Rivals

It took forever for the two of them to get discharged from the hospital. Pretty much every doctor in the place seemed to want to come and talk to them one last time. To ask them more questions. Finally one doctor came in who said he wanted to give them some answers. "Except," he said, "I'm not sure we have any. Not any that mean much, anyway. You both check out fine, physically. Better than fine, really. Um, Brent - your chart says you broke your arm last year?"

"That's right. I was jumping off a diving board into a pool and I hit the bottom with my wrist. It was in a cast for six weeks."

The doctor consulted something on a clipboard. "You see, normally that would show up on an x-ray, even after it healed. But I don't see so much as a hairline or a shadow here." He looked up and smiled at them. "Whatever happened to you in that ravine - you came back healthier than when you left. Now, we'd love to do some more tests - "

"Not on my dime," Grandma said. She lead the two of them down to the parking lot, where Brent got a surprise. A hundred and five pounds of teenaged girl came flying at him like a bullet out of a gun, trailing balloons.

"Oh my god oh my god oh my god you're alright," Lucy said. Lucy Benez had been Brent's best friend since they started high school together and met at an anime festival. He was truly, truly glad to see her and he actually kissed her on the cheek, something he'd never done before.

She stepped back and looked at him. She was so excited her face was flushed. She wore her hair in two pony-tails sticking out at angles from the top of her head and she had braces. Not just on her teeth, either - she had braces on her legs as well, metal contraptions she had to wear because one of her legs was two inches longer than the other. The doctors were slowly but surely trying to fix that by stretching out the shorter leg. She said it hurt a lot but she didn't let it get to her. "When I heard I just about died," she told him. "But I knew you would be okay. You've been out in that desert a million times. And oh my God. Oh my God. I'm so sorry about your Dad. He was so great. Oh, Brent. Brent! Here! These are for you!" She handed him the balloons. They all said GET WELL SOON on them.

Lucy could only walk at a sort of fast hobble, but she easily compensated for it by talking twice as fast as everybody else. He'd asked her why, once, and she said that she had twice as much to say as anybody, and anyway half of what most people said was just dumb, just hello, what a nice day, I see you're getting taller when you really weren't, and she figured she would get that half of every conversation over with in the first couple minutes and by the time the conversation wound down she would have gotten to the really important stuff, the stuff people actually wanted to hear.

Listening to Lucy talk made Brent out of breath. Still. There was no one he wanted to see more. He was scared, to be honest, and really worried, and he was still screwed up about losing his dad. He needed her friendship more than ever.

"I am totally here for you. You can count on me, whatever you need, whether that's someone to talk to, or a shoulder to cry on, or who knows, maybe you just want to go to the movies some time and pretend like things are still normal and nothing has changed and that it's okay to just go and, say, see a movie. If you want that, I am here."

"Grandma?" Brent asked. "Can we give Lucy a ride?"

"I'm not sure if there's room," Grandma said, unlocking the driver's side door of her station wagon.

In the back seat, on the ride home, Brent confided everything he'd been secretly thinking to Lucy. He knew he could trust her. He started small. "I don't think I'm really going to like living with the two of them," he said, nodding discretely toward the front seats. Maggie and Grandma were talking to each other, loud enough to drown out anything he said. "They argue all the time - it's awful. It's been going on for years now, but before, at least they didn't live in the same house. We only saw Grandma on holidays. They would always get in a fight and Grandma would end up slapping Maggie because she used a curse word or because she said she was a democrat or an atheist or whatever. Most of the time it wasn't even true, she would just say it to get a rise out of Grandma. I think she wanted to get hit."

"But why?" Lucy asked. "Why would anyone want that? Other than a masochist, I mean, and from my experience masochists are pretty rare. I mean, actual masochists. Lots of people do things that hurt them, but - "

"Because," Brent said, because he knew Lucy didn't mind being interrupted, "then Mom and Dad would have to take us home early. But now, where are we going to go if there's a problem? And Maggie's already starting in on her."

"Your sister is really pretty," Lucy said. "And very smart, which is a rare combination. Only a very few of us - I mean, of us females, I'm speaking for us as a group here, not for my own self - can say that much. It's a shame she's also - "

"Listen, Luce. There's something else." He had been thinking about how to put this. He had failed to come up with the right words, though, the words that would make it sound real. Whenever he said it out loud it made him laugh, even though he knew it was true. "Whatever happened to us, it changed us."

She nodded solemnly. "Sure. Losing both parents would have to change somebody. I can't even imagine what I would do if my dad - "

Brent shook his head. "Not - psychologically. I don't mean it changed my personality. I mean it changed me physically. Lucy - I think I have superpowers."