Heroes 'Til Curfew

  “Hey,” one of the boys said, nodding at her.

  “Tim, your dad around?”

  “Yeah, he’s…” Tim turned toward the activity, craned his neck to get a better look around another group of kids, “over there by there by that truck.” He raised his arm to point.

  “Put your arm down! I don’t want him to look over here.”

  Tim grinned at her. “Your dad doesn’t know you’re out.”

  “Yeah, and I’d like to keep it that way.” She tugged at the back of my jacket like she was ready to move on. “Tim’s dad’s the Fire Chief,” she told me. “My parents have known his parents, like, forever.”

  The idea of Joss’s parents playing bridge or having backyard barbeques with other parents was pretty bizarre. The image of Joss’s dad manning a grill did not compute. Joss’s dad with a flame thrower to keep other people off his lawn, yes, having dinner parties, no.

  “You’re Joss Marshall,” Kenny blurted out.

  “How do you know that?” She pretty much snapped it at him, making him take a step back. I would have too.

  “I…er…I heard what you did at that girl Kat’s party. How you got everyone out of there when that team of NIAC agents stormed the place? Oh man, awesome, you were, like, in charge! I heard—”

  “Wrong,” Joss cut him off. “Don’t believe the hype. I said, ‘Let’s go out through the garage.’ That was the extent of my involvement.”

  That made Kenny stop and think for a minute. I have no idea what. Then he told us, “I can control water!”

  Joss reached out and cuffed him on the side of the head, like she was swatting a fly. “What is wrong with you? You don’t go around telling people shit like that.” I snickered and she gave me light kick. What? It was funny.

  “Yeah, well, it’s kind of lame anyway. You’d think I could help with this fire, but it’s like I have to see the water—sometimes just what’s containing it, but, whatever. I can’t do anything from outside the building.”

  Maybe you should go inside, I thought.

  “Why are you still speaking? Heather, why is he still speaking?” Joss wanted to know.

  Heather just shrugged and Joss looked away, like she just couldn’t deal with this kid anymore. Then she tensed.

  “Come on,” she told us. “You too, Waterboy.”

  “What are you going to do?” Tim asked, coming forward. “I’ll help.”

  “No way. Your dad knows you’re here. You think he’s busy, but he’s watching you. The minute you’re out of his sight he’ll come looking for you. Just stay here and make sure no one follows us.”

  Tim made a face at Joss. She turned and made a bee-line through the crowd until she reached Jessie Morgan, one of the people who’d revealed a Talent during Kat’s epic party. They put their heads together and had a few words the rest of us couldn’t hear, and then headed off quickly, away from the fire. The rest of us hurried to keep up.

  Joss led us down an alley two stores away, and turned down a narrow service road that ran across the back of the building. It came out into a small, rutted parking lot, surrounded by buildings on all sides, with just a narrow access to the next street.

  “Not much point in the fire department trying to bring a truck down here,” she told us as we emerged into the lot. “No windows, no access. The roads are so narrow, Mr. Mueller’s delivery trucks had trouble getting through. Then he got robbed once and decided the safest thing was to have everything bricked in back here.”

  “So what are we doing back here?” Kenny asked.

  “Jessie, you sure you want to do this?” Joss asked her.

  “Sure, it’s cool.”

  “Okay, the three of you move way back. Kenny’s going to need a good view. Come on, Jessie.”

  Joss and Jessie started toward the building.

  “Hang on,” I said. “You go get a good view. Tell the kid what to do.” And stay away from the burning building. “I’ll go with Jessie.”

  I put my hand out before Jessie could get to the building. I was checking to see if it was hot. I don’t know if that was dumb or not; I’d never gotten this close to a burning building before. The wind was in our favor back here, blowing the smoke toward the spectators and the fire department. Which was really good, because we would have been choking in that walled-in parking lot. It seemed fine to me, so I let Jessie do her thing.

  She put her palm to the bricks, and…clear spread from her hand outward, until an area as tall as I am, and about as wide, was shimmering and see-through.

  “Jessie, can you make it any bigger?” Joss called out.

  Jessie faced the wall and closed her eyes. The area flowed outward, like someone pouring invisibility onto a table. In a moment, the whole back wall of the building was gone.

  “That’s great, can you hold it?”

  Jessie nodded, but her body was rigid and her face was contorted with strain.

  “She’s got it, but do what you’re gonna do and hurry up!” I yelled.

  Fire burst through an open archway between the room closest to us and the front of the store. I almost grabbed Jessie and retreated before I remembered that there was still a brick wall between it and us. Over the sounds from the front of the building, I could hear stuff inside now: doors slamming, furniture scraping across floors. That was Joss, doing her best to move things by memory that she couldn’t see, trying to shut off rooms and block out air that would feed the flames.

  Then water started to spew. From exposed pipes that burst in the ceilings of the back rooms, from the walls in the vacant apartment area above. The spew became a genuine flood, as more water than ever should have flowed in those pipes shot out and coated everything. The flames, while not totally extinguished, started to die down.

  “I think we got it!” Joss called, and Jessie slumped, exhausted, stumbling back from the wall. I caught her and we walked back to the other three.

  “That was so freakin’ awesome!” Waterboy looked like he was about to explode, talking a mile a minute. “Joss told me to find the main line in my mind, and follow the path of the water through the building. And at first, I found the water, but it, like, wouldn’t go anywhere. And then, it was like someone turned a valve or something, and I could get it moving through the pipes.”

  Someone indeed.

  “And then BAM! BAM BAM BAM! Those pipes just started popping all over the place! I mean, did you see that shit? Awesome!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, “we saw it.”

  “You did great, Kenny,” Joss told him, and he beamed at her. Could he like, go now? “You too, Jessie. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, thanks, I’ll be okay. I just need to go home and lie down, sleep it off.”

  “Dylan, will you make sure Jessie gets home okay?”

  And leave you alone with Waterboy?

  “Yeah, sure, no problem.” This is exactly how I wanted to end our evening.

  Heather was smirking at me, barely able to keep from laughing.

  Chapter 7

  Joss

  “You look very nice today, Jocelyn.”

  “Um, thanks,” I mumbled at my mom, and tried to pull my jacket closed. But I was hampered by the seatbelt.

  She smiled at me in the rearview. “Anything special today?”

  I have a boyfriend and I’m a complete dork? What was I thinking? Even my mom had noticed that I was dressed differently. Of course she would. Everyone would notice.

  “No.” I had told myself that it was no big deal. It was just a sweater. Okay, maybe there was the fact that the neckline dipped lower and than a t-shirt, baring skin that hadn’t seen the light of day since I don’t know when, and maybe the way it was kind of shaped so it fit my shape, that probably made it girly. But it was black. I had told myself that it was just another black shirt.

  Now I knew I looked like I was trying too hard.

  “Well, it’s nice to see you wearing some of the clothes I’ve bought you, for a change.”

  “Your neck is nak
ed,” Jill told me. “You should have worn a necklace.”

  I just grunted at her. Or maybe it was more like a growl. Yeah, right, a necklace from my vast collection of jewelry. As if. When I had any sense, I moved from the backseat up to the front when we dropped Dad at the store in the morning. This morning I’d been too preoccupied and was stuck back here with Jill until we got to school.

  “A necklace would have been nice touch with that sweater,” Mom agreed.

  “Yeah. A girl needs a little bling, right, Mom?” Jill pushed up her jacket sleeve to reveal a number of plastic and cheap metal bangles with assorted sparkles.

  “Can we just drop the subject of jewelry? And my wardrobe choices?”

  Maybe I could zip my coat up once I got out of the car.

  All the way up to my neck? Yeah, that wouldn’t look dorky at all.

  “I’ll bet Dylan would like you more if you did stuff like wearing makeup and jewelry. Don’t you think so, Mom?”

  “Shut it, Jill,” I snapped.

  “Joss, be kind to your sister. Jill, leave Joss alone. She’s just fine the way she is.”

  We finally pulled into the school’s circular drive. We were a little later than usual—not the fault of my wardrobe choices, thank you. I had practically no hope of escaping up to my stairwell this morning, especially since I could see the knot of my so-called friends, the ones who wanted to hold club meetings at the Pizza Pit, and for us all to get matching jackets with our names embroidered on them and a big, honkin’ TALENT logo on the back. Wasn’t it going to be just awesome when we could all be roomies at State School together?

  I blew out a breath as I stepped out of the car. Being pissed at them wasn’t settling me the way I’d hoped it would.

  I had no idea what I was supposed to do now. I mean, how was I supposed to act around Dylan? Was I just supposed to play it cool? Like everything was the same as it was yesterday? Were we going to tell people we were together? Were we together?

  Set the brake on the crazy train, okay?

  Dylan detached himself from the group as my mom pulled away, and strode over to me. He looked troubled and serious, and it did really bad things for my stomach. He was about to tell me he’d changed his mind.

  “Hey.”

  Okay, what could I read into that? He smiled a bit as he looked down at me, but something was clearly wrong.

  “Hey,” I said back, but it came out in that breathless way that I was really starting to hate.

  “I’d, um, really like to kiss you this morning, but you probably don’t want to make a scene, huh?” He smiled a little more when he said that, in that crooked way that made me stupid.

  “Um, yeah. I mean, no, kind of.” Stupider and stupider. “You could kiss me, I guess. If you want.”

  He reached out, taking my hand to pull me forward, lacing his fingers with mine. His other hand settled under my jaw, pulling me up to meet him. This kiss was sweet, restrained, and there was a lot behind it that I could feel him holding back from me. Not the let’s take this somewhere private holding back, but something more emotional. Serious.

  The kiss ended and I found that I’d been standing on tip-toe. I rocked back.

  “What’s going on?”

  His hand tightened on mine, and his thumb brushed over my cheek as he continued to look down at me. His expression turned bitter.

  “Eric just told me, said he’d gotten from Kat, who’d heard it from Heather, and who knows where she—”

  “Dylan, what?”

  “NIAC took Kenny last night.”

  “Not another—” Talent, is what I was thinking, but I broke off as the name registered. “Waterboy, Kenny?” I moved into Dylan instinctively and his arms locked around me. What have I done?

  But I couldn’t say it out loud. Not yet, or I’d just make more of a scene by having a breakdown right out in front of the school.

  I couldn’t draw that kind of attention. Not now. That might link me to Kenny, make people suspicious. I probably deserved that, but if they started looking at me, they’d start looking at Jill, too, because Talents often run in families. And now, I swallowed hard, thinking it, maybe they’d start looking at Dylan too.

  “Joss?” Dylan pulled me back by my shoulders. “I know what you’re thinking, but there’s no way this is your fault, okay?”

  “He said it himself last night. He couldn’t do anything. If I’d never been there, he would have just stood there, watching the fire like everyone else. And he’d be here today.”

  “Yeah, he said it last night. He didn’t know us, not really, but he just came out and said, ‘I can control water!’ Who knows what else he said, or who he said it to? The kid was a big-mouthed idiot.”

  “He didn’t deserve—”

  “I’m not saying he did, you know I’m not. I’m just saying that it seemed like he didn’t have the sense to keep his mouth shut. Maybe he bragged to the wrong person after we left him last night, or maybe they were onto him even before that.”

  “But I knew he was that kind of kid and I still just drafted him last night. I mean, yeah, he could have said no, but we know he wouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have gotten involved.”

  “And if the fire had spread to the other businesses? Then you’d beat yourself up over that.”

  Guilty. The fact that he knew me made me want to smile, in spite of everything. “Don’t act like you know me.”

  He grinned. “Oh I’m gonna, Unfathomable One. It’s my mission in life.”

  “You seriously need a hobby.”

  “And you’re it, Marshall. Now kiss me again, before the bell rings.”

  * * *

  Joss

  “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “Come on, Kat, stop messing around before someone sees you.”

  “I am not jumping in a sewer!”

  “It’s not a sewer,” Heather assured her, looking around, “it’s like a tunnel. Totally dry, stink free.”

  “Now get your ass down here before I yank you through that hole.” My neck was getting sore from looking up at the small, rectangular opening above us. I knew this was a bad idea.

  “Your Talent doesn’t work like that. You can only move objects, not people and stuff, so don’t even.”

  “You think I need Talent for this?” I grabbed the ladder and put one of my boots to the rungs, giving her one of my more menacing glares.

  Kat sucked her teeth, cussed at me a little, and turned around to climb down the ladder. I stayed close in case her pointy, slick-soled, sorry excuses for boots slipped on a rung and she needed catching.

  “Okay, here, happy? Hey, okay, this isn’t so bad, but damn, Joss. I mean, I know you’re really private and stuff, but come on!” The she waved her hand and started over. “So we walked all the way out here to the college—when we could have waited for Eric to drive us, by the way, and we climbed into your hidey hole or whatever, so dish!”

  “That’s not what she brought us here to talk about,” Heather said, before I could speak.

  “What are you talking about? What’s she talking about, Joss? Don’t you even think you’re going to get away without telling us every single detail of what led up to that display in front of the whole school this morning.”

  My face turned bright red and the invisible cords in my mind broke, letting the grate smack back into place over the access with a hard clang. Like the sound of a jail cell lock down.

  Trapped.

  “I’d hardly call that a display,” Heather scoffed, coming to my defense. “Not compared to the tonsil polishing PDAs we get from you and Eric several times a day.”

  “Are you new? Have you met Joss? That was a display.” Kat turned back to me. “Spill.”

  I huffed, rolled my eyes, and started a rapid mumbling that began with my stupidity at lunch the day before, and ended with, “and then I got to school this morning and he kissed me, big deal, and told me about Kenny, and we were both upset about that, which is what you saw. The End. Moving on
—”

  “Kenny. Not your fault, by the way,” Heather said.

  “Thanks, but—”

  “So, wait,” Kat interrupted, “oh my God, I can’t believe you asked him that, that is so not you. But it kind of is. Okay, so last night, what exactly did he say? Everything.”

  “Kat, give the girl a break. He likes her, she likes him, he’s her boyfriend, she’s his girlfriend, they’ll live happily ever after. You’re embarrassing her.”

  “Easy for you to say. I’m sure she hasn’t been thinking of anything else all day and you’ve just been eating it all up. Mind-readers,” Kat scoffed.

  “Actually, Kat, I have been thinking about something else today. I wanted to talk to you guys about organizing. You know, like you were saying you wanted.”

  “Ohhh, is that why we’re here? We’re all, like, under-ground.” She did the air-quotes thing.

  “Yeah. I wanted us to have a place to meet where we wouldn’t have to worry about anyone listening, or making connections between us. These tunnels are for the maintenance of an outdated heating system that’s been replaced. They run all over below the college. There are only a few access points that can still be used, and there are some places where the tunnels are blocked. The point is that they’ve gone unused for years and no one seems to remember that they’re here.” And here I was, not only revealing another one of my family’s secret safe-zones and rendezvous points, but giving a historical tour. Awesome. Dad’s head would explode if he found out.

  At that moment we all jumped to the sound of the grate scraping overhead.

  “Hey, sorry I’m late,” Dylan called down before starting down the ladder. “Stupid detention.”

  “Have you and Eric learned a valuable lesson?”

  “Yes, Miss Heather. Spitballs are wrong, even in studyhall. We will never do it again. Maybe. Crazy substitutes, the word ‘championship’ means nothing to them. Did I miss anything?”

  Be glad you missed the third degree. I was certainly glad he hadn’t been around while I was trying to explain “us.”