Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect (10 page)

“That’s the spirit.”

Malcolm lets go of the rink
wall and takes a tentative stride toward me. I push away, keeping the distance
between us.

“What are you doing?”

“Giving you incentive,” I
say. He takes a step toward me, his legs wobbly. “Stop trying to walk. Skate.”

Malcolm nods. His legs make
the adjustment and he pushes toward me. Instead of easing into a rhythmic
stride, he leaves his trailing leg out too long and nearly wipes out. He grasps
at the air frantically, his body pitches and sways as it fights to rediscover
its balance, and somehow it all works out: He suddenly smooths out and slides
right into my waiting arms.

“Well done,” I say.

“Yeah? You have low
standards.”

I smile. “Do I now?”

Malcolm bends to close the
few remaining inches between us.

“YO! Mal!”

Oh, no. No no no...

“What’re you doing here,
man?” Angus Parr says as he skates up to us, Gerry Yannick at his heels. Angus
puts on a last burst of speed before skidding to a stop, spraying ice at us. He
glances at me but doesn’t offer a greeting.

“Hey, guys,” Malcolm says
politely.

“Didn’t expect to see you
here, dude,” Gerry says.

“Same here.”

“We were hanging out at the
mall, but it was way dead,” Angus says, ending his explanation there. “Hey,
come shoot the puck around with us. We only got the two sticks, but we can
trade off.”

“Thanks, but I’m —”

“C’mon, man, this loser
can’t shoot for crap,” Angus says, poking Gerry with his stick.

“And you can’t pass for crap.
C’mon, Mal,” Gerry says. He finally acknowledges my presence by saying to me,
“You can watch. You know, if you want.”

“We’re on a date,” I say
pointedly.

Gerry shrugs. “So? I said
you can watch us.”

“That is an option. Another
option? You go back to your scrimmage and we go back to our date, and we stay
out of each other’s way for the rest of the night.”

“Hey, man,” Angus says to
Malcolm, “you going to let her talk to us like that?”

“Excuse me?
Let me
talk to you like that? No one
lets me
talk to anyone.”

“Yeah, well, maybe it’s time
someone starts.”

Malcolm tries to play
peacemaker, but I’m in no mood to be civil to these meatheads, not anymore.
“Oh, you go ahead and try it,” I say, prompting a derisive snort of laughter
from Gerry. “What? You think I can’t take you?”

Gerry looks me over.
“Please. Don’t even.”

“Tell you what,” I say,
yanking the stick out of Gerry’s hand. “You go guard that goal. I’ll take one
shot. One. I get the puck past you, you and Angus leave. I miss the shot, I’ll
leave.”

“Carrie,” Malcolm begins,
but I shush him. Sorry, sweetie, but I need to put this fire out myself.

“
Pft
. Cake,” Gerry
says, taking Angus’s stick.

I follow him back to the
goal. He slaps the puck at me. I catch it on the blade of my stick and skate
away, getting a feel for the motions, simultaneously familiar and foreign. My
stomach flutters; I’ve talked the talk, now I need to walk the walk or I’m
going to look like a mouthy girl with more game than game (so to speak).

I turn around at mid-ice to
face Gerry. He’s center net, crouched low, knees wide, stick down to guard his
five-hole (that’s the gap between his feet, for those of you unfamiliar with
the terminology). Curious, I skate to my left. Gerry adjusts his position to
mirror me. Casually, I cross back. Gerry shifts again. That’s what I needed to
know.

All right, Hellcat Hauser,
let’s do it.

I launch myself at Gerry, my
slow glide becoming a full charge within a few strides. The old instincts kick
in as I close the distance. I guide the puck by feel rather than by sight. I
watch Gerry’s body for the slightest shift in his weight, the tiniest
adjustment to his stance. He hunkers lower, almost laying his stick flat
against the ice. The kid’s a wall, true enough, but there’s a fatal flaw with
walls: They expect everyone to try going
through
them; they don’t expect
anyone to try going
around
them.

Gerry braces himself,
thinking I’m going to crash the net, but at the last second I hook hard to my
left, skirting the edge of the crease. My ankles, long unused to this kind of
strain, scream at me. Tomorrow morning I’m going to be in serious pain, but
man, it’s going to be worth it, because Gerry has kindly left me a huge
opening, which I fill with puck with a backhand snap shot.

When I turn around, I’m
greeted by three faces hanging slack in complete and total awe — although only
one of those faces is also impressed. Gerry looks at me, then at the puck
sitting in the net, then back at me. Go on, tell me it was a lucky shot. I know
you want to.

“That was a lucky shot,” Angus
says.

“That was pure skill,” I
say, “and even if it was a lucky shot — which it
so
wasn’t — the deal
was if I make the goal, you two leave, so get skatin’, boys.”

“Best two out of three,”
Gerry says, and he slaps the puck back at me. I slap it right back. It flies
between his legs. “I wasn’t ready yet!”

“Aw, poor baby, would you
like some cheese to go with that whine? You have two minutes to clear out and
let us get back to our date,” I say, tossing my stick to Angus. “If you don’t?
On Monday, I’m going to tell everyone in school how I owned your poor clumsy
ass, not once but twice.”

Gerry stands there blinking
at me, no doubt searching his pot-addled brain for a scathing comeback,
something that will put the uppity little girl in her place but good.

“Come on, man, let’s go,”
Angus says. Gerry sneers at me and throws a look at Malcolm, who replies with a
shrug. Finally, they skate away. I don’t turn my back on them until they’re out
of sight, out of the building.

“That,” Malcolm says, “was
hot.”

“Athletic girls do it for
you, huh?”

“Girls who don’t take crap
from jerks like them do it for me.”

“Excellent answer,” I say,
and as weird as it may sound, I appreciate that Malcolm didn’t jump in to
defend me. I wouldn’t have held it against him if he had, but he let me stand
up for myself. He doesn’t see me as a frail girl that needs protection, and
that means a lot to me.

He deserves this kiss.

NINE

The Monday night homework session
at Chez Danvers is unusually subdued. Normally, getting homework done is
something of an incidental aspect of the evening and we spend more time talking
than working, but tonight we’re all quiet, focused, intent. None of us wants to
think about tomorrow, so we’re losing ourselves in our homework.

“Hey, I was wondering: How
are we supposed to testify tomorrow?” Stuart says to me through a mouthful of
Doritos (classy). I suppose it was inevitable someone would break the silence,
but I’m surprised it’s not Matt.

“Um, step up to the witness
stand, put your hand on the Bible, truth and nothing but and all that,” I say.
“I don’t think it’ll be any different for us than for a normal person.”

“Yeah, but we’re not going
as normal people.”

Ah, I get what he’s saying:
it’s not going to be Stuart Lumley on the stand, it’s going to be Superbeast,
so how can any court accept testimony from someone using a fake identity?

“I was wondering about that
too,” Sara says.

“I spent last night reading
up on court proceedings involving super-heroes. It was pretty interesting,” I
say.

Matt, the super-hero geek of
the group, closes his English textbook and twists in his seat, his attention
fully on me. “Go on.”

“The whole issue of people
testifying under an assumed identity came up back in the eighties, and it went
all the way to the Supreme Court. The justices ruled, basically, that an
assumed
identity wasn’t the same as a
fake
identity, so testimony delivered by
any super-hero under his or her alias was admissible as long as, if pressed for
it, they could provide proof of their civilian identity.”

“Huh. So we don’t have to
unmask or give our real names or anything?”

“Nope. But we definitely do
not want to perjure ourselves, because the perjury laws that apply to
super-heroes are way harsher than they are for regular people. I guess that’s
the way it goes in general: The law makes a lot of allowances for super-heroes
so they can operate, but it also comes down hard on them when they screw up.”

“Incoming,” Sara says. The
conversation stops and we pretend to go back to our homework. A few seconds
later, Mr. Danvers strolls through the living room.

“What up, Mr. D?” Stuart
says.

“Stuart,” Mr. Danvers says.
“Kids, it’s getting late. You should go home.”

“Dad, it’s, like, barely
past eight,” Sara says, echoing my own thought. We’ve run later than ten on
many a night.

“Don’t argue, Sara. Say
good-night,” Mr. Danvers says, continuing on to the kitchen.

“What the hell?” Sara says,
jumping off the couch to chase after her dad.

“Oh, this isn’t going to end
well,” I say, and a few seconds later the sounds of familial conflict spill out
of the kitchen.

“There we were,” Matt says,
“in the Congo...”

“I think we should go,” Missy
says. My initial impulse is to say yes, let’s get out of here so Sara and her
father can tear into each other in private, but that might only cause things to
escalate.

Mr. Danvers makes the
decision for us when he storms into the living room and says brusquely, “Kids,
go home. Homework time’s over.”

Slowly, silently, we pack
up. I see Sara standing in the doorway to the kitchen, glowering at her father.
Her face is blank, expressionless, but her eyes absolutely blaze with rage. I
try to send her a message over the brainphone but she’s not receiving. She’s
locked me out.

We file out of the house
without so much as a goodbye.

“That sucked all over,” Matt
says.

“
Shyeah
,” Stuart
says. “What crawled up his butt and died?”

“Sara said he’s been in a
weird mood lately,” I say. “Look, there’s nothing we can do, so let’s all go
home and get a good night’s sleep.”

“Yeah, big day tomorrow,”
Matt says with more excitement than is warranted, but that’s my opinion. At
best, it’ll be a boring escort mission. I refuse to consider the worst-case
scenario. Optimism through denial.

I head home, and as I’m
reaching for the front door, my phone goes off. Sara’s name is on my screen.
Huh?

“You’re calling me,” I say.
“On the phone.”

“I didn’t want you in my
head. Not now,” Sara says, her voice thick. Crap, she’s crying. “Can I come
over?”

“Yeah, of course you can.”

I sit on the front porch and
wait, but I’m not waiting long. Sara storms up the walkway, her hoodie pulled
down to hide her face, hands crammed in her pockets. A wave of seething anger
hits me a few seconds before she reaches the porch. She sits down hard, her
breath coming in labored huffs. She won’t look at me. I lay a hand on her knee,
and the tightness in her body eases, but not by much.

“I know why Dad’s freaking out,”
she says. “He saw me using my powers.”

“But he already knows you’re
a psionic,” I say.

When Sara’s powers
manifested a couple of years ago, she was in the middle of the Kingsport Mall.
Her telepathy kicked in and, because she hadn’t yet learned how to shut out
other minds, every thought of every shopper in the whole mall flooded her brain
all at once. She suffered massive psychic shock and was rendered catatonic. She
was out of commission for a month, during which time Matt figured out what had
happened. Her parents called in Mindforce, who had extensive experience helping
new psionics adjust, and he was able to pull Sara out of her vegetative state.

He explained the situation
to the Danvers (Danverses?), who weren’t exactly overjoyed to learn that their
daughter was a superhuman. Momma Danvers has been skittish around Sara ever
since (if not outright scared, as Sara maintains), and her father...now that I
think about it, as far as I’ve seen, he’s kept his feelings on the matter to
himself. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say he bottled his feelings up, and now
they’re spilling out all over the place.

I believe that would be
called “misdirecting your anger.”

Sara tells me what straw
finally broke the proverbial camel’s back. “The other week, we were in the
kitchen. Dad knocked a glass of milk off the counter and I grabbed it with my
telekinesis. It was pure instinct. It was the first time I ever used my powers
in front of him. He looked at me like...”