Rivals

BRENT'S BIG BLUNDER!

SISTER GETS AWAY

Cops curious: did he let her run?

Brent read the headline again. He was still too mad to read the full text of the front page story in the morning paper. The picture showed him standing next to the Volvo. It was taken from a high angle, maybe even from the helicopter he'd seen hovering over the scene, so you couldn't see the mother or her baby inside the car. You could see the blood that splattered downward from Brent's nose and stained his shirt, and the way his nose was kind of tilted over to one side.

Lucy came over and touched his nose gently. "It doesn't hurt any more, does it?" she asked.

"No, it's completely healed. It felt kind of weird for a while but then I figured out why. It was bent out of shape when she punched me. The cartilage had to shift back to the right position. The paramedic who checked me out nearly had a heart attack when he saw it crawling across my face like that."

"Yuck," Lucy said.

"He said normally noses don't do that. He said that when somebody gets their nose flattened like that, normally the doctors have to break it again to put it back in the right shape."

"Okay, stop," Lucy told him.

He was angry enough, though, to enjoy grossing her out. "I could feel it moving inside my head all night. Rebuilding itself."

"Stop! I know I said I would always be there for you, and yes, I guess that's true, but if you tell me one more nasty detail I will totally walk out the door, and I know for a fact that you don't want that, so be quiet, okay, cease and desist, be still, for me?"

He frowned and sat down next to her on his bed. "Sorry," he told her. "I'm just fed up. I did everything I could and the newspaper acts like I dropped the ball. 'Cops curious'. I mean, seriously? One of them did ask me if maybe I let her go, but then Weathers threatened to have him demoted on the spot and he backed down. Everyone who was there saw me go chasing after her at top speed. If I had caught her, if I hadn't had to catch that car - "

"Would you have beaten her up?" Lucy asked.

"I - I don't know," he admitted. "I probably would have tried to talk to her again. And she would have run away again." He thought back to the moment when Maggie had hit him. "Except, there was this one moment, when I was convinced that suddenly everything made sense. That my whole purpose, the point of my entire existence, was to get in a serious fistfight with Maggie. How messed up is that? My dad would have been ashamed. But if she had stuck around, I think I would have hit her back. She's my sister, Luce. Why did I feel that way?"

"Let me ask you something," Lucy said, running one hand up and down his back. "Before you got your powers - you and she fought a lot, right?"

"Well... we called each other a lot of names. And one time, when we were pretty young, I was building this tower out of Legos, like, this enormous thing that I spent days on, and she knocked it over like she was Godzilla."

Lucy laughed. "But you never, even once, wanted to hit her?"

Brent stared down at his feet. He could see where this was going. "Yeah. I guess I did. Maybe about a hundred times a day, some days. But I would never have actually done it. Mom always said I should never, ever hit a girl."

"Which is good advice. Except maybe if the girl is throwing cars at you. Don't punish yourself for being human, Brent. I know you think you're supposed to be some paragon of virtue now because of what happened to your dad, but don't be so hard on yourself! And don't let total strangers tell you what you're worth. You're always going to be my hero. You always have been, even before all this."

He leaned over and gave her a big hug.

For a while they just hung out, the way they had been doing for years. Lucy tried to help him with some of his algebra homework but mostly he just wanted to chill, listen to some music (not too loud) and surf the web. It was actually really nice, the kind of thing he hadn't had the chance to do for ages, and when Lucy said she had to get home he was sad to see her go. At the front door he waved at her dad, who had come to pick her up in his Jeep. Lucy's dad was a really nice guy who had the loudest laugh Brent had ever heard and who always wore a cowboy hat, indoors and out. Brent liked him a lot. When they'd gone, Brent turned around to head back to his room - and found Grandma standing right behind him, watching him intently.

"We should talk," she said. She lifted her cast and gestured for him to follow her to the kitchen. She sat down with a grunt and let her broken arm rest on the table.

"Do you need anything before bedtime?" he asked.

"I need," she said, and stared at him through her huge glasses, "some peace of mind."

"I'm not sure I can help you there," he told her.

"Maybe," she went on, "you think I was too hard on your sister. Look at me, boy. You answer me now, and be honest."

Brent nodded. He didn't like to say it, but - "Yes. I think you really pushed her. I don't blame you for her running away. That was her choice. But you made her life pretty miserable."

Grandma nodded agreeably, as if she could see his point and was giving it ample consideration. Then she said, totally surprising him, "I love that girl."

He could do nothing but sit there and wait for her to explain. What she'd said sounded frankly impossible.

"Don't be so surprised. She's all I have left of my daughter. Oh, don't pout like that. I know I have you as well, but you take after your father. Maggie has your mother's eyes and her hair - that beautiful hair. I used to brush out your mother's hair for her, when she was little. And then, until she was five years old, I brushed Maggie's, as well. Did you know that? No. You didn't."

"But you hit Maggie! A lot!"

"I hit your mother, too, when she needed it. Because it was the only way to keep her on the straight and narrow." Grandma waved her good hand in the air. "I suppose things are different now. But in my day, we had a saying: 'spare the rod and spoil the child'. It was how you taught your children discipline and respect."

Brent thought there had to be better ways. He thought that society must have come pretty far since then. "They don't say that anymore," he told her.

She looked unconvinced.