Hero Types

(Four Years Later)

"—and that part where they blew up the building? Oh my god."
    "Who was the main guy? He was cute!"
    "Guys—"
    "What, like—maybe pizza? I feel like pizza."
    "I'm vegan."
    "Oh my god—"
    "Guys?"
    "What?"
    "I have to go."
    Kit pointed vaguely in the other direction. Bridget blinked.
    "Okay?"
    "Okay. Um. Bye." She waved awkwardly, pulled up her hood, and hurried away. She heard them giggling and muttering in their bunch and hoped that it wasn't about her.
    It was probably about her.
    She plugged in her headphones and caught the metro downtown. There was an ad for perfume on the banner opposite her seat, and she studied it absently for fifteen minutes.
    "Sorry—sorry—" She was nearly trampled in the stampede, so she stood to the side and waited till the crowd had left the car before hurrying out herself.
    "Agh—shit."
    She hopped over to a bench and grimaced at the bottom of her shoe. She removed her house keys and peeled off the gum. Nevertheless, as she walked away, her left heel felt especially attracted to the concrete.
    Park's Breach was a bad part of town, in spite of its name. It was next to the river, and full of abandoned mills. There were posters tacked inches deep on every wall. Kit stood reading some while she waited for traffic to clear.
    The Weasel was at large again, after his spectacularly televised prison breakout three weeks ago. There were five different wanted posters for him on that wall alone, all for isolated crimes. His perplexed, masked face seemed to be challenging her from the page. She rubbed her bruised rib.
    They'd get him.
    Eventually.
Beep!
    She tore off one of the posters and darted across the street.
    The Center for Control of Antagonists was located in one of the abandoned mills right on the river. From the outside, it was dilapidated and vacant. There were boards over several big broken windows, and waterlines up to the second story from flooding. In fact, it would have been entirely indistinguishable from the other dozen places beside it if not for the peeling sign hung over the door by a rusted chain:
    DR. OSBORN'S SHOE-POLISH INC.
    Who Dr. Osborn was or what his shoe-polish was doing in a Park's Breach factory was beyond Kit, but she suspected that it was some inside joke so old that the creators themselves had forgotten the punchline.
    She knocked out the percussion section of ACDC's Back in Black on the heavy wooden door till a small window slid open.
    "Oh! Hi, Kit."
    Mardie opened up the door and shut it quickly. She was a middle-aged Brooklyn native, her skin dark, her buoyant hair in pigtails, and her lips pursed in a guise of intolerance. She smacked the door and the five deadlocks slid back into place.
    "How ya been?"
    "I'm okay."
    "Hon, you've said that every day for four years now, and I swear on not one of them have you looked it."
    "I like your coat."
    Mardie gave her a look, which she ignored, and she hung up her own jacket on the wall.
    "Jersey, have you seen Lucas?"
    Jersey looked up from his gossip magazine. His mohawk was slicked to one side today and his pink checked shirt was opened to about halfway down his chest. He snapped his fingers down the hall.
    There were several conical lamps suspended from the high ceiling, casting long shadows on the curving concrete. It was cold. There was no heating in the Center. She rubbed her hands together till they glowed gold, her breath misting in the air.
    The hallway came out into what had been reluctantly termed as the Center of the Center. Nobody liked this, but nobody had offered up anything better, so it just stuck.
    It was two stories tall and forty feet across, and the opposite wall was covered in tall, fogged-up windows looking over the bay; except for the middle panel, however, which hosted a massive cork-board stuck full of wanted posters and maps and also an advertisement for somebody's bowling tournament. There was giant, oaken round table in the center of the room, which was always overflowing with files.
    Lucas and Howe were arguing when she came in. She fixed her jean pockets and examined the board while she waited.
    "Oh—hey, Kit—"
    "Yeah?"
    "I've got a great new name for the CAA—I mean, that just—I can't even stay that—"
    "You changed it two months ago!"
    "That's what I'm saying," Howe said. His voice was gravelly and his hair was gray. The giant yellow snake draped over his shoulders nodded in agreement. "Nobody ever knows who we are."
    "Well, that's not the point."
    "Yeah," Kit said, "but how will they know who to contact if a villain pops up."
    "Mmm." Howe nodded.
    "Well I won't change it," Lucas said, "as soon as we land on something good."
    "I always liked OrCA," Howe muttered.
    "Maybe a better acronym. Like...something cool. Bobcat."
    Kit frowned. "Isn't that a tractor company?"
    "Dammit."
    Lucas sat down at the table and picked up a ream of flyers. He wrinkled his nose at them. "How can I convince them that we're not a 'lost-and-found' program?"
    Kit sat down. "The Weasel's back."
    "I mean, look at this," he continued. He pushed several sheets her way. "Seventeen refrigerators stolen this month. Who the hell needs seventeen refrigerators."
    Kit flipped through the papers. "But isn't that weird? If it's the same person, like..."
    "And this lady." Lucas slapped a binder on the table. "I don't know how to find her cats. Unless they're a bunch of criminals, I'm not going to."
    "Here."
    Kit grabbed one of the two old phones off the table and dialed the number. While it rang, she checked the local animal control website on her cell.
    "Hi, miss. CAA here."
    The elderly woman on the other end began to talk about her cats.
    "Uhuh." Kit leaned back and looked through the stack of fridge reports again, frowning. "Yes, miss. No, miss. No. Can I direct you to—here. It's our other branch, I think they'll be able to help you. Yes."
    She relayed the number and ended the call. Howe had dropped Percy on the table, and he was currently circling the center, knocking papers aside.
    "I put her on animal control."
    "Did you say something about the Weasel?"
    "Yeah." She passed him the poster. "He's at it again."
    "What a weirdo." Lucas narrowed his eyes. "All right. We should map this out. Howe."
    Howe sighed and took the poster. He began to scribble a few things out.
    "I still think this fridge thing, Lucas..."
    "It's probably just some—" He jumped and pulled his phone out of his pocket. "Ooh, gotta take this." He walked away.
    "Look," Kit pushed back her bangs. "I mean, it's all in the same district and everything. We should check this out."
    "Right." Howe squinted and held his sheet up to the light. "Weasel likes to hit on Wednesdays. You're busy?"
    "No. No, I can make it."
    He wrote something else down.
    Kit sat for a minute. She sighed and stuffed the flyers in her bag.
    "Um, I have to go. Tell Lucas, okay?"
    "Uhuh."
    She had enough pocket change for a taxi to Gran's loft. She spent the car ride looking over the flyers, checking and rechecking the numbers, thinking. She thought about the History reading she hadn't done. It was going to be a late night.
    The lock always stuck. It was a nuisance, because the police were always on the lookout for break-ins in her area. Not, she thought, that that deterred any real ones from happening.
    She climbed up the stairs, past doors that led to empty rooms, to reach the loft at the top of the brick-and-wood building.
    "Gran?"
    She threw her coat over the back of a kitchen chair and circled around the counter. The living room was empty. The metal lamp that dangled from the high ceiling over the couch was off, and the only illumination came from the ceiling-high windows.
    She tiptoed over to the door and put her ear to it. Her grandmother's gentle snoring came from within. She went up the stairs to the half loft and kicked off her boots.
    The apartment was modern and industrial. The kitchen was all steel and wood by bricks, with a small table and a rug and a door leading to the bathroom. Around the wooden pillars backing the setup was the living room, with the TV, the couch, a big faux fur rug, and an xBox. Behind that was Gran's room, and next to that the stairs leading up to the loft.
    The loft, AKA Kit's lair, was positioned over the kitchen, and there was a wooden banister strung with lights looking over the living room. It was mostly bare. There was her bed against the railing, the opening blocked by a vast white canvas, and the ceiling strung with fairy lights. There was also a desk in the corner, stacked with a combination of newspaper cutouts featuring Reflecto-Girl the masked heroine, unfinished calculus work, and doodles. She added the flyers to the stack.
    The house was not especially modern because her grandmother had impeccable taste; nor because it was Kit's call. It was the way it was because Kit's grandmother was (modestly) wealthy following the deaths of her two husbands, and she liked fur coats and expensive interior designers.
    Kit took her history textbook from her bag and read till dinner. Anyway, she meant to, but she awoke with a start at Gran's call and peeled her face off the page.
    "How was your day, dear?"
    "It was good." Kit sat down at the table. Gran set out a bowl of steamed scallops. Although she was nearing eighty, she still insisted on cooking complete meals for the both of them, at least on the weekends.
    "How was the movie?"
    "Movie?" There was already food in her mouth. She swallowed. "It was good."
    "How's your friend there, Bridget?"
    "She's..." she considered. "She's doing well."
    "Mmm."
    That was the sound of discontented silence. Grammy pursed her lips, fixed her scarf, and said nothing. The arc of her brow was enough to let Kit know that she was displeased with her lack of privy to her life. Kit ate fast.
    "Why such a hurry?"
    "Homework." Kit swallowed, putting her plate in the sink. She averted her grandmother's eyes and hurried back upstairs.
    She took her history textbook to her desk and tried. Really tried.
    This sucks.
    She sat tapping her pencil eraser on her lips and staring aimlessly at her dog calendar. Her gaze drifted to the stack of flyers.
    After a second of wrestling with her inner superhero, Kit lost, and she grabbed her laptop and punched in the addresses. She pulled out a sheet of scratch paper and scratched down an approximate map, chewing her eraser while the pages loaded.
    "Dude...." She sat back and looked at her semicircle. That wasn't normal. It was villainy, for sure; but what really worried her was how weird it was. It was that special brand of weird that most people would just frown at and push aside—like Lucas.
    That was the sort of weird that usually meant trouble.
    But there was nothing else. She scanned the flyers again in frustration. It was too late to call. Anyway, it was unlikely the victims would be able to do much more than complain about the inconvenience of their missing fridges.
    She finished her reading. It was painful, and it took her far too long. She showered and tried not to worry about school the next day. She was always worried about school the next day.
    Kit wished that she could just be a full-time superhero already.