green fabric worn gray in places. It can’t be the same couch. It can’t be the same room. It feels like ... someone just emptied the place, ran out in a hurry, and never came back ...because they were sent to jail. The house was foreclosed on, and the bank took it, but nobody ever bought it, not even a developer to tear it down. Everyone who set foot near this place knew what it was: cursed.
A door squeaks, and I jolt, recognizing the sound. The hinges of the bathroom door were all built in at wrong angles, so the door sweeps the floor, scraping it before it hits the wall. I look toward it, and where my mother once stood, eyes bleary, hair sticking straight up and out in a bleached-blond mop, appears a dark-haired person, androgynouslydressed in a pair of black pants and a boxy black shirt, a heaping of layered gold necklaces weighing down their neck.
They remind me of a Greek neighbor Elena and William had when I first moved in to their house. Their neighbor had always been friendly. They’d never told Elena and William about the one time they caught me with all my worldly supplies, standing at a bus stop in town. I hadn’t taken the bus, in the end, but seeing them drive by—in the direction of Elena and William’s house—had been terror-inducing enough, I’d immediately given up on the idea of running. I’m glad I had.
This person has a small smile strung between their cheeks, but I don’t feel soothed by that. Standing here in this house, looking at this person emerging from a bathroom that I’ve used before ... nothing about this is friendly.
“Hi there, Vanessa. How are you feeling?” they say, smoothing a tanned white hand through their jet-black waves. Their sleeves are cropped short to reveal lean muscles that flex on each subtle motion. “I know you don’t know me, so I thought, hey, what the heck? Why not bring you to a place you do know? I thought that might make you feel more comfortable.”
They grin, ring-covered fingers rapping against the paper-thin wall devoid of pictures, not even stained by the outlines of pictures that once were, because there never were any. “No? It doesn’t? You look a little distressed.” They keep pausing between their words, dark eyes moving over me in a plain assessment. There’s something they’re trying to figure out. If only they’d ask, I’d tell them. I’d tell them anything they wanted to hear to get me out of here.
“You’re a shy, skittish little thing, aren’t you?” They lunge at me, arriving on the other side of the tiny, dinky kitchen island. The laminate cracks under their palms as they press their hands flat to the surface. I flinch back so hard, I hit my head against an open cabinet door. The feel of the hard particleboard covered in peeling plastic and theexactway it hurts as it digs into my skull drags me underneath an icy wave of memories where I drown, screaming.
My hand fumbles for my pocket, shock rendering all my movements clumsy. They don’t try to stop me but watch as I reach into my pocket, pull out my phone, and immediately drop it. I’m too scared to pick it up. I don’t want to let this person out of my sight.
They’re leaning forward onto the island that separates us now, their bare forearms down on the cracking material. They’re looking at me with amusement plain in their dark eyes. “I don’t understand how you could be a key. And yet ... here we are.” They sigh, shake their head a little, stand up, and brush a hand through their hair.
“You know, you’re the first key we’ve found. Do you even know who I am? No, I don’t suppose you would. You might work for theChampions,” they scoff, rings clanging again as they slap the counter, making me jump. “But they don’t trust you enough to tell you anything real. Distract the world with cute photos of the darling couple and pictures of theWyvernin tight pants, and the world won’t realize they’ve been lied to.”
I don’t say anything. I don’t know what they’re talking about, don’t know how I’m meant to respond, and frankly, don’t care. I just want out of here.
“Well, I don’t want to take up too much of your time. I have just a few questions that, if you answer honestly, will result in my transporting you back to your precious office space, and if you don’t, will result in me locking you in here to starve, just like your parents did when they went on that weeklong bender, right? It’ll be fitting. You’ll die in here as you were always meant to as a child.”
No.
No ...
