NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE ∙ Peter Parker

✸ Chapter Thirty-Three: Friendly Competition

"Sharon, what the hell is going on? Where have you been!" she rushed out, flustered as she went to roll socks over her feet. They'd healed. When Sharon didn't reply and looked out the window in their parents' Brooklyn apartment instead, she angrily threw one of the Nike shoes back onto the ground. "Sharon! Where are Mom and Dad?!"

Sharon looked at her sharply. "The license plate. You were right."

HYDRA.

Lizzie couldn't do this.

Shaking her head in disbelief, she backed away from Sharon.

No. This wasn't happening.

Something wasn't right, and all she wanted to do was scream into the silence growing between herself and her sister.

"Where were you?" Lizzie asked with more persistence, ignoring the stinging in her eyes. Sharon stared at her like she was insane, and that didn't lessen her panic any more. Pitifully, she wanted to curl back under her covers and cry, all but whimpering as the tears kissed her eyelashes. "Sharon! You're scaring me—"

"I know. I know. You can't be scared right now, MJ. You can't—we have to go, okay?"

Lizzie didn't understand, but it was her sister. Sharon grabbed her wrist and started to pull her toward her bedroom door, but when Lizzie reached to her neck and found it bare, her feet all but cemented on the ground in alarm.

"No, no—stop—wait—"

She needed them. Panicked, the teenage-girl painfully ripped her wrist free so she could scramble back to her nightstand. The chain sat there to her relief, and she snatched it up just as the bedroom door opened. She flipped the tags over to be sure they were the correct way as she talked.

"Okay, okay—I got 'em—"

James B. Barnes was stamped on the tags. The words stopped forming mid-sentence as she stared down at the tags. That can't be right.

"Agent Three?"

Why does Sharon keep calling her that—

"Lizzie."

That wasn't Sharon.

Like sharp nails digging into a chalkboard, the muscles in Lizzie's body spasmed. Her fingers tangled in the dog-tags, unwilling to let go. But she couldn't bring herself to look up either. How cowardice of her that she could not face her demons. Forcing her eyes away from the safety that was Bucky Barnes, Lizzie suffered the deadliest of blows when Agent Ian Monroe stood next to her sister. Betrayal.

"Agent Three—"

Another piercing noise perforating her ear drums, his voice grating down to her spine. The tears made her vision blurry, deepening the hole in her chest as dangerous memories of Agent Ian Monroe assaulted her mind. Nothing was okay. There was not a world where Sharon would allow this to happen—not her sister, she repeated, convinced of that truth when she helplessly prayed Sharon would stop this. Monroe stared through her, and she wished she could swallow up the tears so he had nothing to boast about.