6.
Saturday night is open mic night. Tea and Strumpets is open until eleven on open mic night, and from six to eleven every amateur singer-songwriter in the county shows up to perform. It's usually not the questionable disaster it sounds like it could be. Mo and Jake – two seventeen-year-old prodigies from the local high school – have had firm possession over the six-o'clock slot for the past six months by the sly cheat of each signing up for a solo hour and then having the other one play back-up. I've never been able to call them on it, not with how good they play.
The thing about open mic night is that … well, I thought teleporting home would calm my battered nerves and soak me in the relaxing and familiar hustle and bustle of a normal busy Saturday night.
I was wrong.
“I could tell her to leave.”
“You most certainly will not eject her from this cafe,” I hiss to Dixie, placing the top slice of toasted pretzel bread onto a hot roast beef and pepper sandwich a little harder than I intended. Both of us grimace at the jagged hole my fingertips tear into the bread, and I toss it aside and reach for another slice before Dixie can say anything. “I can't have her kicked out of here when she's doing absolutely nothing wrong.”
“Why not?”
“Because then I'm the bad guy, aren't I?”
“Weren't you already the bad guy when you broke up with her and kicked her out of your apartment?”
I will not fire a good waitress on open mic night, I will not fire a good waitress on open mic night …
“Dixie, Hazel is my problem and I will deal with her. Which I won't right now, because she's not being a problem.” I shove the plate holding the sandwich and a dewy glass of lemonade at her. “Now go serve Jody Casey her dinner.”
Dixie drops a completely unladylike sneer before sauntering off to deliver the special to one of our loyal regulars. Thankfully, Hazel is not one of our loyal regulars, or at least she's not one anymore. She's vegan, which limits her choices considerably even before you take in her food allergies. Her shopping list can fit onto a business card.
Forcefully humming along with the guitar players currently strumming away up front, I swipe at a few wayward crumbs on the metal table in the back where I've been preparing the meals Benny doesn't have to bake, grill, or saut. Tara teased me about making a swift retreat into the kitchen as soon as I spotted Hazel in the cozy reading area in the back of the cafe, but I prefer to think of it as assessing the situation, prioritizing the troubled waters ahead of me, and deciding that the customers need their soups and sandwiches far more than I need to get into a public argument in front of forty curious and hungry onlookers.
Hazel and I broke up after a fight that started over nothing. A lost section of the morning newspaper, maybe. Spoiled milk, it might have been. I've never been quite clear on why we began to shout at one another one moment and ended the fight two hours later with me threatening to dump her, all right, in Argentina, and I'd leave her there and let her find her own way home, too. We screeched back and forth like angry parrots, she caught her things as I pitched them out the bedroom window at her. Just like that I was living alone again, and we remain prickly around one another to this day.
“Get out of my kitchen.”
I dart a surprised glance in Benny's direction. “Come again?”
“Get
out
of my
kitchen
,” he drawls, his words slow and condescending. It feels like he's talking to an obnoxious child crawling around underfoot, except it's just me, little old misbehaving me. I squirm as he advances on me with a cheese-stained spatula. “I'm not babysitting my boss. That's not in my job description.”
“It's not babysitting,” I say.
Benny grumbles out a peeved growl roughened by too many devoted years of cigar smoking. “Says you. I know how these things go. She sits out there waiting to you to come out and you wait in here for her to leave.” He shuffles back to the oven, shambling along like a sleepy rhino. “Ain't got time to deal with grown women behaving like yellow-bellied toddlers.”
I smooth my damp hands over the wrinkled material of the chili-pepper-patterned apron I tied around my waist upon stashing myself in the kitchen. I'm not afraid of Hazel. I'm not. I've faced down oversized mutated lizards the size of skyscrapers, so I think I should be able to handle an uncomfortable encounter with my ex-girlfriend. I don't even know why she's here yet. It could just be for something innocuous, maybe just to say hello.
I mean, it's a wacky thought, but she might just be here to eat. Crazy, I know.
When I finally steel myself and stride out into the dining room, ducking around Tara as she gives me an encouraging grin, I see that Hazel's changed seats, shuffling herself from the back of the cafe to the snug couch tucked against the unoccupied left front window. She'd plucked one of the books from the shelves in the back, some coffee-table book on modern art that must have been published way before either one of us was born. She curls up on the couch with her coltish legs folded underneath her, the book cracked wide open and cradled upside down in her lap.
Seeing the upside-down book draws out a slight smile on my face in spite of my reluctance. Hazel likes reading art books like that, saying it makes her reexamine her artistic perspective. According to her, it's how she became such a reliable tattoo artist.
I let myself take a quick glimpse around the room, uneasy about discussing anything with Hazel in front of a live studio audience, even if that particular audience paid a two-dollar cover charge to listen to Mo and Jake play lovelorn folk rock. This town's occupants have always been respectful for the most part. Occasionally a rotten egg would get thrown at the cafe over godless offenses as simple as holding Hazel's hand, a more prevalent annoyance when we first started dating. Almost everyone with a problem over the two of us sharing a chaste kiss moved on once they discovered that taunting a same-sex couple with horrid names didn't always lead to a morbidly amusing display of woe and misery. Anyone who would expect me or Hazel to burst into tears over anything short of a death in the family clearly has never met either one of us.
Now we're simply the ones known around town for breaking up badly, who gripe about one another when we're apart and snipe at each other when we're in the same room. We make for a good freak show, the pair of us.
Hazel lifts her gaze from her upside-down book as I approach. She doesn't smile. “Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
She stares at me.
I'd like to think it's reflex rather than romantic interest or argumentative instigation when I stare back. “What?”
Hazel narrows her eyes. “What?”
“You're staring at me.”
“I do that.”
“Stare at me?”
“As part of waiting for you to take my order? Yes.”
“Oh.” I blink. “Yes, all right, that makes total sense, actually.”
Her hint of a frown peeks out of hiding, tugging downward at the corners of her lips. I consider fumbling out my receipt pad and a pen before it dawns on me that there's not much left on the menu that she can order anyway. “So what will it be?” I ask.
Something in the vicinity of her left eyebrow glitters in the sunlight, so either her eyes are sparkling with mischief or her newest piercing just has diamond chips and a good shine to it. “Well, what's good here?”
Oh, for crying out loud,
I think in exasperation. “Hazel, I've got three meals left on the menu that you can feasibly digest without medical attention or a three-hour long lecture on the many ways they psychologically mistreat chickens in Guatemala, so how about you just pick some combo of the three and we'll call it an order?”
“Bravo, my girl,” a familiar voice rumbles.
I must have missed the tiny bell above the door tinkling a tuneless greeting as Morris entered, an astounding error on my part considering just how close to the front door I'm standing. But even though I didn't catch the ring of the bell, the sudden silence as Mo's fingers skitter across her guitar strings and the handful of flabbergasted gasps which follow would have been a wake-up call.
Slow and steady movement out of the corner of my eye alerts me to Hazel rising up from the couch, easing to my side as harmlessly as she can manage. I don't suppose now is an ideal time to point out that I can take care of myself, especially against Morris.
Of course, Morris is not making that easy.
Morris built himself a temporary plastic surgery machine not long before my father captured him and carted him off to Beddingfield Asylum for the twenty-seventh and final time. The turnover rate in Beddingfield is more than a little appalling. For a well-funded mental institution housing the superpowered and supposedly insane, patients flow in and out of Beddingfield's doors like a calm and dependable tide. Hollyoak Hills may be the only jail we can reasonably stay in without any chance of escape, but Beddingfield is where villains are more apt to go. For some reason, “crazy” is more comforting for the general public to accept than “perfectly sane but clearly dangerous.”
That's not to mention the large number of patients who were previously doctors in the asylum or those who become therapists there after their release, whether or not they possess medical degrees. As far as I know, Dad continues to swear that the next comet hurtling through the atmosphere towards the asylum is absolutely
not
getting lasered to bits by the Brigade if he had any say in the matter.
In any event, the plastic surgery machine – meant for a single four-hour stint as another person and created for the ensuing chaos it would cause – was mostly just for kicks and giggles until Morris and Dad moved in together. Since then, it's been the greatest blessing to Morris's retirement he could have hoped for. He can have a normal life like this, safely venturing out into the world as someone else before going home to be himself with Dad.
Your average supervillain chooses to hide his true face behind a mask of leather or suede, or perhaps to shade over shiny burns or bold scars with carefully placed makeup. Morris, however, has a more refined way to cover up the stretched skin on his cheeks and the ear-to-ear slice which will forever dig through the skin under his jawline. With a flip of a switch on the plastic surgery machine he can veil his multitude of scars with rearranged muscles and smoothed skin for a short while.
But today there are two black eyes, a split lip and what looks like a broken cheekbone to go with all of Morris's previous scars. He looks a very recognizable wreck, and it takes me a moment of looking into his eyes to understand it's not just a physical sort of tragedy.
He takes in the stunned, frightened faces of my customers and the terrified whimpers of small children in complete silence. When he speaks again, it's a weary sort of tired intimidation, one no sane person would challenge.
“Get.
Out
.”
With his wrecked face on display, everybody recognizes Morris Kemp, the great and supposedly bloodthirsty Quiz Master, destroyer of the Persephone Tower and temporary ruler of the alien planet of Ferlo before he obliterated it.
They listen to his demand without question.
“Oh, they most certainly will not call the police,” Morris snaps derisively a few short minutes later.
I lower the damp dishcloth in my hand, the material stained brown with washed-away blood, and try not to make too childish a face at Morris's declaration. “Did you ever learn anything when you were taking over planets and blowing up buildings? Honestly, Morris.”
“There are exactly two police cars in this town, which presupposes eight police officers at most, if we're stretching,” he says, sounding almost offended that I might doubt him. “I've disabled the services of entire city police stations before. I think I can handle terrifying eight power-mad yokels from Mayberry.”
I resist the urge to point out that this particular town may actually be smaller than Mayberry, if I'm remembering my classic television trivia correctly. Also, we only have four police officers in town, none of whom are the least bit capable of dealing out a speeding ticket without coming off like tremendous self-important jerks. Morris's assessment of the local police force is unfortunately more apt than it should be. “You don't care that they'll come?”
“Vera, come along now.” The condescending way he says my name startles me enough for my hand to pull away out of reflex. “You're registered in the area, of course.”
“Of course,” I say, my voice low.
Enrolling with the county is never mandatory. Forcing those with superpowers to fight the forces of evil has always been more to the advantage of supervillains and their flunkies than the general populace. Smaller police forces leave superhero registration a strictly volunteer program for those who move into the area. While I haven't used my powers in five years I still signed up for the local volunteer superhero program the first day I moved into the area. Not that I needed to, of course – the east coast superhero teams cover vast areas under their umbrella of protection – but the obligation is ingrained in me thanks to twenty years of private rescue and recovery lessons and my own glorious family history, such as it is.
The police may come. They might even bash the door down in a sorry attempt to rescue me. The more likely scenario is that the police will hear the story of what's occurring in the toasty warm interior of Tea and Strumpets, confirm we're the only ones left in the building, and calmly assure anyone who worries about my security that Vera Noble can deal with one pesky beat-up supervillain all on her own. I've certainly handled the others who've tried anything in the cafe in the past few years quite nicely even without using my powers or breaking a sweat.