Rivals

Rivals Page 20

It's official, Maggie thought, staring at her face in a gas station restroom mirror.

You're a villain.

"What a stupid thing to think," she told herself. But it was getting harder to deny. She'd stolen food that morning. She'd been so hungry she hadn't even thought about it. Just walked into a bakery, asked for a half dozen croissants, and then refused to pay once the clerk handed them over.

A kid about Brent's age had been standing by the door, sweeping dust out into the street. He'd had freckles, she remembered, and he was wearing a really stupid paper hat. He tried to stop her. Told her she was a thief.

She had flung out one hand and knocked him into a row of tables hard enough to snap his broom. She only used one hand because the other one was holding a half-eaten croissant. If both hands had been free she probably would have crippled him.

With the door clear, she just walked out and down the street an no one tried to stop her at all. And the croissants tasted so good.

Of course, anything will taste fantastic when you haven't eaten in days.

Maggie washed out her field hockey uniform in the sink with some of the nasty pink soap from the dispenser. She used some more of it to scrub under her armpits and wash her face. There wasn't much she could do about her hair - the soap would just make it more tangled and nasty, so she left it. God, what she wouldn't give for a shower. And her own bed. She'd been sleeping in the bus station with all the other homeless people and it was getting very old.

It had been nearly a week since she'd smashed her way out of Mandy's house, so angry and hurt she couldn't think at all, could only punch and kick and scream. Once she was outside she'd just gone jumping from roof to roof until she wound up somewhere downtown, just wandering the street with her head full of fog. When she went back to get the car it was gone, along with her purse and her sidekick - most likely Brent drove it home. Brent, who was in all the newspapers now. Everybody loved him. He had saved Mandy, after all. Maggie hadn't given a single thought to whether her friend was in danger when she left. She'd just wanted to get away and had thought of nothing but herself.

She was glad Mandy was okay. Apparently she was still in the hospital but would make a full recovery. Maggie told herself over and over she was glad for that. Even though there had been a moment there, after Mandy told her she wouldn't keep her promise, when Maggie could have - she might have -

It wasn't worth thinking about what she might have done. The things she had done were bad enough.

There'd been nothing in the papers about Maggie so far, which she figured was something Special Agent Weathers must have arranged. She was kind of grateful to him for that. She did know the police were looking for her. Twice so far a cop had seen her on the street and shouted for her to freeze, but both times she'd just jumped up onto the rooftops and gotten away without any problems.

She dried her clothes with the old battered hot air hand dryer in the gas station restroom. No matter how long she held her skirt under the wheezing vent, though, or how vigorously she rubbed at it, she knew it would still be soggy when she put it back on. It was also a dead giveaway whenever the cops spotted her. How many homeless girls could there be wandering around downtown wearing field hockey uniforms?

Maggie needed a change of clothes. She needed money. And she needed to get out of town.

None of that should be too hard, she thought, for a notorious supervillain.