Page 13 of All Superheroes Need PR
Vinny snarls, “I obviously got up and freaked the fuck out, and the bastard—even though he broke and entered—demanded to know who the fuck I was and wouldn’t hand you over, even after I told him I was your brother. Woke Luca up. He came in with his goddamn lacrosse stick—”
“Which he burned to shreds! Literally vaped it on the spot! The bastard owes me a new lacrosse stick!” Luca slaps his palm on the table, and my dad slaps him upside the head.
“To be fair, you did whack him in the back with it ...” David adds.
“He was trying to steal our baby sister!”
“I’m older than you,” I grumble.
Charles is thirty-seven, Vinny’s thirty-five, I’m thirty-four, with David right behind me at thirty-three, and then there’s a huge gap in which Elena was done having kids before an accidental Emmanuel, who’s now twenty-five, came along. Not wanting him to be “alone,” as she puts it, she had one more kid, Luca, who’s now twenty-one and about to graduate from undergrad.
Luca stabs David in the ribs with his elbow while Elena brings the swear jar from off the top of the fridge and slams it down in the center of the kitchen table. Charles is glowering at me, likeI’mthe problem. “He took you back outside and would have flown off with you if Mom hadn’t woken up and seen him holding you and screamed bloody murder.”
“And even after he came inside and put you on the couch, he still hit me,” Luca sputters, showing me the back of his head. I can’t see anything through his curls, but I still feel my heart lurch.
“Hehityou?” I choke on my mouthful of coffee.
“He took my whole face in his hand, and he shoved me all the way into the bookcase. All the way across the room!” Luca should be outraged, but once his expression breaks, he can’t keep the grin off his face. “I didn’t know he’d be that strong. He barely touched me. Did you see it, Vin?”
Vinny’s mouth twitches. He nods. “It was fucking insane. I can’t believe you haven’t posted about it.” He glances at his phone.
Luca sinks into his seat sheepishly.
Vinny raises his eyebrow. “You did? How many views?”
“Five hundred K. Nobody believes me, though. They want to see him on the house cam, and nobody believes we don’t have one.”
“Don’t need companies spying on us,” my dad grumbles. “A good old-fashioned gate’ll do the trick.”
“Not if the intruder can fly!” Luca chuffs.
“That’s what the shotgun is for.”
“Did dad tell you he almost shot him?” Emmanuel snorts.
“Dad! You can’t shoot one of the Forty-Eight!” I squeak.
William shrugs. “Nobody comes into my house and threatens my little girl.”
I’m not sure how it’s possible to feel so much love, so much shame, and so much terror in equal doses, but the combination is too much. While the rest of my family might be chuckling and reliving the adventure, tears prick the backs of my eyes. I also feel like I could faint all over again.
“I ... I’m so sorry, everybody. I didn’t want anybody to get hurt.” My throat constricts.
“Hey,” Charles says. “It’s not your fault. The drinking is,” he says, pointing his fork angrily at me. “But everything that happened after is on him.”
“You could have gotten hurt. He’sdangerous.”
“We had it handled,” David insists, and that gets everybody talking simultaneously, including me.
“You slept through the whole damn thing,” Mani shouts.
“No lo teníashandled,” Elena says at the same time.
I all but screech, “He shoved Luca into a wall!”
“It didn’t hurt. I could have still taken him.” Luca’s cackling. Emmanuel, seated beside him, tries to shove him off his stool.
“Querida, todo está bien ahora. Todo el mundo está bien y sano.” Another sign of the cross before she switches to English. “It’s good that we don’t ever have to see that terrible creature again.”
