Twenty Three
I’ve never had superb control of my facial expressions. As Kristen would say, “I can always tell when Madeline thinks I’m saying something stupid because her cheeks puff out.”
When I step into Arielle’s dimly lit enclave, it doesn’t surprise me to hear her say, “I know what you’re thinking.”
I crouch on the dusty floorboards to avoid scraping my head on the low ceiling. “What’s that?” I don’t know what to think.
Arielle still wears her pink sparkly, strapless gown from Hallowfest, and her long auburn hair tumbles around her. Her citrus perfume overpowers our alcove, but there are thick walls that separate us and civilization, so hopefully her signature scent won’t be her fatal flaw.
“Are Phil’s men out there?”
“Um…” I remember the mayor’s entourage following us, though we’d tried our best to lose them. “Fox is outside. He’ll scream if they are.”
“Fox? Why is Fox here?”
I laugh. “I’ve been asking myself that all night.”
More questions hang in the air, but Arielle gives me the same look she gives at swim practice, like she’s doing me some great favor by allowing me to be in the same room, and I shouldn’t ask for anything more.
“Okay,” I say. “We can come back to that.”
Arielle sighs. “I’m sorry, Madeline. I told myself that I was going to stop treating you coldly… It’s complicated.”
“How so?”
“I owe you an explanation, and I don’t think what I can give you right now is good enough.” She stops, and if I didn’t know her better, I would say she’s tearing up. Wait. Something on her face is moving, from her eyelashes down to her lip… onto her bare foot. Arielle is crying .
“Arielle,” I start, but am not sure how to comfort her.
“I thought I had to, and all this time, I didn’t.” Arielle sinks to the floorboards. Her dress fluffs in the dust.
Is my sister losing her mind? I can’t look away.
“Your powers, Madeline. I thought if I could monitor you at practice, I could keep you from discovering them. I especially didn’t want Phil to realize that you have them, but it looks like both were inevitable.”
“What?” I need clarification. “You didn’t want me to know that I have powers?”
Arielle blinks, as if what she meant was obvious. “Phil would have killed you.”
I gape back. “Your husband would have killed me?”
“Last week at practice when you spoke to me about Phil covering up the accident, you knew.”
“Arielle!” I would have screamed if we weren’t hiding. “Phil is evil—killed our mom evil—and you’ve known this whole time? That is way worse than being cold or whatever. Way worse.”
“No.” Her voice is stilted and commanding. “I guessed, but I didn’t know until the autopsy record went public. After Mom’s death was solidified as a murder, I realized Phil had something to do with it.”
And I thought Arielle had something to do with it. “What were you and Mom arguing about that night, then? If you’re so innocent.” I’m laying it on her, but her complete 180 also isn’t fair.
Arielle’s eyes glisten from the tears and… something else. “Phil…” she gathers herself. “Phil is a Super.”
Aces, Arielle.
Yet, I believe her. Phil’s personality seemed inconsistent from the start, with his people-pleasing abilities suspicious. Then there was our mom’s warning: be careful of people who don’t seem to have enemies.
“ He can make people like him,” Arielle explains.
“Like drawing people toward him, making them more agreeable to whatever he says. I believe the technical terms are ‘enhanced likability’ ‘or extra charisma . ’ The night she died, Mom warned me that he wasn’t who he said he was, but I didn’t believe her. ”
That’s what my dad meant about Arielle needing to come to us. Did he have the same information? Is that why he didn’t trust Phil either?
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I ask.
“I couldn’t find proof. I didn’t know how he fudged the Super test results to become mayor, and I thought I’d only have one chance at speaking out against him.
It was the same with Mom, Mads. She knew about his powers and was building a reveal against him, but he killed her before she could get enough evidence.
When it became obvious that I covered up your powers…
well, I wanted to run before he had a shot at me.
“When Mom died,” Arielle continues, “she told me to watch Phil’s reflection in a mirror and I would see what she meant, but only do it without him knowing.
I thought that was overkill, but when I married Phil and we moved in together, I realized how much he hates mirrors. The house has maybe two of them.”
“Mansion,” I correct her. “The makeup mirror… you always check your lipstick when Phil goes on a rant.”
My sister nods. “Apparently, his powers stop working if his reflection is in a mirror. I’m not sure why, but Mom was right.
If we catch his reflection in a glass mirror, he can’t get that likeability boost when he’s talking or near other people.
I try to use my makeup compact so he can’t use his powers on a big group. ”
“You’ve been working against him?” I clarify. “This whole time?”
“When I realized his powers, I couldn’t break up with him.
I had to play the part and figure out what was going on.
I had to go through with the wedding. But I had to be sneaky, I couldn’t hang up a mirror at Phil’s events or do much on a large scale.
Doing those might temporarily turn people off him, but Phil’s already mayor, and he can bring people right back into his orbit. ”
That’s why she uses her lipstick mirror when she hears him talk. It serves the dual purpose of playing the dutiful and beautiful mayor’s wife while sabotaging him. Arielle will always be a cold ice princess, but she had been looking out for me. She was playing a part.
You played it well, I want to say, but a BOOM comes from the other side of the wall.
Arielle dives away from it.
“POLICE. FREEZE,” a man shouts. Another BOOM .
“Oh no,” Arielle whispers, “This is bad.”
Didn’t they already check this house? I press my nose against the two hundred-year-old wall, searching for some kind of hidden crack or a lookout, but there’s nothing near me that can help. What’s the point of having a secret hideout in your house if there isn’t a lookout?
“Let’s run.” I stand.
“Wait,” says Arielle. “We need a plan.”
“If you want us to get killed, sure, let’s wait and see what happens.”
Arielle narrows her sky-blue eyes. “I know you hate me, but I did it all for you, Madeline. You and Dad. If I hadn’t married Phil, if I hadn’t been there to stop him from installing cameras in your bedroom , if I hadn’t been there to convince him that Mom and Dad were never actually that close, and Dad never knew what Mom investigated…
If I hadn’t been the person to administer your high school swim test, which I got to do because I married him…
If I hadn’t spent the last three years learning his contacts inside and out and discovering his weaknesses, then you and I would not be having this conversation. ”
She pauses, somber. “It’s also why you can’t tell anyone, not even Dad, about Phil’s powers. We can’t know who he has influence over, and we need to keep whatever leverage we can. Alright? Promise me.”
“Yeah, yeah. Promise.”
Arielle listens for footsteps on the other side of the wall. Someone shuffles closer, then moves away.
Arielle wets her lips. “I thought you wouldn’t realize you had powers until you were off at college, or you had left Capital City—until you didn’t have to see me every day, ignoring you.
But it caught up to you. It shocked me when your powers came through on the Super test, but I knew I had to keep them secret. ”
“Did Mom know?” I ask. “Did she tell you I have powers?”
Arielle shook her head. “She thought you might. I suppose she saw something when you were younger, or she could have gotten a feeling when she was pregnant with you that she never had from me. Powers are random, Mads, but she said that as soon as you figured out who you are in this world, that’s when your powers, if you had them, would appear.
That’s why I didn’t think you would get them until later. ”
I fidget with my jacket zipper. My emotions settle, and I realize the extent of what Arielle has risked for me.
It’s a felony to lie about the results of a Super test, and Arielle had lied to the top branch of the government.
She risked more than Phil finding out about my powers; she’d risked her life.
“All those years of being horrible to you backfired in the end,” says Arielle. “Phil found out I sabotaged him. Currently, we’re playing the grown-up version of hide-and-seek, and there are bigger consequences to being found.”
“POLICE, DROP YOUR WEAPON.” The muscles in my legs contract, coiling like springs as my body prepares to bolt for its life at any moment. We’re going to die if we don’t do something.
“What do we have that we can use?” I ask.
Arielle stands and wipes her hands on her soiled ball gown. She rakes fingers through her hair and dusts herself off. Then she’s all business, which is helpful for two reasons:
Arielle has hawk-like reflexes.
Arielle has a black belt in karate.
“Drink up.” She lifts the jug of water and before I can tell her not to, empties a third of it over my head.
“Oof, cold.” I shiver as the drips soak into my skin. My heart almost stops as they disappear into my arms like water poured into a flower’s soil, and energy takes their place. “That’s never happened before.”
Arielle disregards my weird skin condition. “We don’t need to fight. We just need to get out of here. You said Fox is outside?”
“He’s supposed to be.” Fox’s predictability status is far from perfect.
“Great. Let’s go to his house. Brynn owes me a favor, and Phil will have already searched there.”
The police officer’s call echoes from the other side of the wall. How close he is makes me jump. “Hey, I think I found something.” Tap tap tap. “It sounds hollow.”
“Happy to be a part of your grand plan,” I say. The water races through me, ready to do anything that could save us.
I expect ice from her for the sass, but it doesn’t come, nor does her need to control. She’s been carrying the weight of everything for so long, maybe she had to let it go to have any sense of what is real.
“Can you blow up this kitchen?” Arielle asks. On second thought, maybe she hasn’t returned to reality yet.
“What!? No.”
“I hear talking,” yells the police officer. “THEY’RE BACK THERE.”
“I’ll buy them a new kitchen, whoever lives here now,” says Arielle, who’s already moving to the rear of the outhouse, as if that can save her from an explosion. “We need a diversion big enough to knock out the police. Then we’ll run around the front to Fox and get out of here.”
“How do we know there aren’t twenty cops waiting outside? How do we know Fox is still here?”
“We don’t.”
“STAND BACK,” yells the police officer. BOOM.
Everything goes silent as the sound of the bullet leaving its shell generates so much force that my ears ring and my heart rate skyrockets.
“0.002 seconds to reach the other side,” yells the police officer. “Definitely hollow in there.”
“Madeline,” Arielle says. “Do it now.”
“Arielle, I can’t blow things up.”
She holds up one of the gallon-sized jugs of water. “Can you boil this?”
“I—I think so.”
“Then supercharge it. Boil the water, then trap the steam that comes from it. If you can heat that, it explodes the container it’s inside. You can explode this jug of water, or the pipes of water in the kitchen sink and take the kitchen with it.”
So that’s what happened underneath Capital City Hall. I was so angry and disoriented that I boiled Mr. Wilson’s extra water bottles, then supercharged the steam to detonate the entire basement.
“Arielle, the last time I blew something up, someone died.”
“This time you know what you’re doing.”
“That’s not true—” Arielle had said I got my powers because I’m getting stronger and I believe in myself. It sounds like the punchline to a family movie, but maybe believing in myself is all I need to do right now.
“Fine,” I say, “but you owe them a new kitchen.”
As the police officer tries to figure out how to break down the wall, I gulp more water and imagine the kitchen sink and its rusty pipes in the plumbing and the water well they draw from. I spin on my toes until the water is in my ears and I can’t tell where I am. I spin until my fingertips sizzle.
“WE SHOULD TEST IT OUT AGAIN,” the police officer yells. “READY, AIM…”
“Fire,” I say it with them.
It happens just like it had before: energy bursts from deep within my bones and knocks me off balance.
I skid against the floorboards, bracing for danger, but this time it’s a little more controlled.
I can picture where I want the blast to land, and instead of it happening at all angles all around me, the explosion is contained to the kitchen.
Well, as contained as an explosion can be.
“LET’S GO!” Arielle pulls me up. The floor in front of us burst into flames, and the refrigerator has already disintegrated. My legs shake uncontrollably. I can’t make it out without her. Fire fuels on oxygen and consumes the water vapor from the air, driving away everything I have to work with.
Arielle drags me across the burning kitchen and through the flaming walls, all the way around the house to Fox’s SUV, which Fox stands in front of with his mouth wide open.
“Seeing how many flies you can fit in there, Levine?” Arielle shouts.
“Yes.” Fox snaps into action. “For the record, I’ve caught five.”
“Charming,” she says. “Drive. Now. ”
“Yes, coming.” Fox opens the back and Arielle helps me into his SUV. She runs to the passenger seat and buckles in before Fox has even closed his door.