Thirty Five #2
“You’re not the first person to be upset about this,” says Arielle.
“But we can’t fight back without exposing your identity.
” She pushes away from the counter. “I’m going to check on Dad.
” Classic Arielle. She said her piece and now she would leave me to figure it out.
She made one thing clear: she won’t see me at the next practice.
I need a change of scenery. I heave myself up and grab an old jacket of Arielle’s from a hook by the back door.
Arielle’s mansion has many porches, but the back porch is the smallest. It has three deck chairs, a small wooden table, and stairs going down to the garden.
When I step onto the deck, someone else is already there.
“S’up?” says Damian. Besides his sling, a brace bumps out under his tennis sweatshirt.
I hobble to the chair beside him. “Sorry about all that.” I gesture toward his injuries.
“Me too. And about your mom and everything.” He slides his chair so we’re sitting side by side. “I have some of my powers, but they’re not all back yet.”
Crying comes easily these days, but Damian’s words hit different. First, because the Golden Ace lost some of his powers, and that in itself is tragic. Second, because I believe that Damian and I are friends now, and as his friend, I realize he must be going through the worst.
“Was this the first time that’s happened?” I ask.
“Being smacked by a giant piece of gold?” Damian groans. “Yup. I’ve had some close calls before. My mom’s jewelry, my grandma’s dishes. Got a little dizzy near that stuff, I’d itch if I touched it. Nothing like this. No clue what I’m going to tell my parents.”
“They don’t know?” I ask.
“They think I’m studying,” he admits. “ But they might guess after this.”
I may be new at the whole Super thing, but I understand that battles like the one we’d just been through don’t come along often. But being exposed to your weakness on top of it?
“The worst part,” Damian says, “is that I have no idea how long I’ll need to recover. There’s no data on Supers because none of us can risk our identities. I might not get all of my powers back. Not that saving everyone wasn’t worth it,” he adds.
I shift, getting a little more comfortable. I remember Fox, as Dark Static, saying that if I asked what Damian’s event was, the one where his powers came out, he’d tell me.
“I’ll tell you, sure,” says Damian.
“Hey, you promised you wouldn’t read my mind.” I say, though I’m glad his power is working.
“I can’t control it as well anymore,” Damian admits sheepishly. “I swear. Careful what you think around me.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it,” I admit. It makes sense that if he had known Arielle’s true motivations, he wouldn’t say anything to protect all of us. But why hadn’t he read Phil’s mind to discover what he was planning? They were both at Hallowfest and the school assembly that day.
“I can only hear what people are thinking in the moment they’re thinking it,” says Damian.
“It’s not like I could touch his hand and see his whole life.
Same with Brynn. She was careful with what she thought around me.
That’s why you never want people to know all of your powers.
I learned that the hard way.” He shakes his head.
“Anyway, you know some of my origin story.”
“I do?” Had there been anything on the Goldie site?
“What you interrupted on Hallowfest? With Zane.”
“Zane Milligan?”
“Yeah. We had a thing before he started dealing, but he went back to it after Aaron-slash-Patrick came, which is what you saw at the comic book shop. Zane wanted to get together again, but I wouldn’t do it if he was still dealing. He swore to me that night that he’d stop.”
Wow. I digest this. That night, I’d thought Zane was Golden Ace.
“Not everyone has parents as nice as yours,” says Damian.
“When I was eleven, I tried to come out to my dad, who honestly believes I was put on this planet to be the next him, by the way—hence the Jr. My entire identity growing up was being his ‘golden boy’—a law school bound star athlete. But that night… forget being the golden child, he looked at me like I wasn’t even human.
He had to see me that way, in order to hate me. ”
Damian swallows. “So I took it back. And now, well, Golden Ace is like Superman. Who’s more ‘golden boy’ than Superman? And my kryptonite is also close to home. That freaking gold. Things changed again when I met you in the hallway at school, before the assembly.”
“For real?” I didn’t realize I’d made an impression.
“You told me that people need Supers, because we need to believe in people who are more than human. I realized that’s why I needed Golden Ace, because he made me believe in something.
And he made my dad seem small. But I didn’t want to be bigger than anyone else.
I just wanted to be the best version of myself.
After that, I didn’t want to use Golden Ace to hide behind anymore.
So, I ended my deal with Molly and tried hanging out with Zane.
Someday, I hope Capital City will know this part of Golden Ace.
For him to be the Super for kids like me, and more than a hero, someday. ”
Rustling leaves and the sounds of autumn take the space between our thoughts. “Thanks for telling me,” I say. “Fox told me that you and Molly were never really together. That must have been traumatic, pretending to date someone, especially because she hates Supers.”
“Molly doesn’t hate Supers.” Damian laughs.
“She’s basically president of the Anti-Golden-Ace committee.”
“Nah. She knew I was Golden Ace before Fox did. She pretended to loathe Golden Ace, just in case anyone ever suspected I might be him, because Golden Ace would never date someone who hates Supers, right? She wanted to help me.”
Wow.
He tilts back in his chair. “What else would you like to ask? Since I’m in such a sharing mood.”
“Actually, there is one thing. How did you pass your sports Super test? Fox and I had Arielle to lie for us.”
“Ah,” he says. “You want to know how I made the tennis team.”
“Definitely.”
“If you could stand, you would strangle me for this.”
“Now you have to tell me.”
“Non-supers design the Super test, right?” he starts. “I just listened to the administrator’s thoughts when I was taking the test, and it was like they were literally telling me what they were looking for.”
I think back to my own Super test. Arielle had forced me to drink a lot of liquids and monitored my body’s vitals to see how I reacted to them. “What?” I ask. “How can you fake your own vitals?”
“You drink the liquids, right? And if you’re a Super, your heart rate would be normal after you drink the blue cup, because that’s the control, but then it would be higher after the purple cup, and lower after the red cup,” he explains.
“I meditated to keep my heart constant. It’s a glorified polygraph. ”
“That’s it? I thought they would have checked for some kind of Super genome or tried to poison you or something.”
“Don’t tell me you’re sharing how you cheated.” A familiar voice muses. “Maddy’s going to get the wrong idea.”
“And there’s my cue to leave,” Damian says, slowly pushing himself out of the chair. “Don’t forget, Madeline. Everyone has a weakness, and the likelihood is that it won’t destroy you.”
“Our boy is so golden he sweats in 24 carats,” Fox jokes as he helps Damian step back into the house.
“This is coming from an Ex-Supervillain,” Damian says, lightly closing the door behind him.
Fox sinks in Damian’s chair. “He’s right though.”
“Okay, thanks. Got it the first time.” I say, and he winks at me.
Fox tips the chair back. Crickets chirp on the last of autumn’s green grass, while a low breeze blows through Fox’s hair.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he suggests.
“Um,” I hesitate. Pain shoots through my legs as I consider walking through the yard. How had the IVs not helped me? Injecting water into my veins should have activated healing powers. I groan, wondering how much more complicated my powers could get.
“I got you,” he says, standing and lifting me from the chair.
“Fox, oh my gosh.”
Fox runs, holding me piggy-back style.
“You’re not scared, are you?” he yells. Wind blows on my face as I shake my head. Fox zigzags all the way to the edge of Arielle’s yard.
“Are you kidding?” Fox had run to the only tree that wasn’t a casualty of my irrigation-explosion-crater, the willow tree. He leads me under its canopy.
“Remember when we were here?” he asks, breathless from running. He stops where I can lean back against the trunk for support. Fox moves until there’s only an inch of space between us.
“No, you’ll have to remind me.”
He brushes the edge of my cheek, where my stitches are, and I loop my arms around his neck.
“It’s a little different without a mask, isn’t it?” he asks.
“I get why we wear masks,” I whisper. My palm brushes the space under his eyes, where his protective garment would have been. “But why not wear a cape? Don’t superheroes wear capes?”
Fox gives a boyish whoop and moves away, like he’s infused with a windfall of energy. “Nah. Not unless they want a death wish. Capes are hazardous to your health, Maddragon. No capes.”
His silhouette glows in the starlight. “Besides, you don’t need a cape to be a Superhero.”
A drip falls from a leaf overhead. It soaks into my skin, and I welcome the relief, more of the calm after the storm.
“The Torrent,” I say. “That’s what I want to be called.”
“Not Hot Water?” Fox laughs. “It suits you. The Torrent,” he says, trying it aloud.
The stars glisten in his eyes, and it’s funny that light coming at us from billions of light-years ago can illuminate so much right here, right now.
“The Torrent,” I whisper.
And I wonder if the stars know of the magic that can happen below.