Rivals

Rivals Page 10

They jumped to the far side of town and they weren't even tired. Maggie lead Brent over to a junkyard on the far side of a quarry and for a while they tried out their new strength by picking up old rusted-out cars and playing catch with them. Brent would run backward, his feet stamping down on broken glass and old orange sharp pieces of metal, feeling as if he were running on a pebbly beach, and then as the car came flying at him out of the night he would hold up his arms and catch it with both hands, grabbing at exposed engine parts or axles or the edges of windows that had lost their glass long before. Then he would wind up, swinging from the waist, and throw the car back. That lasted until Maggie missed a catch and the car Brent had thrown landed on a pile of old washing machines and a couple broken-down carnival rides, which exploded in a cloud of rust and flying springs and cogwheels and dryer doors that went spinning up into the air and then came down hard, digging long furrows in the dirt. The noise was immense, deafening, and Brent wasn't surprised when he heard a dog barking and saw someone with a flashlight come running toward them.

"Whoops," Maggie said. She ran up to the top of a stack of long pipes and gestured for him to follow as she jumped back into the air and away. The flashlight speared upwards after them but they were already gone, half a block away and accelerating.

Brent was still "it", jumping from the top of the elementary school to the complicated roof of the local industrial bakery when he noticed Maggie wasn't chasing him anymore. He skidded to a stop before he fell through a bunch of skylights and then looked back. This time he could see her just fine. She was perched like a bird on the edge of a roof, two or three blocks back, looking down. She wasn't laughing anymore.

Brent jumped back the way he'd come and found her staring down into the street at a line of very small houses across the way. The houses had unkempt yards and a chain-link fence running around each little plot of land. In most of the windows he could see the flickering blue light of television sets. Some of them were dark.

The house that Maggie was staring at had a yellow light in one window. Brent could see a man sitting at a kitchen table inside, hunched over some papers. He looked like he was doing his taxes or something, and having trouble.

"Mags?" he asked, coming up behind her. "What are you looking at?"

"Dad took me out here, once," she said, very quietly. "He didn't want to. He didn't think it was appropriate but I asked and asked until he gave in and said yes. I wanted to meet him," she said, nodding at the man in the window. "I wanted to ask him some questions. I thought you should come, too, but Dad said you were too young. I'll never forget this house. We drove up and parked over here, and then Dad and I stood in the street just looking at the house for the longest time. It scared me. It scared me so much I couldn't move. I memorized every detail of what it looked like while I was trying to muster the courage to go up and press the door bell. Dad wouldn't do it for me, he said. If I really wanted it I had to do it myself."

Brent was afraid he knew who the man was, now. He didn't want to say it out loud, though. "Did you ring it?" he asked.

Maggie wrapped her arms around her knees. "No. I chickened out. I just wanted to ask him why, you know? I wanted to ask him why he killed Mom."

"We know why," Brent insisted. "The lawyer said. He was drunk, and he lost control of the car. It was just an accident. Sometimes people make bad choices, and other people get hurt." It was not something Brent understood very well, himself. He had never seen why anyone would get in a car if they knew they were drunk. Dad had suggested that when you drank, sometimes you couldn't tell how drunk you were, and sometimes it seemed you were fine when you really weren't. Brent, who had never so much as tasted alcohol, didn't know.

He started to say something more when Maggie stood up straight as a knife and dropped into the street. She landed effortlessly and walked across to the fence around the man's house. Brent started to follow but he didn't know what she was going to do. Maggie tore open the man's trash cans and then threw the lids back on with a clattering noise. Then she grabbed the blue recycling bin and held it up so Brent could see.

Brent looked up and saw the man looking out of his yellow window. His face was scared, Brent thought. Really scared. He didn't know what Maggie was going to do next, either. But he recognized her. Brent could see it in his face. The man knew exactly who Maggie was.

"Vodka," Maggie said, picking a bottle out of the bin. She hurled it at the house and it shattered against the wall with a tinkling rattle. "Gin," she said, and threw another bottle. This one was plastic and it just bounced off with a clunk. "Beer. Plenty of beer." The bottles crashed on the side of the house like machine gun bullets. "You're still drinking!" she yelled. "How can you still be drinking!"

Eventually, Brent managed to pull her away before she could do anything worse. They headed home, jumping back the way they'd come but it wasn't a game anymore. When they made it back to their house and climbed back in through Brent's window, Maggie was shaking. She stood in the door of his room and looked down at her fingernails.

"I wanted to kill him," she said.

"I know," Brent told her.

"After all this time I haven't forgiven or forgotten anything. I don't think I can. I think there's something wrong with me."

"No," Brent told her. "That's not true."

"I could kill people, now, pretty easily," she said. "With these new powers? I could have punched him a couple of times and that would have been all it took. I could have picked him up, jumped to the top of the bank building downtown, and dropped him over the side. I could have - "

"But you didn't," Brent told her.

She went back to her room without saying more.