You know what’s even better than being able to fly? Aside from never being able to fall to your death, of course. You don’t make any noise when sneaking up behind someone.
Danny Silverstein zipped by immediately after Michael noticed his pants were around his ankles. Punk floated right up behind Michael and pantsed him. The best part, of course, was his tighty-whities, which his mother refused to replace with anything less humiliating.
Well, the laughter was pretty rich too, especially coming out of Charlotte.
Michael swore under his breath and pulled his pants back up before stomping off. It didn’t matter if you’d saved the stupid town, you just weren’t the right type of super unless you could fly. He hated this whole place. The trees were shaking with laughter in the breeze. The sun was making him sweat through his shirt, showing off his puny little physique to all the Actives with their Greek god builds. And he wouldn’t go near the lake if somebody set him on fire. Which, come to think of it, was a distinct possibility.
“Hey Mikey, nice drawers, man! Hero undies, hey?”
He had to shade his eyes against the sun, his feet firmly planted on the ground as Danny soared overhead like a bullet. Michael hoped he got a bunch of bugs stuck on his face, like they had on his mother's windshield.
Danny did a couple of loop-de-loops, then darted off to one side to catch a football thrown at hypersonic speed maybe half a mile off. The throwers were laughing to each other. One of them slumped down to the ground, made himself into a real ball, and gestured to the girl to toss him. She picked up the ball boy as if he weighed no more than a tennis ball and heaved him out toward the lake.
Ball boy flew like a line drive, and actually skipped over the surface twice, then three times before splashing beneath the water. Then he came up, made himself into a sort of boat, and floated out to where a couple of girls were sunning themselves on a raft in the middle of the lake.
“Don't sneer,” Charlotte told him.
She was smiling at him, and wasn’t being a… she wasn’t being like everybody else. Her eyes crinkled up just the right way, and the sound that came out when she laughed was always so clear and pure.
Right now she was dressed in something ridiculous, a hat that covered most of her head, and a long dress which ended at her ankles. Around her neck, in the June heat, was a fake fur stole. She was calling herself a flapper for some reason. The strangest thing was that the clothes suited her. They always did.
Michael scowled to himself.
“I wasn't sneering,” he mumbled.
“I could practically hear Danny smashing into a mountain in your mind, master Washington,” she told him. “Come on, he got you good.”
“He wouldn't have to hit it very hard.”
She laughed, “Oh, so a minor bit of revenge then?”
“I know, I know, he didn't do anything to me. I shouldn't be jealous.”
“You don't have to wait for your ability to blow them all out of the water Michael,” she told him.
“Right.” He was super just the way he was: unable to shoot laser beams out of his eyes or walk through cars or slide into computer systems or reverse gravity or have a barbecue on the moon. Nothing. He couldn't even do anything pointless, like command ants or shoot spaghetti from his fingertips.
“Just repeat after me,” she said.
“Don't do it,” he warned her, smiling. She steamrolled him anyway.
One second she was Charlotte Sulszko, the next Michael was standing next to his identical twin, dressed in exactly the same clothes, with exactly the same five freckles on his nose and the same boring brown eyes and hair. The same glasses perched on his face. Down to the last few teeth just about finished growing in.
“I'm super just the way I am,” the other Michael said. Only this one said so in a mocking, lisping voice.
“Quit that,” he said, but he couldn't help it. A smile crept over the corners of his mouth. Their school had tried to make up a slogan and little inspirational posters to make all of them feel good throughout the rest of their school year, after everything that had happened. Michael finished out seventh grade making fun of whoever had thought up 'I'm super just the way I am'. Nobody in their right mind would ever, ever, in the history of ever say something so dorky.
“I'm super just the way I am,” Charlotte-Michael said again.
Next, Michael was standing not in front of himself, but in front of a large rugged looking man in a raccoon skin hat. His leather coat was more fringes than actual material, and he looked down at Michael from a stern brow, over a well-kept beard.
“I am super just the way I am,” Mr. Springfield told him.
“Quit it,” he laughed.
But she got on a roll. She changed into Michael's mother and said it again, and then changed into Michael's father, a hulking giant of a man with a booming voice, and said it again. She changed into Michael's grandfather, then Charlotte's mother, followed by Charlotte's twin brothers. She started going through the teachers at their school, LADCEMS.
“Lincoln Area District Consolidated Elementary Middle School reminds you that you’re super just the way you are,” Mr. Samuelson said.
His vision was beginning to swim with tears he was laughing so much, and his face was starting to ache.
Charlotte turned into a fat, balding man in thick plastic glasses and a crooked smile. He started to open his mouth, but frowned. Michael had flung himself backwards onto his butt. She reappeared as her ‘normal’ flapper self in an instant.
“I'm so sorry Michael,” she said, “I got carried away.”
He slumped to the grass and stared up at the blue, blue sky and tried to get his breathing under control. Charlotte didn't have any problem with seeing Mr. Lansing. He’d shot her. Maybe it was face dripping like a candle that did it to him. He shuddered.
She sat down beside him and ran her fingers through the grass.
"Not your fault," he said at last.
"I wasn't thinking."
"It's okay," he said.
"Forgive me?"
"Of course I forgive you," he said.
They sat in silence for some time. After a while, she lay back on the grass too. She didn't like to crush the grass, it was kind of her thing about hurting or killing anything alive, but this time it seemed too perfect. The leaves on all the trees weren't ready to turn yet, but in the fading light they were all bathed in gold. A faint breeze made all the leaves glitter.
“Can you change into Marcus Patterson?” he asked.
She giggled. “Why would I want to do that?”
“Seriously? He’s the best Active ever… the first one, if you believe the movie.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said, smiling.
“You don’t… you don’t… ach!” He mimed strangling to death. “If I didn’t know you, I would say you didn’t have a shred of culture.”
Now she really laughed. “I don’t get what’s so important about Marcus Patterson anyway.”
“Um, aside from being the first guy in the world to have a bus wrap completely around him and live to talk about it?”
“That’s silly… a lot of people have done amazing things in the past, and we didn’t make them into heroes. Well, some we did.”
“He got hired on by the military and did all kinds of stuff: break up the North Korean dictatorship, clear out the worst of the yuck in Africa, de-nuclearize the Middle East.”
“Is that even a word?” she asked.
“What?”
“De-nuclearize.”
He shrugged.
“I guess when you read as much as Michael Washington you can make up whatever words you like.”
“Little known fact: my middle name is Shakespeare.”
“I happen to know for a fact that your middle name is Edward. Anyway I want to give you a gift,” she told him.
“What? You don't need to do anything like that.”
“I know. But I want to get it for you all the same. What do you
want?”
This was strange. Usually Charlotte was so creative she would just make him something, like a playlist of her favorite songs for the month or a little painting of him exploding with superheroic firepower.
“I don't know,” he said. “A food fight?”
She laughed, but when she looked at him her eyes flicked to the right and her smile vanished.
“Oh jeez,” she said. He whirled around.
“—kill you!” Michael heard. “You’re going to die!” And after that were a whole bunch of words, phrases and images Michael wouldn’t even say to his worst enemy. This was followed up by girlish screaming… from a guy.
He didn’t know the boy, but he was a big kid, and had energy blasts as his ability. Michael knew at least that much from the way he kept blasting the ice shards out of the air.
“I… can’t… believe you!” the girl said.
She was maybe a junior. Older than Michael anyway. Brown hair up in a ponytail, short skirt and tank top, skin covered in a thick layer of frost, inch-long icicles were hanging off her hair and forearms. Advancing at a sure, quick clip, and throwing balls of ice at the guy.
“How could you?” she shouted.
“It wasn’t working out, seriously!” he shouted, then blasted another big hunk of ice. He wasn’t fast enough, and several pieces stabbed into his arm and shoulder. He nearly fell, but staggered backwards and was up again quickly.
“Ugh! Why do you even care?”
“Friends care about each other,” the girl hissed. “Nobody just dumps Meghan and gets away with it.”
So she had to kill him? Oh geez was right.
The guy was a basketball player named… Zylkowski or Zalinski or something.
Michael started doing the zombie shuffle everybody else was doing in emergency situations, and caught himself.
“What’s his name?” he asked Charlotte.
Danny Silverstein answered. While Michael wasn’t watching (again!) he’d dropped to the ground and was watching with a massive smile plastered on his face. “Peter Zylowski. He just dumped Meghan Iverson over the phone. Rumor is he has a thing for Skye Everett.”
“Aren’t you going to help? Fly him out of there,” Michael said. Or fly and get help. Something.
“Yeah, and possibly get frozen to death? No way. Plus, I’ve been waiting for one of these.”
He didn’t wait to find out what ‘one of these’ was, but he ran forward and, behind Zylowski, looking for something that could help them. A quick survey wasn’t especially helpful. Purple mountain majesty, check. Perfect sunrises, check. Lake situated west, check. Foothills, check. More perfect sunsets, check. You could believe the place was like the Lincolnshire golf course: specifically engineered to be beautiful and easy and perfect by someone who studied these sorts of things.
Acives with the ability to stop this, check. People stepping in to help out, negatory. No industrial-sized fires handy either.
Unless…
“Zylowski!”
“Huh?”
“Follow me, to the lake.”
Zylowski took another hit, to the shoulder this time, but used the momentum to spin and start dashing towards the lake. Michael sprinted to the edge of the water, where the docks linked up to a huge swimming area, and beyond that where the rowboats were tied.
“Come on!”
Zylowski dodged another ball of ice, which smashed into the dock and plunked into the water. Immediately following, the crackle and hiss of water freezing could be heard, where the ice ball surfaced. Another flew overhead. Approximately a half second after Michael took the line from the rowboat and threw it in, Zylowski was in the boat with him. Michael kicked off, sending the boat drifting out into the lake. He hopped in and grabbed an ancient oar, giving himself about a dozen nice painful splinters in the process.
“Oh I am so stupid. Washington? I can’t believe this. You’re gonna get us both killed.”
“She’s going to come after us,” Michael explained.
She walked straight onto the water, lightly stepping onto the surface. The lake water froze around her foot, and there was a distinct snapping sound as she pulled her foot off to take another step. If it wasn’t so terrifying, Michael probably would have found it angelic. Beautiful.
“Oh nice plan,” Zylowski said, and zapped another ice ball as it sped towards the boat.
“Come on,” Michael said. With the oar, he tried to get the boat to actually do something instead of just look like a sitting duck. The girl was laughing now.
She bent down and scooped up some water, which instantly froze into pretty nasty looking icicles. Like a bunch of knives were dropping out of her hands.
“You are such an idiot!” Zylowski cried desperately. “Why did I listen to you?”
“Under her feet,” Michael urged. “Shoot under her feet, right now!”
Zylowski shot up and leveled his hands. Red energy shot out and crashed into the frozen surface of the lake. The girl shrieked, just before plunging into the lake. The water all around her instantly froze solid, leaving half her face just above the water’s edge. Trapped.
Michael slumped down into the musty old boat and waited for the adults to get their act together.