Fiction.

I’m not going to lie to you. It is difficult to concentrate when Lauren is upset, what with a piggy bank’s worth of change accumulating on her lap. Maybe that’s why I lost focus in the midst of her story, as horrifying as it was. Even as she described with a shaking voice the expression on the face of her dead friend, I had to struggle to pay attention, returning instead to the admittedly much less traumatic experience of having a perfect stranger tell you about your own sexual past and then laugh about it (before vomiting on your feet). She had stopped talking, though, and was clearly waiting for my response.

“Whiskey,” I said.

“What?” she called after me as I went across the hall to the kitchen.

“I know it’s cliché, but you need a shot of whiskey right now,” I shouted to her, grabbing the bottle of Jameson from on top of the fridge.

“Weren’t you just on my case for underage drinking, like, 12 hours ago?” This was better, at least she was almost smiling.

“Yeah, well, that was more me being on your case for putting my job in jeopardy. I mixed it with ginger ale, drink up.” I thrust the drink in her hand and started pacing the room, illuminating the numbers on the face of our old grandfather clock one by one. “Did you say you were in town for a funeral?”

“Yeah, my cousin Courtney.”

“Christ, that’s a lot of death for one week.” She nodded, but the pennies had ceased. “Look, Lauren,” I said in a rush as I sat back down on the sofa. “I know you’ve got a lot going on here, but I just have to know…do you know anybody else who can…” She looked up. “…You know…”

“You mean, do I know anybody else who can do freakish things like cry pennies or…what is it exactly that you do, anyway?”

I sighed. Patience! “I just make light brighter. But yes, that’s what I mean.”

Lauren put her glass on the sidetable and pulled her knees up to her chin. “No, I don’t. But it’s not like I went around showing people those things” (she pointed at the pennies scattered over the carpet) “and asking if they could maybe sneeze some dimes out for me so I could make a phone call.”

“Yeah, that makes sense, but I’m just thinking here. If you have this power…”

“Power!” She rolled her eyes. “More like disability. Some of us don’t just glitter over here.”

“OK, fine, if you have this unnatural disability, and I have an unnatural disability, doesn’t it make sense that other people would, too?” Just saying those words made my heart leap.

“Like the X-Men or something? So we can all band together and shoot pennies at people?” Clearly it was time for another whiskey and ginger. Or maybe just whiskey. I went back into the kitchen, brought back the bottle, and filled her up. I watched her face. She wasn’t nearly as annoyed as she was letting on, so I plowed ahead.

“No, not like that,” I couldn’t stop myself from blushing. I had been a huge Wonder Woman fan as a child, and I won’t say thoughts of magic lassoes hadn’t crossed my mind. “I would just love to…I don’t know…have people to talk to about it. Ever since my mom died, I’ve been so busy taking care of my dad and me, I feel like I haven’t made one friend in eight years.”

“I seem to be losing mine by the hour,” she said, and I felt like shit. There I go again, putting my foot in my mouth, I thought. This girl just lost her best friend, stumbled upon a bunch of corpses, and is about to attend the funeral of her teenage cousin, and I’m rattling off at the mouth like I’m the first person to ever understand loneliness. But even as she raked her unruly hair in front of her face to hide what must have been some understandable intense emotions, I felt myself becoming uncontrollably thrilled for the twentieth time in twelve hours. I felt nurturing. I felt like a big sister. I wanted to take care of this poor kid whose problems I really believed, maybe ridiculously so, that only I could understand fully. The idea that there were more of us was almost too exhilarating for me to handle. I stood up to take the bottle back to the kitchen.

“How did your mom die, anyway?” She had stretched out on the couch by the time I got back and was picking at her hair.

“Oh, she had a heart attack one day while she was bringing in groceries.” I sat on the floor and flipped on the TV, hoping to catch some news about the murders. Lauren sat upright.

“Wow, that must have been awful. Were you guys really close?”

There! On Channel 12, footage of the outside of the Navy/Stuart building, with police tape and everything. “Yeah, she was great. She was my best friend.” I smiled to myself. It felt good to talk about her. “What was Lily like?”

Lauren didn’t answer. She was staring at the images of the stretchers being pulled out of the building with white sheets over them. “I should call my mom,” she whispered and stood up and walked into the kitchen.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” one of the cops on the scene was saying to the live broadcast reporter. “My thoughts and prayers are going out to the families of these kids, and I hope other kids are taking this as a…” The cop paused and I thought for a second that he was getting choked up.

But he wasn’t. He licked his lips, actually licked his lips on live television and bit his lip, making his mustache bristle. “I’m sorry, I have to go. There’s been a, um, dispatch from…” And he fled out of the frame. The cameraman panned to the reporter, clearly confused, and she rallied as quickly as she could.

“That was Officer Tahegan on the scene of this terrible tragedy.” There was an awkward pause. A man walked by the edge of the screen, and the reporter brightened. “Perhaps the neighbors have some memories to share about the victims. Sir? Are you a friend of the victims’?”

Then, right there in front of me, were the eyes I seem to be unable to escape. I felt my mouth hanging open as James smirked confidently into the camera and said, “Why, yes, yes I am, Cindy.”

That was all I needed to see. I grabbed my car keys and yelled to Lauren to get her bag. Seeing him twice in twelve hours was a coincidence, maybe, but three times is plain scary, and I was going to find out why.