Chum

Days blend into evenings of patrolling and vigilante actions, nights bleed into predawn study sessions where my eyes struggle to focus on textbooks and assignments. In the faint glow of my desk lamp, I see shadows forming. Shadows of Liberty Belle, of Safeguard, of Puppeteer, of a life where I'm someone more than just Samantha Small, a 14-year-old girl trying to make it through high school without too many hiccups.

The following week, my mom starts mentioning Jordan more frequently at the dinner table, her curiosity barely veiled by her casual tone. "So, you've been spending quite a lot of time with this Jordan. When will we get to meet them?" I shrug it off, saying we're just friends. My dad, a portrait of supportive but bewildered, nods but says nothing, taking another bite of his spaghetti.

"You know, if you're a lesbian, that's not something we have a problem with. Just. Just to make that clear." My dad says, and I nearly gag on my drink, but for a different reason than I think he knows.

"I don't think Jordan is a girl," I say, deflecting the statement.

"Well, we don't have a problem with you being heterosexual either," He says, chewing thoughtfully.

"I think what Jordan's got going on is more complicated than that," I deflect again, trying to push my skull through the tablecloth so that I can avoid looking my family in the eye.

"Well, you can date them either way. Just so long as they're kind to you, dear," My mom says. "But no shut doors, if they come over. You know that."

"Mom, I'm not… interested in Jordan romantically. And I hate this conversation. Can we move on to something else?" I say, trying to avoid noticing the theoretical steam coming out of my ears. And it's true - I don't really have that feeling for Jordan, not the same way I have for Gale, for whom our recreational flights have continued into the days, and not… Ugh, not for Rampart, who still makes me feel uncomfortably warm whenever we grapple.

"Sure thing, honey. We got a call from your teacher today. Your science teacher," my dad replies mid-chew, which is not a sentence I want to be hearing ever. Never ever ever. My heart bottoms out into my pelvis and my blood runs cold in my veins. "Says you're falling asleep in class?"

I sigh quietly and don't reply. My mom glances at me, and then my dad. "Is everything alright? You know, if there's anything you need to talk about…"

"I'm just training for track and field," I say, well-rehearsed, knowing it would come to this eventually. "Did my teacher say if my grades were bad?"

"They were fine, actually. I asked the same thing. You're doing better than most of the class," my dad replies, not looking my mom in the eyes. She shoots him an easily-interpretable look - don't encourage this behavior. "…But not by much, so don't rest on your laurels."

"You're training for track? Like… at night? Sam, that's dangerous," my mom cuts in, getting more pragmatic than my father. "I mean, I know you have… your powers, darling, but… Let's try to keep the nighttime training to a minimum, okay? Does the school let you use their track?"

"Not unless I'm signed up for a sport. Which I'm not, not in the fall," I mumble through a mouthful of food. My parents look at each other, exchanging telepathic parent information.

"Well, I'm sure you're going to be the fastest girl on the track team. Maybe the fastest student. You don't need to push yourself so hard, you're only fourteen, honey," my dad says, reaching over to pat me on the shoulder. Instinctively, I flinch away from the physical contact, and immediately feel bad, my increasingly well-tuned dodging instincts over-reacting to the innocuous touch. I put my shoulder back towards my dad, and he gets the message, giving me two small pats. "You're just a kid, Sam. Take it easy sometime. Have sleepovers."

"Speaking of sleepovers--" my mom says, through a mouthful of spaghetti just like her husband. She swallows, and repeats her sentence, unmuffled this time. "Speaking of sleepovers, though, I would like to meet this Jordan sometime. Or maybe his mom. Or both."

"Their mom," I gently correct my mom.

"Right, their mom. Let's try to get that organized some time, okay?"

"I'll see what I can do," I answer, half-sincerely.

Jordan and I continue our nightly escapades. This time, we intervene in a planned robbery, saving a local shop owner who gives us grateful nods but wisely refrains from asking too many questions. We also manage to bust a small drug handoff at an abandoned park, scaring the dealers enough to scatter their stash before running off into the night. As we sit back, panting, amidst the scattered paraphernalia, Jordan looks at me and laughs. "We're getting good at this," they say.

"Yeah," I smile back, bloodied knuckles and all, every fight leaving me with fewer and fewer bruises and marks than the one before. My skin has become a patchwork of scars, but even they are beginning to fade, even the distinctive ones across my belly, although they're leaving behind thick, skin-colored mark where the surface of my skin is raised up, sort of like halfway between a scar and a… not-scar. "We are."

I scroll through messages from my middle school friends. Their lives seem so distant, their problems a universe apart from mine. I read about homework woes, about crushes, about weekend plans. It makes me nostalgic for a simpler time — a time when my world wasn't tinged with violent vigilantism, but my work is too important here to take time off.

So, I lay there in our home base, steadily improved by the presence of additional filtration, a mop-and-vacuum bot, air-conditioning units in the walls. The darkness of the vast ceilings is punctuated only by the dim glow of my phone screen, a window into a past life that I'm not sure how to return to. The silence feels oppressive, pushing down on me like a weight. A void asking to be filled by a girl who's still figuring out how she fits into all of this.

And as I finally succumb to sleep, September crossing into October, it's not the successes or failures of the past weeks that occupy my mind. Instead, it's the gaping chasm between the life I'm living and the life that's expected of me — a rift that grows wider with each passing night, even as I gain the skills and experiences that make me feel, ironically, more whole. More complete.

Every time I return to the home base, our headquarters, with a knife stuck in me, I feel more alive than ever compared to the humdrum existence performing "patrols" for litter and lost pets. I cherish my 'hero team', but Puppeteer taking a voluntary leave of absence for psychiatric assistance and the adults handling all the big boy stuff has left me feeling gapingly empty when I'm with them, even when I'm with the people I have crushes on. It all feels so vapid compared to the work I'm doing here on the streets.

With both leaders out of action, Liberty Belle still MIA and Puppeteer getting herself treated through inpatient, there's no energy to do anything other than go through the motions. My fists, shins, and bones are getting increasingly strong thanks to Rampart's training, moving up from sandbags to bags full of just straight up rocks. My combat style is evolving, and I take the opportunity to train with the Young Defenders as just that - training.

The routine is comfortable. I go to school. I try not to fall asleep. After school, I either train and patrol with the Young Defenders, or go and plan our next raid with Jordan. We rack up victories, or at least stalemate after stalemate. I'm still only a fourteen year old girl, and our odds get worse and worse every time, but my intention is never to win - my intention is to make people scared, to make people know that there's no fucking around in this part of Philadelphia. I can't say for sure if I've ever won any of my fights, but I've survived them - I've survived being stabbed about half a dozen times at this point, and I'm sure I've broken my nose twice, and I just keep bouncing back.

I look at Jordan as we prepare for another raid. Someone's been shaking down people in nearby Palmyra for protection money, right across the bridge. Not technically my jursidiction, but close enough. Jordan does the heavy work of tracking down the criminal elements - how, I'll never know - and setting up dead drops days in advance. Then, it's just time to handle things.

I put on my costume, modified for these night operations. Wherever Jordan got their cloak from, they got me another one, along with a helmet, a little like theirs but with more freedom of face. Some glued-on dog ears on the top, and a couple of red high-vis accents hidden beneath, and I'm ready for action.

The Big Bad Wolf isn't gonna let this shit stand. Not in her neighborhood.

Getting a text from Marcus is neither rare nor frequent, but it's definitely a cosmic alignment when that text comes with an attached video and the phrase, 'We need to talk.' Normally, that sort of sentence only comes to me from my parents, and I haven't gotten a text like that in at least a couple of months.

I sequester myself in my room, making sure to close the door with an exaggerated softness that's designed not to attract attention. Even with the door shut, I can't shake the unease stemming from the stacks of ill-gotten bills stuffed under my mattress, like the metaphorical pea underneath the princess's bed. With trepidation, I tap the video's play button, keeping my headphones' volume low enough not to bleed sound but loud enough to hear over my pounding heartbeat.

As the video unfurls on my screen, my stomach performs an impromptu freefall.

The clip is far from a professional production, teeming with fuzzy visuals and shaky camerawork. Yet the raucous voice that blares through my earbuds is unmistakably mine, shouting, "I'm the Big Bad Wolf, and this neighborhood is under my protection. Get out before I bite your dicks off." There's a vaguely humanoid form shrouded in incandescent yellow flames, a spectral vision rendered by a clearly amateur drone struggling to keep focus in the pitch-black night, a multi-man showdown with a handful of thugs ducking in and out of combat with a clearly smaller girl. It's almost cathartic, watching the whole thing over again, the dodging and weaving, the powering through adversity, and who could forget the climactic dropping of the overpass chunk.

"What about it?" I text back, my thumbs skimming over the on-screen keyboard. My hands feel clammy, sweating as if my palms were filling up from some internal bleeding, like a fresh wound filling up with blood. I despise the charade of ignorance I'm putting on.

Marcus doesn't bite. "Don't play dumb," he retorts, like an investigator sniffing out a lie. "I know what my friends sound like. I've been listening to you talk for ages, dude."

I give up the ghost. "Fine, you got me. So, what's the plan? You looking for a cut? Are you gonna blackmail me?"

He's typing for a while, the indicator staring me back. "What?" comes the painful, eventual reply. "No, dude. You're my friend, why would I want that? I just thought you should know you're kind of a big deal now, and that you need to, like, talk less on camera."

"Huh?"

He sends me a hyperlink. My finger hovers for a moment before committing to a tap.

A webpage loads, replete with banners, posts, and a user interface that screams fan site, hosted out of someone's closet. An online sanctuary for maybe twenty people, but that's twenty more than I'd ever thought I'd have. My alter ego — the adrenaline junkie turned neighborhood watchdog — has fans. Real, genuine fans dissecting my every reported move.

'Finally, some law and order in Northeast Philly,' one post reads. Another gushes about recent pantry donations they're attributing to me. Thread after thread of local legends, my mythology already writing itself in real-time. Two threads speculating details of my personal life (I must be in my early twenties, statistically. And with a single mom). One person asking for nudes and immediately hit with a public ban notification, to much applause. I… try to dump that one out of my head immediately.

"Cool," is all I manage to text back, astonished and a little terrified. There's even speculation about my powers, and zero mention of Jordan, or Safeguard. No - there's one mention, in the thread about the sole video of me in action to exist. Some speculation about my unnamed "sidekick". I file that away in my head to laugh at Jordan about later.

"Yeah, it is cool," Marcus writes. "But, look, there's posts here about sightings almost every other night. You good, man? Getting enough sleep? Holding up okay emotionally? Physically? Mentally?"

I pause, staring at the blinking cursor on my phone's screen. I'm not sure how to begin answering his questions. Not when I'm not even sure what the answers are myself.

His text comes back after two minutes of no response. "Look, I'm not gonna tell anyone. I'm not gonna bug you about it. You're my friend, and you're talking less and less in the group chat, and I just want to make sure you're like… okay, okay? Real talk, dude, I care about you. Even if we're going to different high schools."

There's another pause while I try to think of a response, a little flabbergasted.

"I think you're doing a good thing. I'm just worried because I don't want one of my best friends getting shot by a gang member on Roosevelt."

Another pause.

"Y'know?"

I think for another minute. "I understand."

"That's not an answer to what I asked," Marcus immediately drills into me with all the efficiency of a particularly skilled dentist. "I asked if you're doing okay."

"I don't know," my hands type out, almost without me meaning them to. I hover over the send button, and then erase the message. I type in "I'm fine. Don't worry about me," and then I send that instead.

"I'm extremely unconvinced," Marcus replies.

"I'm sorry," I text back.

I can almost hear his sigh through the phone. "Look. You might have missed it because you probably haven't looked in the group chat in a hot minute, but Lilly's parents are going to be out for a couple of days over this weekend. Lilly's older sister is obviously going to throw a party because what else would she be doing. Halloween party a couple of weeks early. You in?"

I consider it. My immediate impulse is to reject it - not the least of which because I don't like parties, but also because I have plans with Jordan. But, you know. There's parts of my brain at war here. And I have been exhausted. Not physically, because I think over the days, my regeneration factor keeps me from feeling the worst of the pain, the soreness and the fatigue, but mentally, emotionally, it's a lot. Seeing the bad parts of Philadelphia, the parts my parents worked so hard to keep from me, and for good reasons.

Getting stabbed, you know, it's not… great! Even if it's less life-threatening for me, I have now been stabbed in the back at least four times, and it really does not get any easier. The pain… compounds, even if it doesn't leave me injured permanently.

I get ready to text Jordan, preparing for an argument. "We might have to postpone our weekend plans. Friend I havent seen in a month is having a party. Is it cool if I take some time off to be a normal teenager again?" I ask, and the response comes almost immediately after I hit send.

"fuck yeah dude can i come?"

I stare at my phone, a little incredulously.

"I'll ask," I reply.

"fuck yeah" comes the immediate response.