One week without any large scale villain attacks stretched into two, then three, though that didn't mean there weren't any disasters looming on the horizon, and by that, I specifically meant Finals Week. In a mere ten days, final exams would commence. I had already committed to a college — a process not unlike throwing a dart blindly at a dart board — but maintaining my grades could make or break my acceptance. No pressure. A more responsible person would have started studying by now.
Unfortunately, I was not a more responsible person.
Nicole had been sporadically reviewing for ages, while Leigh relied heavily on her private tutors to drill two semesters worth of information through her thick skull. Historical record showed both strategies were met with general success, but I lacked the foresight to begin cramming reasonably ahead of time nor the money to purchase aid from others, so I would inevitably have a come-to-Jesus moment the weekend before and choose to replace sleep with truly toxic levels of coffee until I could barely hold a pencil through the caffeine-induced jitters.
That was future-me's problem. Current-me felt very little regret forsaking my textbooks in favor of taking my sister to her school science fair. Since our dads were working, that left l me to go with her and feign interest in erupting baking soda volcanoes for an hour.
I wasted no time turning down my step dad Adrian's offer to borrow his car for this expedition. My exact words may have been, "Over my dead body," because there would be quite a few of those if I got behind the wheel. Enough things went wrong in my life without me operating heavy machinery, so as far as I was concerned I was looking out for the human race by choosing to abstain.
To Alexia's annoyance, that only left the subway.
Leigh agreed to meet us there. For better or for worse, she and my sister got along like a house on fire. A part of me wondered if she simply missed having a sibling of her own to annoy, or if their kinship resulted from only a child being capable of keeping up with her own incessant energy.
"I'm gonna have to be quick, since I have tutoring at 7:30," Leigh announced after greeting Alexia with a big hug and a dangerous spin through the air — dangerous for others, I ought to specify. It was like a windmill of destruction for innocent passerby's who veered too close. "Which gives us an hour so I can leave by 7."
"You could always skip," Alexia suggested chipperly, hands intertwining with Leigh's to tug her through the campus towards the gates and finally past the entry doors.
"You two really are siblings, alright," Leigh laughed. "So, which class is yours?"
"Aaaaaaaaaall the way over here," Alexia replied, her voice growing faint the further she dragged Leigh down the bland halls all the way to classroom number 113, denoting a room on the first floor out of a total of three floors, not including a roof generally restricted to students.
When I caught up, I walked in on Alexia sharing her full analysis of her classmates projects, the good, the bad, and the brutal. For someone who appeared so sweet and dimple cheeked, she was immensely cut throat in her criticisms.
Indiscreetly, she pointed to a gaudy display of lime green and muted brown. "The colors on that one are ugly."
"Lexi," I hissed through gritted teeth, "what did I tell you to do when you have nothing nice to say?"
"Oh!" Her little hand flew up to clamp down over her mouth, then she leaned forward, voice hushed. "You said to keep my voice down."
"What? No! I did not say that. I told you not to say anything at all, remember?" I circled up behind her and wrapped my arm around her throat, miming choking her out of consciousness. "Nothing. At. All."
Alexia played her part readily, giving a dramatic performance of fighting off my chokehold, gagging and squirming riotously in my grasp, before falling utterly limp and forcing me to adjust my hold so as to not actually strangle her on accident.
Peaking one eye open, safely propped up from each of my hands beneath her arms, she said, "Dad and Papa won't like that you've killed me."
"They'll understand."
Her other eye flew open in unrepressed indignation. "They won't!"
"They'll never know it was me."
"They will!"
"They won't," I assured her, barely repressing a grin beneath my affected mask of seriousness. "They'll never find your body."
"Did I hear that you need help getting rid of a body?" Leigh asked, swooping down to take hold of Alexia's legs and balancing them on both hips, like we were hefting around a ladder.
"Yes, I think there's a garden out back we can bury her in," I replied primly, making as though to begin carrying Alexia through the school. "Your help is much appreciated."
"What are friends for if not disposing of bodies?"
Around us, people were beginning to stare, not least because Alexia had started squealing, "No! No! I'm still alive!" in excited terror.
"Gosh, this is quite a noisy corpse," I remarked as I struggled to not lose my grip amidst her flailing. "How curious."
"Very peculiar," Leigh grunted, also struggling.
"What are you three doing," came a voice I recognized all too well. A rhetorical question. It was quite obvious what we were up to. I craned my neck to see Alexia's primary teacher stride up to us, her long skirt swishing around her ankles, her wrinkled face reproving. "This is a place of learning, not a playground."
Fortunately, I'd picked Alexia up from school often enough that Mrs Wilson obviously recognized me as Alexia's sister and not a child abductor. Still, based on her expression, the ruckus I was causing was almost worse.
Using Leigh's help, I carefully lowered Alexia to her feet. "Sorry, Mrs Wilson."
Her glare could break innocent men in an interrogation into babbling messes. "Where are her parents?" she demanded.
"Work," I answered.
Better to keep my responses short and precise, lest any additional information be used against me. I watched enough true crime to know that much.
"Well." She pursed her lips, displeased. "If you cause another disturbance, I will be forced to ask you to leave, which, as you know, will affect Alexia's grade on her presentation, since attendance this evening is worth points."
"It won't happen again," I promised, properly chastened.
Casting us one further skeptical scowl, she swept away to supervise other families touring the presentation boards.
I loosed a sigh, turning back to Alexia. "You heard her. Behave."
"You started it."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever you say," I said dismissively, already moving on to read a presentation of Thaumaturge Genetics, complete with a Lego model double helix meant to represent DNA.
Nothing I didn't already know, except a cute little factoid mentioning that the boy who created that particular project's mother was one of the few Supers with a true identity fully known to the public. She was employed at the Guild by the name of Will-O-Wisp. I'd heard her name a few times on the news, though not terribly often, since creating fires was generally less useful than extinguishing them, especially in a dense city.
"Say cheese!" Leigh ordered, startling me from my reading and pressing the camera button on her cell before I could even process what she'd said.
In the resulting picture, she and my sister were each making heavy metal signs with their fingers, tongues stuck out, as though headbanging to something far more intense than the science fair going on around them. Just beyond them in the background, there I was, examining a trifold cardboard presentation, completely in my own little world.
"You're not seriously going to post that, are you?" I asked, exasperated. "I can promise you that your followers don't follow you for eight year old science fair content."
"How would you know? I'm being a good influence on the youth by promoting women in STEM. That's pretty on brand."
I snorted. "Sure. Keep telling yourself that."
"Hater."
"Egomaniac."
"There!" She typed rapid-fire for just a moment longer, then slid her phone back into her pocket. "Already posted."
"Do I even want to know the caption?"
She allowed a practically vibrating Alexia to drag her through the walls of cardboard, grinning mischievously back at me over her own shoulder. "'Out with my best friend and her annoying big sister'."
"Wow. I'm feeling the love over here," I monotoned, trailing behind them.
The two of them seemed to have the time of their lives over the next hour, sprinting around in circles through the different classroom displays like two golden retrievers high on a cocktail of cocaine and speed. I didn't even try to keep up, nor did I have the energy to chase after and remind them we were supposed to behave ourselves. Merely watching them made my feet tired. Trusting Leigh wouldn't lose my sister to the best of her ability, I enjoyed myself as much as I could under the circumstances.
"I'm going to head out," Leigh finally said. "I should have left a few minutes ago, actually. It's already 7:15."
"You should flee while Lexi is distracted," I recommended, eyeing my sister, who was on the receiving end of a second talking to from her teacher across the room. "She'll be sad to see you go; you'll be even more late by the time she releases you from her whiny clutches."
She followed my gaze, nodding. "I hate to leave without saying goodbye, but I really am running late... Tell her I'll see her Sunday."
I arched a brow. "Just her? I see how it is."
"I love her more," she replied, blowing me a kiss as she walked away.
With her gone, I felt my interest to remain waning as well. Besides, through the nightmare of public transit, we'd be lucky to arrive home by eight pm if we left that very second, and we still needed to eat dinner, wash up, and feed the dog. It would be cutting it close to Alexia's ten o'clock bedtime, that was for sure, not that she'd have any complaints about that.
"Lexi!" I called, waving her over from her still-lecturing teacher. "Time to go. Come on. Sorry, Mrs Wilson. My dad called and he wants us home."
I lied. So what? She didn't have to know that.
Appearing reluctant to release her, Mrs Wilson grudgingly allowed Alexia to scurry over, my sister's bright pink shoelaces untied and dangerously close to tripping her.
"Dad called?" she asked.
"Nah, but tie your shoes so we can leave." I indicated the offending apparel. "If you trip and break your legs I won't carry you home."
Giving an unnecessary hop, she dropped into a crouch, humming the bunny-loop shoe-tying song to herself while she fastened her laces one after another. Just as she leapt back to her feet, however, a deep chill brushed across my skin, far below traditional May weather. Gooseflesh pimpled up and down my arms and my muscles tensed in preparation of giving way to shivering.
Glass shattered in a distant room and, being near the door, I was among the first to step into the hall to check on the commotion, watching, perplexed, as one by one all the glass trophy displays and windows splintered into fragmented pieces and crashed to the ground. I bent to examine a shard. When my fingers grazed the glossy surface it stung with cold and I flinched back. My attention traveled further, catching on the frost creeping across the tiled floor — and then thick- soled black boots, in stark contrast with the white ice crystals dusting across the quality leather. Further up, black pants, a cloak, and a mask that covered everything below terrifying blue rimmed irises that stared right through me.
"I've been looking for you," Shade, the city's recently absentee villain, said, absent no longer.