Making dinner went about as well as I expected it to go. Neither Miguel nor I had any real experience in the kitchen, and we spent most of our time goofing off. I told him about my time in Nova City, but only the stupid parts. He told me about the craziest things that he and Elliot did and all the places they got transferred because of their terrible behavior.
"What got into you?" I asked while we waited for the oven to preheat. "Back at the academy, I was the only rule breaker. The rest of you were good two shoes."
He held up his hands. Believe me, I still am, it said. "Elliot has more rebellious teenager in him than we thought."
The oven beeped and I put in the box cake mix we had prepared. I wasn't sure if it was supposed to look this lumpy, but we tried our best.
"What I'm hearing is that our hands are going to be full?"
"Hopefully with three adults to keep him in line we won't get chased out of Nova City."
I thought back to my nights on patrol--arguing with cops, ice rope walking between buildings, dropping snowballs off roofs onto passers-by. Maybe an adult wasn't the best way to describe me, but I had at least managed to avoid being run out of town. That was more than Miguel and Elliot could say.
By the time Elliot and Diana finally got back from their classes, the entire suite was a mess. And I'm not just talking about the kitchenette. There were dirty dishes on the coffee table because we ran out of counter room. A cracked egg was oozing on the floor. Diana was going to kill us.
I hid behind Miguel when the lock clicked open and she walked in with Elliot following her. "I should have known better than to give you free rein of the kitchen, Anna."
"This was not all my fault! Miguel dropped the egg."
The stinker in question pulled out the biggest, most innocent puppy eyes I had ever seen. Elliot rolled his eyes, clearly immune to the effects, but Diana was helpless. She had a thing or two to learn about living with the boys.
I shoved my way in front of Miguel. "Do not take his side."
"I will take the side of whoever has food for me." She plopped down on the couch and her backpack thudded against the floor. "School sucks," she groaned.
Elliot laid his backpack carefully on the ground and sat on the other side of the couch. "I don't think it was that bad."
"That's because you're a nerd!" I yelled from the kitchen.
Elliot and Diana attempted to straighten the sitting area so we had a place to eat. I didn't mind the mess. It reminded me of my apartment back at Paramount Lake. I was roommates with my best friend who later tried to burn me alive--no hard feelings though--and the two of us were notoriously messy. We had the beginning stages of a hoarding problem before graduation.
I carried out a stack of french toast with one hand and four cups of orange juice on a tray in the other. My waitressing skills were really starting to pay off. Except for the second where I almost tripped over a broken egg that had found its way to the living room floor (A byproduct of mine and Miguel's mini food fight probably). The orange juice sloshed out of the glasses a little, but nothing fell before I could set the plates carefully on the coffee table. Miguel returned with dinner plates and silverware.
I spread my arms out over the glorious meal we had prepared. Some of the french toast pieces were burnt and a few completely charred slices were hidden at the bottom of the trash can, but we had treated ourselves to high quality maple syrup by my advice. The sweetness would cover up any mistakes in the cooking. "Bon appetit!"
Elliot alone ate what would have been an entire loaf of bread made into french toast. The kid was piling them up three high, drizzling some maple syrup in between and eating it like a sandwich. I admit that it was an innovative idea, even if it meant he had sticky syrup hands.
Part way through the meal, the alarm on my super watch (actually a super watch now thanks to Diana's amazing tech knowledge) started beeping. "Miguel, would you mind helping me?" He got the cake out of the oven while I gathered our icing supplies. A few tubes of decorating gel for writing. We had forgotten to get the actual frosting, but I didn't think anyone would notice.
I started slowly writing out the message but the slower I went the shakier the letters got. Miguel jumped from one side of me to the other trying to decorate whatever space I hadn't filled with the words. His flowers and butterflies were less shaky than my letters, but looked more like blobs.
"Why butterflies?"
"They aren't butterflies," he said.
We squinted at the cake. "Definitely butterflies."
"No, that's you" he pointed at a purple butterfly. "This is me" He was the orange flower next to me. "And Elliot and Diana." The blue and green butterflies respectively. "No butterflies, just faces."
"I don't know where you learned to draw faces, but those aren't it. Those are butterflies."
He squeezed a blob of frosting on my hand. I abandoned my letters to retaliate and drew a line up to his elbow. He pointed the tube at me like a weapon. I held mine up. A stand off. Miguel didn't blink, just stared at me with narrow eyes darting around my face, waiting for me to make a move.
I tossed the tube of frosting aside and stuck out my no frosting covered hand. "Truce?"
He hesitated before taking my hand. I batted my eyes in my best impression of his puppy dog face. He fell for it. When he moved to shake my hand, I brought my frosting covered hand up and smeared it across his face, a patch of purple sparkling icing.
Miguel grabbed me and tried to twist me into whatever hold Elliot had me in earlier. His form could use some work, but it was enough to immobilize me for a few seconds. The top of my head felt cold and gooey. Orange gel dripped past my eyes.
"Miguel!" I gasped. His hold broke when I stepped on his foot, but he would have dropped me even if I hadn't. He was clutching his stomach in laughter.
I ran my fingers through my hair to check the damage. Bad idea. My hands came back orange stained and my hair clung to my cheeks like properly cooked spaghetti noodles on a cupboard. I had learned a few things about cooking, but not much. Spaghetti was basically fool proof. We should have made that instead of burned french toast.
"Need a hand with the cake?" Elliot asked from the living room. He and Diana had a full view of the Miguel and Anna show. What a trainwreck that was.
I wiped my icing hands on Miguel's back and grabbed the cake pan with a pair of oven mitts. "I got it." We walked it back to the couch. My letters were starting to melt on the hot cake. Miguel's decorations were so destroyed they almost looked like our faces.
"What does it say?" Diana asked when I started cutting pieces.
I gave her a big slice. The lumpy bits hadn't cooked out, like Miguel insisted they would. They were just pockets of powdery cake mix. Maybe no one else would notice. "Welcome home."
Elliot and Miguel smiled when they got their pieces. I plopped in between them on the couch and reached for the TV remote. We had just enough time to catch the eight o'clock news and see if their faces were still plastered across the vigilante segment. Before I could hit the power button, Diana knocked the remote from my hand.
"What gives?"
In answer, she pulled her laptop from her backpack and set it on the coffee table in between our dinner dishes and the cake.
"No hacking during dinner. This is family bonding time."
She laughed. "Dinner's over and my curiosity is going to kill me."
Like cooking, I had no clue how to hack. Thankfully, Diana required no assistance, just quiet, which was almost as difficult to offer. Eventually I began squirming enough that she sent me to my room to start gathering my things.
Somehow the deal had been made that Diana and I would move into one of the rooms with a single king bed while Miguel and Elliot would share the other room with two queen beds. The trade didn't seem fair to me. I had been here longer than them, and it was because of me that they were here and not rotting in a secret government prison or wherever captured superheroes are taken. They argued that point against me. It was my fault they were here, so they deserved their own beds.
Elliot had pulled the puppy eyes on Diana. Not even I was immune to that from him. I could read Miguel well enough to know when he was faking, but Elliot was a darn good liar. Maybe even better than me. The kid could get away with murder and I would thank him for it.
With the two boys living here, Diana and I were going to have to learn how to say no to puppy eyes.
I was in the middle of shoving dirty clothes into an overflowing laundry hamper when there was a soft knock on the door. Elliot entered when I called for him to come in.
"What's up, kiddo?"
He frowned at the nickname. "How about we stop calling me that?" He was trying to make himself look bigger than he was. His shoulders were squared back straight, arms crossed over his chest. I was pretty sure he was pushing up his biceps to give the illusion of him having any muscle.
"I'll think about it."
He took a movement to ponder my response. "I guess that works." He sat at the foot of one of the beds, careful to avoid my supersuit that was sprawled across the bedspread. "Diana said that she's almost in, and if you promise to be on your best behavior you can come back out."
"Of course she did." I finished picking up my laundry. Already the room was looking better, and by better I mean less like a hoarder's house. Can you blame me though? Doing laundry sucks. Once I became a big name superhero, I was going to hire someone to do it for me.
"Diana said that you were the reason Miguel and I got transferred to Nova City." His voice was small. I searched his face for any type of deceit. I wasn't ready to walk into a roast about myself. But he just had that wide eyed innocent look again. It was going to be the death of me.
"Diana's a liar then," I said and sat by him on the bed. "I didn't know who I was helping emergency transfer, and I didn't know where they were being transferred. It must have been Graham who made the final decision. I'll have to thank him for it."
"Do you think we'll be here for a long time?" Any suspicion of this being a trap faded. This was just Elliot, he was the closest thing to a little brother that I would ever have.
I nudged him in the side. "You can count on it, kiddo."
"I thought we decided not to use kiddo."
"I said I would think about it. I did and I decided it's going to stay." I hopped off the bed and offered him a hand up. "C'mon, let's see what Diana found."
I told you there would be more lil bro-big sis time, and I am here for it. Quiet Elliot is one of my favorite Elliots. Right up there with reckless Elliot who y'all might see in the next few chapters.
What do you think about the assembled team so far? Do you think they can keep Nova City safe?
m nicole