Chum

I take a step forward into the semicircle, doing a quick headcount. Blink had returned at some point when I wasn’t looking, probably when I was staring at Gale. I raise a hand awkwardly. “Uh, hi. I don’t have a name yet. I’ve got shark teeth and I can smell blood,” I explain, doing a quick mental assessment of what my blood sense is telling me. Besides all the people within about a block or two that are bleeding outside of the warehouse, nothing useful, nobody immediately gushing blood, and no Liberty Belle. She wasn’t kidding when she said she was going to vamoose.

“Okay, I’m not going to test that second bit but you better show the chompers, girl,” Playback says, taking two steps forward, to which I take two steps back. “Can you spit ’em or something? Use ’em like knives? Make jewelry?”

“Uh…” I stall, thinking about it. “No, no, maybe. They’re just person teeth sized. I don’t have the big shark teeth because I’m not a big shark, but they do grow back and I do have to keep getting rid of the old ones. I’ve got a baggy at home if anyone, uh… You know, if anyone wants a bunch of person-sized shark teeth. But act fast, cuz they turn into dust in a couple days.”

Gossamer is immediately in my face while I’m pulling my mouth open by the lips to show my teeth off. Her phone flashlight is on and it’s pointed down my throat, while a scatter of voices jumbles out behind her, voices which I haven’t yet learned to associate with a name and face. “Quit it, Goss!” “Hey, don’t scare the newbie!” “Can I have a tooth?”, you know, those sorts of gossipy voices. Her free hand fearlessly is just in my mouth, poking, prodding with her fingertip, and I really have to resist the urge to bite. Not just because it would be monumentally stupid, permanently injure someone who’s supposed to be my teammate, and make me look really bad, but also because… Actually, I’m not sure where I was going with this sentence. I just make a groaning sound as I’m prodded at like I’m at the dentist’s. “Can I have them? I have ideas.”

“Mnyeah, sure,” I reply, wiping spit out of my lips from the back of my mouth. “If you really want a baggy full of baby shark teeth I will definitely not stop you.”

Puppeteer has bent into a squat at the back of the pack while everyone else, now that order has broken, is busy trying to examine my mouth. I keep my mouth open, which makes it hard to talk, but let them fawn as much as they want. After a couple of weeks of friends calling me creepy and weird, even if I know they don’t mean it in a mean way, just having a bunch of people going nuts over how cool my disgusting shark teeth are to them feels like a well-needed breath of fresh air. None of them are touching me, but they are getting very close, gloved hands and bare fingers and flashlights in my face. My breath comes out in halting waves, panting a little bit as I force my mouth to stay open with my fingers.

“Alright, alright, give her some space,” Puppeteer says, gently waving everyone to the side, where they part like the ocean. “Can you bite hard, or are they basically cosmetic?”

“I ‘an ‘ite hard,” I say, keeping my lips spread open with my fingertips at all four corners. Then, realizing I’m probably incomprehensible, I let them flop shut. “I can bite hard enough to bite through silverware. I haven’t tried on anything harder.”

“Okay, okay. And the blood sense, how far does that go?” Puppeteer asks, staying direct and on-topic while everyone else is chattering. I’m trying hard to focus on her and not on the snippets of out-of-context talk about me that my ears are tuning in and out on like a radio.

“What? Repeat, please,” I ask, my brain not having fully processed the message yet. She flicks her hands forward, and I see some sort of disturbance in the air rush past me, anchoring to the ground behind me. She scoots forward on her heels, and I recognize for the first time that her boots also appear to have little tiny wheels on them. My first instinct is to think “oh, that’s cute,” followed shortly after by “oh, that’s practical.”

“The teeth are cool but for practical matters I think the blood sense is the more effective tool in the line of duty.” She says, skidding to a halt in front of me. I like her, too, Puppeteer – she’s got her head on right, and I like her straightforwardness. “Don’t show me the teeth, I’m good on teeth.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She smiles, and I watch the semi-visible strands whip past me as they retract into her fingertips. “Blood sense. Range. What is it?” she asks, not chiding me on calling her ‘ma’am’ like most people have. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I always felt like it was right to be polite with sirs and ma’ams. I’m not calling someone old, it’s just a matter of respect. “Give me the details.”

I bow just a little bit at the knees. I hear someone mentioning “shark-tooth necklaces” and absorb the idea for later. “I’m not good at visualizing distances, but I can smell someone on the sidewalk outside that scraped their knee. When someone’s bleeding from an open wound, I can see their entire vascular system,” I explain, trying to impress her with my knowledge of what a vascular system is, “including heartbeat and anywhere that blood is flowing inside of them such as internal injury. I can also smell blood in the air or on surfaces.”

“Can you distinguish blood from two different people if it’s mixed together?” she asks, glancing backwards at the group behind her that seems to have immediately dissolved into nonprofessional gossiping.

“I haven’t tried, ma’am.”

She nods, rubbing her chin. “We’ll figure it out. Do you actually like sharks? You called ’em shark teeth before. A hundred percent sure it’s a shark power?”

“Oh, yeah, I can also swallow a lot of seawater and it doesn’t make me sick. So I think it’s sharks, or maybe a piranha or something,” I ask, straightening myself up and folding my hands behind my back in an attempt to look as professional as possible. “And, really, I’m uh, ambivalent about sharks. Ma’am. Don’t really think about them much one way or another. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” she replies, causing my heart to skip a beat with fear. “Here’s your schedule; we’re going to start by getting your baselines while Goss works on a costume. Then, we’ll run through the obstacle course, break for lunch, and you can either stay here or join me on patrol. Got it?”

“Yes’m.”

She spins around on her heel and claps loud enough to draw everyone’s attention, immediately silencing the air. “Alright, y’all. Morning chat circle is over, let’s get this shit started.”

Puppeteer’s thumb clicks on a stopwatch while I shoot by, sneakers slamming on the mat-coated floor to push me forward. “Good. Nine point eight six seconds,” she says, as I lean over into my knees, sucking in air through my teeth. I can feel the blood rushing in my ears, my stomach aching, my arms hurting. Not from running, one of my favorite activities, but from all the stuff preceding it.

Curl-ups, pull-ups, push-ups, vertical jump, everything you can do without picking up a weight, the same stuff you do in PE class when you’re getting assessed. Someone shows me how to do it and I feel a rush of inadequacy flow through me like water in an open bathtub, draining out in my knees. There’s nothing interesting or new under the sun here, just a 14 year old girl in a room full of older teenagers getting smoked in nearly every respect. Gossamer is the only one that I’m competitive with, and she wasn’t already an athlete before getting her superpowers, I’d bet. My hands hold my kneecaps hard and I gasp for air, before standing back and holding my hands up over my head. My hair is all over the place. I feel ugly.

All I can do is kick a soccer ball real good and run real fast. These aren’t skills translatable to superheroing.

I walk in a loose circle, hands behind my head now, while Rampart and Puppeteer talk quietly, whispering below what I can hear. I turn around at the feeling of a tap on my shoulder, only to spin face-to-face with Gale, and the blood rushing through me pumps a little bit faster. “Would you like a breeze, newbie?” she asks, twisting her fingers around rhythmically.

“Uh, ah, I, um, I mean, uh… I, uh… If you’re… If you’re offering?” I stammer, looking like the least cool person in existence. She smiles and brings her hand up like she’s pulling something up from the floor, and the wind around me picks up, flowing into the spaces between my shirt the rest of me, up around my neck. It wipes sweat from my brow and sends my hair everywhere. It is the best breeze ever. “Can you, um, fly with that?”

“Yes. Wanna see?” she replies, glancing behind me. Her little USB fan spins and spins on her belt, making the mildest of breezes that I assume she accelerates into this wondrous air conditioning cooling me back down to a functioning core temperature. She glances behind me. “Maybe later, actually.”

I turn around at the sound of footsteps and the breeze stops, my shirt’s billowing edge flopping back down against my stomach, hiding my scars. In the distance I spot the others working out, Crossroads and Gossamer lifting weights, Playback running on a treadmill, Blink… doing handstands. Hand-walks, actually, which is a lot more impressive. Puppeteer and Rampart approach me as a unit, and I hear the last edges of the whispering as they stop talking to each other and start getting ready to talk to me instead. “…sure about her?” from Rampart, and my heart sinks.

I guess it must be apparent on my face, because Puppeteer puts up her hands preemptively, a posture of compromise. “Hey, hey, no worries. You look scared. We’re not kicking you out or anything.”

“I’m expecting a ‘but’, ma’am. What’s the ‘but’?” I reply, trying to keep myself stiff and professional and not shoving my hands in my pockets or looking down at my feet. I make eye contact. I can feel Gale behind me, hear her taking a couple of steps back.

“No ‘but’! You’re just fourteen. I’m not expecting to be blown out of the water – you’re probably a lot more athletic than most of us were at your age. Rampart was just expressing his concerns.”

I feel betrayed, even though none of these people are my friends to begin with. My face twitches without my permission. “Concerns?”

“With candor, newbie,” he starts, and I realize that none of these people know my name. Or maybe they do, but aren’t saying it for whatever reason, but I certainly don’t know theirs, so I assume the lack of info goes both ways. “at your age and body weight, a 35 kilo deadlift is impressive, and beyond the norm. Nine point eight six shuttle, well above average. You know your mile?”

“Almost six minutes flat. Sir.”

“Right, good, impressive. You’re definitely a good athlete – for your age. I have no doubt you’re the best of the best at whatever track and field team you’re on, or whatever sports you play. Bluntly, though, good, even great, isn’t good enough,” He folds his arms over his chest, and I mirror him. “You need to be exceptional. Cream of the crop in your afterschool team isn’t enough. You have to be willing to buckle down. You might get stabbed, or shot, or otherwise attacked. If you’re not there, we can take you there, but it’s gonna be tough. Do you think you have the fortitude?”

I can see his eyes, hazel with what looks like a ring of blue, assessing me. I have muscle, but I’m not beefy. I have a runner’s build. I keep in shape, but not by going to the gym, and I feel like he must have some sort of telepathy he’s not telling me about because as far as I can tell he can just tell this, he can smell the inexperience on me. I can see his eyes seeing through me. He can smell my weakness. There’s a moment of uncomfortable silence, and a little twitch of anger works its way up my spinal column like a centipede.

“You’re just saying that because I’m a girl,” is what comes out, backed up venom from an hour and a half of tension, testing, and exhaustion. Rampart looks completely taken aback, like he’s been physically pushed in the stomach, his face twisting up in confusion. Part of me, the mean part that lives in the center of my brain, the part that my mom says is from the lizards we evolved from and tells me to eat bugs, is satisfied by this. He tries to open his mouth in protest. “You afraid that a girl’s gonna beat you out some day?”

Puppeteer covers her face with one hand, the other on her elbow, trying to hide laughter. Rampart stumbles, trying to save face. “You’re good for a guy, too! I mean, for a boy your age, you’re still above the fiftieth percentile, that means you’re better than average.”

“Oh my god, she was joking, dawg,” Puppeteer says, prodding Rampart in the face with one of her strings. She looks about as embarassed as someone can look, mixed with what I can only described as a sort of horrified amusement. “Get the stick out your ass.”

“Yes’m.”

“Alright, you spoke your candor, newbie, you’ve heard his concerns. We’re cool now,” she says, turning towards him and whacking him on the head a couple of times with vertical chopping motions, carrying her strings with her. “And you, nitwit, know that she’s ready to go the distance, or she’d just leave. Right, newbie?”

I stand up tall and adjust my hair. “Yes, Puppeteer, ma’am.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Rampart mumbles under his breath, looking thoroughly cowed. The lizard part of my brain is pleased. His entire body is deflated like a balloon.

“I’m serious, newbie. There’s no shame in quitting. If this isn’t for you, you’ll know it, and you can leave, and we’ll all say we never met you if asked,” She says, turning back to me, squatting on her heels, elbows on her knees. “We get like three, four people a year. Most of them quit even if they can hack it, because the life isn’t for them. The rest just can’t hack it. There are physical demands. There are mental and emotional demands. Nobody will judge you. You in?”

“What, are you trying to convince me to quit or something?” I reply. “Respectfully, ma’am.”

Puppeteer’s smile is infectious, and dangerous. “Right answer. Related question – how do you feel about obstacle courses?”