Chum

I am perfectly ready to write off an encounter with Philadelphia’s most well-known hero as a one-off, a fun little coincidence that happened during a casual Sunday afternoon and wasn’t to be thought about beyond that. Perhaps a small bit of my brain had considered it as a possibility, that it was meant to be something beyond a meet-and-greet, but that part of my brain hadn’t managed to convince any of the rest of it. I also hadn’t realized that it had become Monday morning somehow.

That does, however, explain why my eyes hurt so much, and why my room was getting brighter without me turning the lights on. Unlike my mystery with the injuries and ailments of Liberty Belle, this one had a much more obvious solution, which was that I had inadvertently pulled an all-nighter by obsessing over this. The last time I had to do one of those was a couple months ago, at Tasha’s birthday party, and the purpose of that all-nighter was to drink soda and gossip about boys and girls that we liked, and not to perform near-compulsive research about a superhero’s private life.

So, I’m a little flabbergasted, and also a bit regretful, when she shows up at my front door. I am really, really hoping she doesn’t glance behind me at the delirious text-wall on my computer screen.

“Hi, Sam! You look surprised to see me,” she jokes, leaning into one hip, her hand on it. She’s wearing an even more stripped-down version of her patrol outfit, losing everything but the shoulderpads, which I guess are just too iconic to drop, and her hair is tied up in an extremely loose bun, presumably in an attempt to look more casual and nonthreatening. My heart is racing as I attempt to figure out what in the world she could want with 14 year old me. A small voice in my head says that I am about to be assassinated for figuring out her deep, dark secret, and then the louder voices tell that small voice that it’s being an idiot.

“Hi!” I bark back, trying to keep it cool and utterly failing. I clear my throat and try a second time. “Uh, hi. What are… what are you doing in my house?”

“I’m going to knock it down and kill you for uncovering my deep, dark secret. Obviously,” she replies. She raises her hands up in front of her chest, palms out to me, and starts waving them about a bit when she sees my horrified expression, which I imagine looks like something out of a scary movie, mouth agape, teeth on full display, all the blood immediately draining out of my face at once. “Kidding! Kidding, kiddingkiddingkidding, I am so joking. I am as kidding as it gets.”

“Mrs. Liberty Belle, I’ll have to insist you avoid killing my daughter, lest I become an enraged Batman-type setting out to hunt you down at all costs and topple the system for which you work,” my dad says from around the door, one eye peeking over the edge of it. “I really would prefer to not do that.”

“Jeez, tough crowd. Okay, jokes aside, señor Small, can I have a moment of Samantha’s time? Just superhero stuff, and then I can rope you and your lovely wife in,” She says, visibly on the back foot at the disastrous reception of her joke, while I close my mouth and gulp, trying to will the sweat back into my body.

“Certainly, but flattery will only get you so far,” He answers, and then shuts the door and vanishes down the stairs. I stop and listen, waiting for his footsteps to hit the bottom – it’s a series of sounds I’m intimately familiar with, to the point of instinctual memorization.

Liberty Belle and I stare at each other for a solid ten seconds, like each one of us is waiting for the other to break the ice first. Eventually, though, after an eternity consisting of twelve seconds total, I speak first. “Do you want to, um, sit on my bed or something? There’s not really a lot of seats in the room.”

She smiles at me. “Yeah, sure,” she says, and she sits on my bed while I take the desk chair, spinning it around so I can sit on it the wrong way, facing her. My eyes feel pinned to her like a note in a corkboard, stuck like thumbtacks. They could be pried free with a little effort but, unless an earthquake is happening, they are not coming out under their own power. I’m filled with an uncomfortable, nausea inducing mixture of giddiness and fear. Obviously, she was joking about killing me, but was I not supposed to know that she was dying of something? Did she use her government contacts to find out I was spying on her, in a sense? The bed creaks and shifts under her weight.

“I’m dying, Sam,” she says, and I have to resist the urge to crumple into a little ball and toss myself in the trash can. Somehow, I caused this – a totally irrational thought that offers nobody anything useful, but one that I am convinced for a moment is true. Not convinced in my head, but convinced in my heart, where all the sentimentality lived, convinced that Liberty Belle was totally fine until she met me and manifested year-old battle scars. I try to shake the thought away, but from the outside, it just looks like I’m shaking my head. “No, no, don’t worry about it that much, baby doll, I’ve made my peace with it years ago.”

“Why are you telling me?” is not the first question I want to ask, but it’s the one that comes out anyway. I have given up on even the faintest illusion of control over my own reactions to this situation.

“I’ll get to that, hold on, kiddo. I had a whole list of questions and answers prepared in my head and you just went and skipped to the end. There was a whole building-context thing and everything… Man,” she says, her voice going quiet like she’s talking more to herself than me. “I don’t know. None of my colleagues know I’m making a house call like this. They know that I’m visiting you and the end goal but not the middle parts and all the details. I guess I feel like you deserve to know it? I don’t think I’m making a rational, well-thought out decision. You do weird things when you’re dying, Sam.”

Part of me really wants to shout at her for wasting time, since clearly it’s pressing on her. How much more time can she afford to burn on rambles? On the other hand, though, I’m not going to interrupt her unless I really have to, since the mention of a “end goal” has me intrigued and a little scared. Most things nowadays have me a little scared, but in a different way than this fear. This fear is light and sparkly like carbonation, sitting somewhere in the base of my stomach, threatening to turn me nauseous and ill. The other fear I get is usually the cold fear, the type that sits in my chest (specifically, my sternum), the kind I get when I’m afraid I’ve done something wrong and I’m going to get yelled at.

I just hum and nod.

“Alright, let’s just get through it then, yeah? I’m dying of stomach cancer. It’s metastasized to my lungs. My powers let me tolerate chemotherapy a lot better than most people, but it’s never a guarantee, and we’re only managing it. I will be in the ground within four years, probably three,” she starts, each sentence punching me in the face a little harder than the one before. I keep trying to predict what the next admission will be, but her face is hard as stone and her heart rate, which I can feel through the blood on her breath and in her throat and lungs and stomach, hasn’t spiked once. She’s rehearsed this speech, and the amount she’s prepared for it makes me feel a little out of place, with my hair scattered around my head and my eyes sagging with a deep, unslept tiredness.

What is she going to say next? Is she passing her powers onto me? Am I being called upon to help do a dangerous surgery? What could be so important that it involves dragging an untested 14 year old girl into it that none of her adult friends could do? Immediately, almost compulsively, I start inventing a scenario in my head as she talks about her naming me as my successor, whereupon I inherit not only her status, but her name, her costume, and her enemies. She wouldn’t lay that burden on my shoulders, would she? All I can do is bite people.

“I’m sure you’ve heard this from your dad or your teachers or your local cops,” she starts, almost spitting the last word. “Crime is growing nearly every year. Superhumans like you and I are becoming enmeshed with syndicates, gangs, criminal families, and they get ’em young, while they still have time to get dragged under the current by necessity and ideology. The cops don’t want to do anything about it, not since the riots, not since Tesla, so we have to handle our own business. And you’re a sweet kid, Sam, and I think you have a lot of potential. To save lives and all that jazz.”

My breath lets out, and I didn’t realize I was holding it. I feel a bit like I’m being preached to. “Did you come all the way to my house to tell me to not be evil? I’m pretty sure that won’t be a problem.”

She straightens her posture a little. “What do I look like, a preacher? A fuckin’, uh, one of them saturday morning cartoon jawns? No, I’m here to invite you to join the Delaware Valley Defenders.”

Huh?

“Huh?” I sort of blearily dribble out. “Like the, like the superhero team?”

“No, like the jazz orchestra,” she snips sarcastically. “Yes, like the superhero team. We have a division for promising young metahumans called the ‘Young Defenders’. I’m not going to throw a fourteen year old right in the thick of it right away, if that’s what you were worried about.”

For some reason, “What about a fifteen year old?” is my immediate, instinctual response.

That gets her to laugh, which makes me feel like I’m getting a good grade in this social interaction. “No, I don’t want fifteen year olds fighting Tornado Allie either, or sixteen year olds. Seventeen year olds are a strong maybe. Once you turn eighteen, we throw you in the gladiator pit and don’t let you leave until you’ve beaten up at least one criminal. Well, subdued, maybe, I don’t want to encourage anyone to beat up anyone else,” she says, and I feel a little better.

Then, the next-most obvious question of mine down the list. “Why me?”

She raises an eyebrow. “Didn’t I just tell you that, kiddo? I think you have promise, and your blood sense is a real good power for saving lives, and I want to make sure we can get as many promising young kids and teens who can save lives involved in the superheroing game as possible. Before… Before, y’know, before I bite it. It’s not like Philly’s Number Two hero is interested in public outreach.”

“Philly has a number two hero? Who is it?” I ask.

“Depends entirely on who you ask. Also, not super relevant. I don’t think I’m supposed to have an opinion on that, y’know, for PR purposes,” she answers, struggling to avoid laughing, hissing it out through her teeth instead. “Maybe it’ll be you in a decade.”

“Are you trying to say you don’t think I’ve got what it takes to be number one?” I ask her, letting my eyes widen and staring her in the face as creepily as possible. She flinches, and I grin with a mouth full of sharp shark teeth, interrupting her when she tries to walk it back. “I’m joking, I don’t think I do either.”

“Hey! Lesson one – you gotta cut out the negative self-talk,” she whips a finger out at me, jabbing it in my general direction, padded gloves like boxing equipment hiding away her skin.

“Is that really lesson one? That’s kind of a lame lesson one. My therapist taught me that one already.”

“Listen to your therapist, then, jeez! No, lesson one is freerunning training. That is also lessons two through fifteen or so.”

I think about it a little. “That’s pretty cool, I guess. But… like, I don’t know…”

She scrunches her face up like a wad of toilet paper, scooting around a bit on my bed to adjust her sitting position, presumably for her comfort. “Kiddo, I’m offering you a spot on a superhero team. Maybe I’m old-fashioned because I grew up back when they still made cape comics, but how is this not an immediate yes?” she asks, rolling her shoulders back until something in them pops and she sighs. “I mean, contingent on your parents’ permission, obviously,” she says as I’m thinking about how to answer her question.

“Oh, right! Wait, isn’t it dangerous for my parents to know? Like, couldn’t some villain go after them? Do we really need their permission?” I ask, trying to work out all the complexities in my head, the way they interact with all the tropes and cliches I’ve learned over my long one-and-an-almost-half decade in my life.

“One – yes, we need their permission, legally. Two – nobody these days really holds anyone’s family hostage,” she answers, her body visibly slumping a little bit. “Like, I mean, could it happen? Sure. But some shit-for-brains with a gun might do that anyway. No villain wants that kind of heat on them. Nobody wants to get balled on by a p-o’d hero now with nothin’ to lose and two dozen of his friends and then another three dozen strangers who feel bad for him, which is what would happen, and everyone knows it. Do you watch cop dramas, Sam?”

“No. I mean, if it’s what’s on TV, but no.”

She’s a continuous ball of subtle motions, her heartbeat slow and calm, her stomach continuing to trickle blood into the mass of fresh coffee grounds pooling inside of it. Before, I thought it was nerves, but I think this is just what she’s like, the way she can’t sit still, just like I can’t. I’ve been fidgeting too, but at this point it’s so natural to me that it’s wiped clean from my internal train of thought, like how you don’t notice your nose in the middle of your face until it’s pointed out. From the outside, though, from here, it’s all I can see in her, the way none of her joints want to stay still for very long, always cracking or popping or stretching something or other.

She sighs. “There are few things in your life that will lower your end date as fast as being a cop killer. Driving into a brick wall is one of them. Throwing yourself into one of them woodchipper jawns is maybe another. You picking up what I’m laying down? It’s suicide. All my coworkers know who Mr. and Mrs. Williams Senior are, and they know that I do this, and they’re very proud of me,” she explains, fiddling with her hair tie, tightening her bun while I nod in acknowledgment. “Back in my day we didn’t need parental permission to throw down in an alleyway, but, you know, times are changing, Sam. Everything’s getting weird. I can’t guarantee a 24/7 security detail on Mr. and Mrs. Small, but, y’know, we keep an eye on things.”

I nod, trying to look wise and knowing. “I still have to think about it. I really wanted to just play soccer.”

She visibly deflates. “Over being a kickass superhero? Fighting crime and saving lives and trying to make the world a better place?”

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. My life so far has been pretty comfortable. I have friends that like me. Parents that tolerate me. I got into a really good high school and I’m gonna get a boyfriend one day and maybe become a physical therapist, or a nurse or something. I didn’t ask for powers, and my powers kind of suck. I mean, I get how they’re useful, or the one is, anyway, but now I’ve got weird fucked up monster teeth and I can see when everyone’s having their period and it’s really gross. And one of my teeth dropped out last night and that hasn’t stopped being freaky. What am I gonna do with that? It’s a person-sized tooth, it’s not even shark-sized,” I answer, starting slowly and quietly but getting more worked up the more I talk. I’m trying not to, but I really can’t help it once it gets started. Liberty Belle just looks at me with this sad, sad look in her eyes, like I just kicked her dog, and I really don’t like that at all.

Some part of me feels angry. “And… I mean, I didn’t ask to become fu-messed up like this. I’m glad I’m alive but that’s all I wanted to be in the first place. I know, everyone says “with great power comes great responsibility” but he’s like… He’s got cool powers that are awesome. I have shitty powers that suck. I’ll just become a normal nurse and save lives on the down low. What’s so wrong with that? Why does everyone… want things of me?”

At this point, I’ve begun shouting, although I don’t know why and I don’t really notice it until the sentence is over. Liberty Belle is looking away from me and I’m looking away from her. “You don’t need to tell me it’s selfish. I know,” I say, quieter, a little below a normal speaking volume.

“I wasn’t going to say that,” she lies.

“Is everything alright in here?” my mom meekly asks through a crack in the door. “Should I get you two some tea?”