Rivals

Once inside the house Maggie went straight to her room and slammed the door. Grandma went to the kitchen. When Brent and Lucy headed for his room, however, she leaned around the corner of the doorway and scowled. "This your girlfriend, boy?"

Brent's eyes went wide. He stared at Lucy, then back at Grandma. "No!" he said. "We're just - friends, we study together sometimes, it's - "

"I'm holding you to the same rule I gave your mother twenty-odd years ago. When there's a girl in your room, you keep the door open at least one foot, and you don't play any loud music. I know perfectly well why boys your age listen to their music so loud."

"You do?" Brent asked. He didn't know whether he played his music particularly loud or not.

"I do," Grandma agreed. "I may look old to you but I was sixteen once."

"We're fifteen, Mrs. Gill," Lucy said, with a huge metallic smile.

"Reynolds," Brent corrected her.

"Mrs. Reynolds. I mean. I guess you were Brent's mom's mother? I mean, of course, you still are. Except she's - but you don't stop being somebody's mother, that's not something you can - "

"We're just going to sit in my room and talk," Brent explained.

Grandma blinked, every flicker of her eyelids magnified by her huge glasses. "Yes, I imagine you will." Then she stepped back inside the kitchen and out of view.

Brent went into his room with Lucy. She unstrapped her leg braces, then flopped on his bed while he put his balloons in the corner. Brent always thought better while he was pacing, so he started a circuit of his room, going from his computer table over to his poster of Edward Abbey and then over to his closet door before starting over on the same path.

When he didn't say anything for five or six laps, Lucy sat up on the bed and grabbed at his arm as it went by. "Hey. Hey. Talk to me."

"You don't believe me. I understand that," he told her. "I wouldn't believe me either. It's a ludicrous thing to say. Nobody in the real world has superpowers, nobody in history has ever had - "

"Brent," she said, interrupting him for once. "I do."

"What?"

She smiled. "If anybody else said it, then, maybe, yeah. I would be kind of skeptical. But this is you. I believe you. I always do."

He ran his fingers through his hair and started pacing again, then thought of something and hurried to his closet. He threw the door open and started rooting around under piles of dirty clothes.

"What are you looking for?"

"Research materials," he told her. He pulled a plastic bag out of the closet and threw it to her. She caught it easily.

She opened the bag and spilled out a couple dozen comic books with bright, lurid covers. They all showed men in various muscular poses, most of them punching something or about to be punched by somebody else. They wore elaborate costumes, some with masks, some with capes.

He picked one up and stared at it. "I haven't looked at these in years. I used to really love these but then after a while they seemed kind of dumb. Look, I remember this one. It's about a guy who got bitten by a radioactive aardvark, right?"

"Um, let me see - no, that's the one whose experimental airplane crashed on this totally deserted island, right, and he found a cave, and inside the cave were all the gods of world mythology, and it turned out, right, he could summon any of them to help him out if he just said the right word."

"Oh, yeah," Brent said. "Is this what I am now? Am I going to have to start beating people up?"

"Hopefully only the ones who deserve it," she told him. "You know, criminals, and dangerous types, and - and oh my God, you could fight supervillains, that would be so cool, except there aren't any, are there? Because you're the only one who - hey, I just thought of something, your sister, did she? I mean, I assume you both - but - but - "

He rolled the comic book into a tube in his hands, rolled it tighter and tighter because he didn't know what else to do. It was only after he'd rolled it as thin as a pencil that she noticed and stopped talking.

"Brent!" Lucy said. "Stop! Those are highly collectable!"

"It is kind of old," he said. "Do you think it might be valuable?"

Lucy stared at it in numb horror. "Not anymore," she said.

"Oh my God, that was stupid," Brent said, smoothing it out as best he could. He put it down on his desk.

"This isn't just about superpowers, is it?" she asked him. "You have something else on your mind. I mean, if I had superpowers, that would be the only thing I could think about. I'd be concerned with finding out what my limitations were, and whether I had a fatal weakness to something, like, my powers didn't work against the color blue, or if there was some special kind of radioactive rock that could hurt me, or - " She stopped. "There is something else. I can see it on your face."

"Yeah."

"And it's big. It's bigger than the existence of superpowers." Her eyes went wide. "Bigger than that?"

"Yeah."

When he said nothing more she made a rolling motion with one hand, to suggest that he get on with it. She looked like she was dying to hear his big news.

"There's one more thing else I have to tell you. Except I don't want to."

"But - "

"But I have to. Because I have to tell somebody. And of all the people in the entire world, you're the one I can trust the most."

Lucy pressed her lips together. She knelt on the bed and folded her hands in her lap. Then she nodded, to indicate she was ready to hear it.

"I think I killed my dad," he told her.