At Leigh's insistence, a car chauffeured by the Courten's personal driver appeared at the Guildhall not half an hour later to pick me up. Hers was not a house I could easily arrive at via public transportation, and she demanded a prompt audience. Never before had her parents allowed her to exploit their personal driver for her own whims, but I supposed they accepted these were unusual circumstances. Her brother — miraculously alive! And me — similarly miraculously alive! Even they could appreciate why Leigh wanted to splurge just this once.
Another half an hour later and we pulled up to tall wrought iron gates eclipsing a residence that not-so-subtly screamed "Old Money," despite the Courten's wealth being only a relatively recent affair.
"Thank you," I murmured to the chauffeur after he opened the door for me to step out of the luxury sedan.
Despite wearing the best clothes my closet had to offer for the press conference earlier in the day, part of me still felt too woefully inadequate to touch the expensive leather seats, and I practically leapt out of the vehicle, lest I accidentally cheapen the material through osmosis.
"Lil!" Leigh screeched from halfway down the driveway. I couldn't help but match her jubilant energy, despite that not being an emotion I expressed, well, ever. "You weren't eaten by dingos!"
We collided in a bone crushing hug, only pulling apart in the first few moments for her to give me a thorough looking over.
"I wasn't in the Outback," I said through my laughter. As cross as I'd been at her for not answering my prior calls, I couldn't muster even a scrap of annoyance, especially in light of her own circumstances. "Where would I find dingos? Or, rather, where would they find me?"
"Shade could have taken you anywhere. For all I knew, he dropped you into a tank of man eating sharks, Bond villain style." Grasping my wrist, she dragged me after her into the foyer. "Let's go to my room. I have so much to tell you! And I'm sure you have even more to tell me. But, first things first..."
A phone materialized in her hand, and I internally groaned when the camera app came up. I barely managed to tame down my windswept hair and flash an admittedly pained looking smile before the shutter clicked several times in rapid succession. She began sorting out the good photos from the bad, editing while we walked.
"Tell me the truth," I said dryly as we crested the wide marble staircase leading to her room on the second floor. "Are you exploiting my abduction for likes?"
She didn't even have to think about it. "Yes."
"At least you're honest... I guess." Honestly, I didn't know how to feel about the matter. I was less upset than resigned. Typical Leigh.
"My parents have forbidden me from posting about my brother. Can you believe that?" she complained.
"Really?" I humored her, pretending to be shocked, when, in fact, nothing had ever surprised me less. "How unfair."
"Luckily, they didn't say anything about posting you."
"Poor me."
She swatted my shoulder as we entered her room and then fell back dramatically onto her King sized bed. "Don't be like that. You should be honored. I don't give just anyone free exposure."
I stared at her stonily until her serious expression cracked into a wicked smile. People could say what they wanted about Leigh's preoccupation with social media, but at least she was self aware.
"I really had you going, huh?" She laughed, kicking off her shoes and patting a spot beside her for me to sit. "Of course I'm not going to post anything." Holding up a halting finger, she amended, "Yet. Not until if and when you give me the go ahead."
"In that case, you can go ahead and schedule 'never' into your calendar right now."
She clutched at her chest, as though my words pained her. "I feel like I've been shot. How you wound me so."
"I'll make sure your funeral is up to your highest expectations," I said, unconcerned, tugging absently at a lose thread in her knit throw blanket.
Her hands fell away in a huff of lackluster annoyance. "You know, I don't get why my parents don't like you all that much. You're exactly like them, ruining my dreams at every turn."
I nodded earnestly. "It's a full time job."
Without my realizing it, Leigh snatched up a pillow and took a swing at my head.
"Hey!" After wrestling the offending weapon from her grasp and tossing the rest of the pillows to the floor as a precaution, I said, injecting as much condescension into my voice as humanly possible, "Violence is never the answer, Leigh. And!" I held up a censuring finger. "Don't you dare tell me it's a solution."
"Okay, Mom." She rolled her two-toned eyes, and sat up, her expression sobering. "I can tell when you're bullshitting, Lil, and you were bullshitting the hell out of that press conference. Tell me what actually happened. Spill."
A crack formed in my veneer of nonchalance. Like a dam breaking, it all flooded out, down to the most minute details of what Shade and I talked about in the woods, the feeling of losing all hope of ever seeing everyone again, and, of course, my spat with my father the previous evening.
An age later, she chewed on her bottom lip after I finished, thoughtful. "That is odd for your dad to be so opposed to you interning" she admitted.
A weight lifted from my shoulders at her endorsement of my opinion, since that meant it wasn't all in my head. I wasn't gaslighting myself. There really was strangeness afoot.
"What about you?" I asked. "Your brother? What the hell?"
"What the hell," she agreed succinctly. She dropped down to a whisper, despite us being the only ones in the house. "I don't even really know what to say to him, you know? It's been seven whole years since he disappeared. Last time we saw each other, I was freaking eleven. He looks like my brother on the surface, mostly, but on the inside he's practically a stranger. He's obviously messed up from his time in captivity, so that's understandable, but it's still awkward. What am I supposed to even say?" She shook her head, nonplussed, and with a lighter tone, said, "Worst of all, I apparently went through years of all that expensive therapy for no reason, since he's alive and well. Ish."
We both knew it hadn't been a waste, but I smiled anyway at her assessment. The trauma of his disappearance couldn't simply be erased upon his return. The hurt and worry had been real, and done very real damage to her young psyche. Besides, we wouldn't have met otherwise. I'd wager that alone made it worth all the money spent.
I held my tongue from asking how he was messed up, as that couldn't really be phrased in a delicate way. Although we rarely held back around one another, I had yet to determine how sensitive a topic his current state was to her, and didn't want to accidentally hurt her with my questions.
"Where is he?" I settled on. Nice and inoffensive.
Back to her normal volume, eyes low, she answered, "My mom and dad took him to some special care facility up north. Make sure he's not, I don't know, clinically insane, or something, from all that happened. I think they're also supposed to better assess his physical well-being and jump start his own therapy. The Guild is dying to get their hands on him, I've heard, in order to get more information on Shade, but they're too afraid of upsetting my parents before the Gala to demand an immediate interrogation."
The Gala happened once a year, falling on July 31st, the anniversary of the Guild's founding, intended to fundraise for Super salaries and the cost of repairing the city following any villain or natural disaster related destruction. What I didn't understand was —
"What do your parents have to do with the Gala?"
"Didn't I tell you?" She tilted her head and squinted, visibly puzzling out her memory for corroborating evidence. When she presumably came up blank, she waved a dismissive hand. "Maybe not. They go every year. Big supporters of charities, my parents. It maintains their good name."
"Wouldn't it make more sense to just use all the money they waste throwing these massive parties on the charity portion itself instead? If it's really about doing good by our community, people will still donate."
Confirming my lifelong suspicions about similarly publicized charity events, Leigh scoffed, "And miss the opportunity to show off? Oh, heaven forfend! I thought I raised you better than this. This thing wouldn't raise nearly as much money if all the rich folk weren't trying to outdo one another, preening like over-idle peacocks. They go for the party aspect and pretend it's for others. Keeps their egos nice and inflated. Which brings me to my next point: now that I'm eighteen, I'm invited to preen with them!" Rolling over into her stomach and balancing her weight on her elbows, she steepled her fingers together in front of her lips, all business. "Obviously, that means you're my plus one. Dress accordingly."
For a moment, I thought I was suffering the effects of whiplash following her sudden shift in focus. "Uh, I might have to go to my internship that day."
"It's in the late evening," she said, the weight of her stare daring me to object. "You'll be free by then."
"I don't know..."
"Don't make me kidnap you."
I had a sudden, crystal clear mental image of her chauffeur stuffing me into the trunk of his car while Leigh lounged luxuriously in the back seat, a glass of champagne in hand.
"I'll make sure I'm ready on time," I rushed to say, lest that horrible future come to pass.
"Great!" She perked right up. "With any luck, my brother should be able to attend, so you might be able to meet him. My parents are hoping it'll serve as his societal debut. Mine, too, I guess."
Her less than enthused demeanor showed how highly she valued such things.
"I thought you'd jump at the opportunity to get those pictures for your followers," I pointed out.
"It's not the pictures I'm worried about. The fancy clothes and food, being surrounded by superheroes, all that sounds like an influencer's dream! What sounds less dream-like is being forced to fraternize with all my parents' old, rich friends. Nothing screams 'party' like entertaining a seventy-year old man who believes giving women the vote kicked off societal decay, and, in all likelihood, wants to set me up with his equally repellant bouncing baby, forty-year-old son."
I found it hard to sympathize. Sounded to me like an average day in customer service existing as a woman, only with the added comfort of wealth.
I yawned. "There, there. I'm sure you'll get through this trying time."
"You know, if I could, perhaps, maybe, potentially post that picture of us, it might make this trying time less trying." She plastered on her most despairing expression, worming her way closer across the bed. "Please? Please, please, pleeeeaaaase?"
Snatching my hand away before she could take it hostage in her quest to beg her way through my mental fortitude, I laughed, "You have a problem. A real, psychological problem. You know that, right?"
"Tell me something I don't know. Now, come on," she whined. "Please?"
"This is practically extortion."
"I know."
"I'll never know peace again until I agree, won't I?"
"That's a distinct possibility," she confirmed.
"Fine!" I stood up and paced towards the door. "It's not like I have any dignity to speak of, and obviously neither do you. Post whatever you want, just don't tag me. The less I know about what you say, the happier I'll be."
"Hey, where are you going?" Even scrambling after me, she couldn't conceal her evident glee adding pep to her step. "My parents aren't even going to be back until morning, so you have to at least stay for dinner. I'm ordering pizza."
About to descend the staircase, I paused. "Leigh, you do realize it's almost ten o'clock. At night. Well past dinner time. I need to get home, so I can report to the Guild in ten hours. Some of us require sleep to function."
"Since when are you a beacon of responsible decisions?" she pouted with the annoyed tone of someone who knew they'd lost.
Bickering the whole way, she walked me to her car — the chauffeur had apparently been off-duty for hours — and drove me home. Only in the comfort of my own bed, being squished into the wall by Moose, my dog, with sleep expertly dodging my loving embrace, did I recognize that something was bothering me. Something big. It was like my subconscience recognized a pattern, something important I missed, but, for the life of me, my conscious mind couldn't puzzle out the problem, let alone a solution.