Our week passed somewhat uneventfully and, fortunately, my punishment for sneaking out never actually came beyond my dad sternly telling me not to do it again.
College application denials began trickling in around March, which meant the deadline to confirm the sporadic acceptance was coming up soon, as well, and we were, tragically, back in school to polish off our last few months of public education. It all felt so surreal in light of my most recent near death experience.
But life moved on, and so did I. Or I tried to.
Because my wounds from the brief impact with the car were surprisingly minor — just a few scratches, really — I made the dubious choice to keep the encounter between myself and my friends, and I would have gotten away with it, too, were it not for my meddling sister. The little narc saw the video circulating the internet within hours of the event, despite Nicole's promises about the fickleness of media focus and she ran straight to our dads. To be fair, I should have had the presence of mind to preemptively buy Alexia's silence. My mind felt like it was being pulled a million different directions lately, causing all the regular things I would normally anticipate to slip past and cause me problems later.
I shouldn't have wanted to keep the matter to myself. After all, it wasn't like I personally did anything wrong that needed concealing, but it still felt like I did, and being caught only added a layer of irrational irritation to everything else I was already feeling.
I struggled to focus in my classes as a result, and definitely saw the impact it was having after scoring a nice round fifty percent on my fourth period physics quiz. Ms Geiger looked at my paper with a frown, stared at me long and hard, and then projected to the class, "Senior-itis is no excuse to let your grades slip. You're almost at the finish line, so it would be a shame for you to fail my class this close to graduation. No offence, but I don't want to see any of you next year."
Believe me, I thought. The feeling is mutual.
Luckily, the bell rang at that moment, and before she could start the "The bell doesn't dismiss you, I do," spiel I was already snatching away my paper and herding out the door.
"Geez, how bad did you do to earn that speech?" Leigh asked, coming up behind me.
I pressed my lips into a resigned line, shrugging. "Take a guess."
"Hmm... thirty percent?"
"Who got a thirty percent?" Nicole popped into the conversation, fresh out of Advanced Chemistry a mere two doors down from mine and Leigh's shared bare minimum physics class.
"Lily did."
"I did not get a thirty," I clarified.
Leigh's brows disappeared into her hairline. "You got below thirty? Ouch."
"You twit. When did I say that? I got a fifty."
"That's not even that bad," said Nicole sympathetically, the same girl who probably hadn't gotten bellow a B+ in her life.
"Oh well." I smiled, feigning detachment. "You can't really blame me for my lack of focus, given the circumstances. You get hit by a car and tell me how up to test taking you are afterwards. In related news, what do you think about me dying my hair pink? Now that red-headed me is also viral for the whole flying over the car thing, I should probably go with a different color for the sake of anonymity, right?"
"Why are you so threatened by the idea of being recognized again?" Leigh asked.
We turned the corner, the exit doors coming into sight over the heard of seniors clambering for a lunchtime escape. Riotous chatter grew the closer we drew into the throng, cresting over our senses. Some discussed school, or where they wanted to get lunch, but most fell into the default: superhero politicking. Given that scientists estimated the birth of a Thaumaturge (their fancy term for those with special abilities) to be roughly one in three dozen births, people enjoyed speculating who amongst their classmates might have powers and be concealing it. At those odds, there should have been nearly one hidden Super per class period, though that sounded more impressive than it actually was. Most powers were useless, such as seeing extra colors, being able to communicate with ladybugs (who apparently didn't care to listen), or never getting brain freezes. They weren't exactly going to be a formidable crime fighting force. Beyond trifling speculation, they also liked to debate the morality of registering people with abilities into the government database to track any misuse of power, or the true identities of famous Supers, the motives behind Shade's villainy, and the drama of the latest attacks — including the identity of that girl Tempest saved last week.
Geez, I wondered who that could be?
I pitched my voice low, into just above a hiss, so that none who passed our small group might overhear. "I stabbed a homicidal maniac, in case you've forgotten, because I can guarantee I have not."
"Do you want to go bald?" Nicole ran a lock of my hair between her thumb and forefinger. "'Cause that's what will happen if you bleach your hair twice in a week."
"Our resident supervillain has been awfully quiet as of late, actually," Leigh mused. "Maybe you hurt his feelings."
Although her tone was earnest, her eyes held a teasing spark.
"I hurt more than just his feelings. In all likelihood, he's out there somewhere nursing his wounds. It's not as though he can go to the emergency room with injuries like those without raising a few alarms."
"The Guild must be bored out of their mind," Nicole added, referring, of course, to the Hero Guild, the dominant crime fighting force in the city with countless chapters scattered throughout the rest of the country. "Without Shade they might just go out of business."
We flashed our ID's for the school security officer on our way out the doors, more a formality than anything. He'd seen our faces for the last four years, and even knew Leigh by name.
"Some lower tier hero stopped a jewelry thief earlier today, and Aqua put out a house fire, but, you're right, it's nothing nearly as glamorous as I'm sure the Guild prefers. Poor them."
"They still get our taxes, Leigh. They'll weather this storm, worry not your fragile heart." Slipping into the front passenger seat, I asked, "Who wants to skip fifth period?"
Leigh snorted, starting the engine and carefully backing out of her parking space. "Maybe your Dads are conflict avoidant enough to let you get away with that, but my parents will end my life on purpose."
"And I have homework to turn in," Nicole added, leaning over the center console from the row of seats behind us.
Leigh made a valid point. Her parents despised sending her to public school, and I suspected they merely tolerated Nicole and I for enticing their daughter to going somewhere so far below their means. Even then, she only managed it by striking a low blow in reminding them that fancy private schools didn't save her brother. He disappeared regardless of the piles of money they threw towards his education, but if they discovered I was trying to lead Leigh down a life of hooliganism they might very well end MY life on purpose, and I didn't want that. With bank accounts like theirs, I held little doubt they would succeed.
"How boring," I sighed, despite the original suggestion only being halfhearted at best. "Keep up this behavior and I might begin to think you two actually want to graduate with our classmates."
"Oh, heaven forfend!" Leigh gasped, clutching at her chest in mock horror, only for Nicole to yell at her to keep her hands on the steering wheel while on the road. They fell easily into an argument about how Nicole didn't want to die today, and Leigh's counter that we weren't in any danger because, "I can drive with my knees, too."
*~*~*
I was above gossiping about the secret identities of heroes who obviously valued their anonymity, but damn if I wasn't curious, so there I sat, not for the first time over the last few days, skipping back and forth through the three cell phone videos worth of footage of me hovering over the car that were viral enough to pop up upon a quick Google search. While the sum total of all three clips were less than a minute long, they each displayed a different view of the scene, showing different potential suspects, one of which who must have been Tempest for me to have been saved from becoming a grease spot on the pavement. As far as we knew, he was the only wind manipulator in the country, and therefor must have been nearby. If I had any moral backbone to speak of, I might have respected his privacy.
Well, I didn't. I was born nosey; sue me. I wasn't about to use the information for evil or anything. A person could only look at a half concealed face so many times without a burning curiosity to know what lay beneath.
Besides, half the internet seemed to be zealously on the job, as well, because they, like me, had no concept of boundaries.
I consoled myself with the knowledge that at least I was self aware, even if I couldn't resist temptation.
Obviously Tempest was cursed with only a single X chromosome, so I eliminated all the women in the video off my list. Next, perhaps I was being ageist, but I also eliminated any men over forty. "Midlife crisis" was not the vibe I got from him when he carried through the city in his arms, nor when he prevented me from being robbed.
Which left me with still quite a few suspects, actually. It had been a rather busy street, after all, and, of the people actually captured on camera, I spotted more than a dozen men who fit within my admittedly very wide criteria. After eliminating the Ex-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, I dropped down to a solid dozen people.
How many people would I need to stalk to get any answers, though? I didn't know their names. I had a vague awareness of software that could identify people based solely on their photos, but just thinking about it made me feel creepier by the second.
Nope. No thank you. That was not a road I wanted to go down.
Abruptly, I closed my laptop and pushed it to the far end of my bed.
It wasn't like I was ever going to see him again, anyway. Two encounters with Tempest in under two weeks were surreal, almost magical, and even though they ranked amongst the scariest moments of my life, they were all each exhilarating in their own right, a high I couldn't help but want to chase.
Except I was normal, and normal people didn't get to live lives of magic and exhilaration. Those encounters were a mere chapter of the long book of my life, over and done with.
But sometimes I hoped otherwise, and other times I felt normality wasn't in the cards for me, not with my luck.