Fiction.

I have another secret.

I mean, it’s not a huge deal.  I can’t make anything happen that doesn’t have a chance of happening anyway. I don’t create these situations, I just take advantage of them. And I didn’t kill many people tonight, just whoever was on life support, I guess, when I found the faulty point in the hospital’s wiring and started the chain reaction with fuses and wires and shit (I’m no electrician!).  I’m in the camp that believes that life support is no way to live anyway. Definitely pull my plug if I’m ever in that situation, God forbid. It gives me chills just thinking about all those slackjawed vegetables, so I don’t feel too bad about dispatching them, and I’m going to elect not to include them in the secret tally I’ve got going in my head. Unless I don’t have that tally anymore. I’m not sure. Things have been a little confusing lately.

I’m pretty sure Lauren and Kaiser and them got out OK. I don’t see why they wouldn’t, unless they got trampled by an onslaught of overweight, panicking nurses when the lights went out. I even tried to focus a little light in their direction as I made my way out onto the street with everyone else. I couldn’t catch a glimpse of them, but I hope they appreciate the fact that I left them alone. Maybe I’ve slipped up a little lately and let this thing get away from me a bit, but I’m feeling better now. I’m even a little proud of myself for how strong my light manipulation capabilities have become! I’m thinking if I just keep working on that, maybe I won’t need the other thing, the bad thing. Maybe light will be enough. At any rate, when I saw them all lying there in the stark hospital lighting, they looked so helpless and so tired. It didn’t seem right to kill them. They’d done a lot for me after all. Well, some of them, anyway. So before they could react in their feeble ways, I cut the power and hit the streets.  One day I’ll find them again when I’ve got everything under control.

But look, like I said before, I have very few vices. I don’t steal, I don’t lie. I always show up to work on time. I just, sometimes, push things in a direction in which they were already headed, that’s all. Nobody made that guy swim around in a part of the river known to be dangerous. And basically if you’re going to be a young girl alone at night in a cemetery, you’re pretty much asking for it. Chemical plant explosions? Come on. It was really just a matter of time for that one.

In fact, it took me awhile when it first started happening maybe ten years ago to figure out that it was me that was causing the deaths. I experimented on some old people for awhile, just some grandparents of people I knew and an elderly couple on my block. I figured no one would miss them, you know? After the fifth pre-existing old-person condition that I pushed over the edge, I decided to try something more complicated. My mom was carrying groceries up the steps one day when the knowledge of her very own dangerous information hit me. I could almost see her slightly weak heart inside her bursting with the effort, even though I was upstairs in my bedroom and couldn’t actually see the front steps at all. Her usual call for help with the grocery bags nearly distracted me, but I’d been practicing with the geriatrics, so it wasn’t too difficult to concentrate on those valves and aortas or whatever. Then I heard some dull thuds and the sound of a little broken glass, and it was all over! I can’t even begin to describe the rush that followed.

I guess some people get high from giving life and some from taking it away.

I mean, the bum was easy. Jack Arrow was a demented individual who was so close to being pushed into a murderous rampage that I barely had to do anything. I didn’t know he was what he was when I set him off one night on my walk home, and even now I’m not sure how much he knew about me and what I had done to him. But it sure does seem that I’m the only woman around here whose neck didn’t get a saw held to it, doesn’t it?

To be honest, though, I’ve gotten a little out of hand lately. I’ve started to do it without even thinking about it. It’s become automatic, like lighting up a cigarette, which I should also probably do a little less. The other day when we were in Monroe Park, I didn’t even realize I was responsible for the car smashing into the Mosque until after it happened. My reach has expanded too. I get these little danger alerts like an annoying kid pulling at a corner of my brain, and I make the deaths happen just to make it stop, only now they seem to be coming from farther and farther away. I’ve certainly never, to my knowledge, caused something as big as a chemical plant explosion as far away as Hopewell before. The rush it gave me almost rivalled how it felt when I was just starting out.

I’m sorry, Dad, wherever you are. I miss her too. And I guess I’ll miss you now. And maybe I’d stop if I could, but I doubt it. I didn’t ASK to be like this. I didn’t ASK to be able to do these things. I can’t help it anymore, and who cares anyway. I deserve to have a little pleasure in my life. I haven’t had everything handed to me on a silver platter like Lauren or Kaiser. And fucking douchebag assholes like James are far more harmful than someone like me. I don’t insult people. I don’t fuck over my friends. I don’t belittle people for no reason. I don’t completely disregard the feelings of another person. Maybe I don’t want to stop after all.

So you know what? Fuck you, James. Fuck you, Jack Arrow. Fuck you, Dad. And fuck you, everyone else!

I recommend staying out of harm’s way.

We were sitting outside of Diana’s house, having gotten her to sleep on the couch without mentioning the corpse (and yes indeed, it was a corpse) occupying her bed upstairs. Everyone was so exhausted that nobody even wanted to speculate on how Jack Arrow had gotten to Dan. So it was just silence all around, except for a driver on the street who I noticed had been trying to parallel park for about ten minutes too long.

“Leave her alone, asshole,” I said to James.

“Women drivers,” he said grimly, watching the car. “You know how they are.”

“Yeah, I know how they are when you’re making them want to redo their parking job over and over again,” I could feel my voice rising, furious again. “I hate you.”

“Whoa, whoa,” He turned around and looked at me. “That’s a strong word for someone so into being a ‘team’. What’s the matter? You got a crush on me or something?”

“Please!” I was shouting now. “This is not some romantic comedy. I’m not going to just decide that some fuckhole isn’t a fuckhole anymore and run away with them…”

“Stop it!” shouted Lauren, her chin on her knees. “Diana’s trying to sleep. And frankly, it’s getting a little old. You’re not helping anyone with all this fighting.”

James looked back out at the street, where the woman was trying for the fiftieth time to park her Subaru Outback. “Who said I was trying to help anybody,” he muttered under his breath.

“Amelia, what does your father do?” asked Kaiser quietly.

I was caught off guard. “He used to work for the army. He was a…a dentist. But he retired early when my mom died.” What the hell did that have to do with anything?

He looked up at me from his seat at the top of the steps. “I can’t see him much in your memories or in your future.”

I was completely bewildered. “We don’t see each other much – I guess we kind of avoid each other. I’m working most of the time anyway.” Fuck. Work. I hadn’t even thought about Grandma’s this entire time. Oh well, I can always get another job at another place with another dick bartender. A thought occurred to me. “So what DO you see in my future then?”

Kaiser seemed to be putting his words together carefully. “You know, it’s weird. With Lauren I can see a couple things, and with James a couple more, you know, normal stuff. Driving a car, talking on the phone. But all I see with you is…” He stopped and looked baffled.

I sighed impatiently. “Is what? What?”

“I just see darkness, I don’t know. Nothing clear, anyway.”

James had moved onto controlling the actions of a stray cat that had blundered into his field of vision. “Hey, maybe you die and Kaiser’s seeing the inside of a coffin.”

I always wonder if that thing that happens when you’re so angry you can’t speak is actually your body’s defense mechanism, preventing you from saying something completely irrevocable. I turned my attention back to Kaiser.

“No, we need to go back to your house,” he said with determination.

“What?” said Lauren. “Why? Do we have, like, an objective here that I don’t know about?”

Kaiser brushed her off. “The bum told me to ask about your father. I don’t know what for, or what any of this means, but I can’t shake the feeing that it’s important. I mean, how would he know your father?”

I was completely dumbfounded. “I have no idea.”

Lauren looked back and forth from me to him. Even James was paying attention. Lauren blurted, “You don’t think Amelia’s dad has something to do with all of this do you?”

“Well, I don’t know! I mean what am I supposed to think! I’m not saying he and Jack Arrow are in league together or something, I’m just saying that he might be some sort of clue to all of this.” Kaiser was getting flustered now.

And he wasn’t the only one. I had to sit down. “Seriously, I can guarantee you that my dad has zero clue about any of this. All he does is sit upstairs in his room, reading novels and putting together jigsaw puzzles. The man has barely left the house in years!”

“I still think we should talk to him. Let’s just talk to him, OK? Can we walk to your place from here?” He was interrupted by the sound of broken glass.

“Let’s go!” shouted James, who was becoming a natural at stealing cars, I’ll give him that. He brushed some glass shards from the driver’s seat before getting in and ripping off a panel under the steering wheel. “Everybody jump in. As soon as I figure out how to hotwire this bitch, we are out of here.”

“On the move again, I guess,” Lauren looked at me sympathetically, but obediently went down the steps and got into the backseat of the car.

Kaiser moved in that direction as well. “I’m sorry, Amelia. I’m not trying to be an asshole. I just need to talk to him. I just need to figure this whole thing out.”

The car engine growled with life. “Kids!” yelled James. “The Nancy Drew Express is leaving in thirty seconds. Let’s move it!”

And before I knew it, we were on our way back to the house I just couldn’t seem to escape today.

I picked out the ashes from Lauren’s curls as we stood atop the roof of an apartment building on Boulevard and watched Richmond’s oldest movie theater burn to the ground.

Kaiser paced back and forth, looking as if he’d trade clairvoyance a hundred times over for a power that instead made him flame-retardant. I suspected his sister was dead. I think we all did, but no one wanted to tell him. Well, Lauren and I opted to keep quiet, anyway. James had long since departed in the vague direction of Devil’s Triangle. He had said he was going to get Slurpees, and the iciness that this comment produced in Kaiser was most likely the cause for the delay in his return. I’m not an unfeeling person. I know what it’s like to lose a loved one, but the heat and the smoke and the running made Slurpees seem a pretty genius idea.

I hadn’t meant to start a fire at the Byrd Theater. I had meant to throw a little more light from the chandeliers onto the situation at hand, since, from my own vantage point at least, I couldn’t quite tell what was going on with that saw. I’d gathered that my own particular brand of freak had been augmented, just like everyone else’s seemed to be, in the past day or so, but I hadn’t had much time to experiment. So when I nervously added what I thought would be a touch more brightness to the light inside the theater, I was in no way expected for an explosion of sparks so elaborate that Roy Hobbs would have been hard-pressed to match it.

Lauren, with startling presence of mind, kept her eye on that saw. The bum snarled as he found himself holding a swatch of delicate gold filigree as sparks and glass rained down into his matted hair. I yanked Lauren down between two rows of seats in a desperate attempt to save her from the red-hot shrapnel I had inadvertently created, but she never looked away from her target.

“His head!” Kaiser shouted over the din. “He has a metal plate in his head! And another one in his leg – no!” He corrected himself. “A bullet in his leg, that’s it!” I believe only I saw Lauren smile a little smile as the bum then clutched his scalp and howled in the double agony that is caused when your hair has caught on fire at the exact same time that some unidentified metallic horror has begun to take shape within the confines of your skull.

The air was beginning to get thick with smoke, and I could hear the crack of various historic beams giving way. “Come on!” I screamed. “We have to get out of here! Let’s go!”

It took James and I a minute to realize that we were the only ones escaping. Kaiser, of course, was attempting to crawl on all fours through smoke, sparks, debris, and crazy bums in order to pull his sister to safety. Lauren was still at work, and the shrieks of the bum were clearly audible.

“Christ, Sweet Tits is a little too into torture for me,” James yelled to me in the lobby.

And then it came to me. “Get them out of there!”

He looked at me incredulously. “You get them out of there!” He shouted. “What do I look like, an armored tank? The whole place is coming down! Her tits aren’t that great; it’s a death trap in there!”

“No, fuckface, make them want to get out! Do your mind control thing!” For the first time, I saw him look at me with genuine surprise and even a little respect. Then he closed his eyes and clenched his fists. In a moment, Kaiser and Lauren finally emerged from the theater, the latter dragging the former by the back of his orange shirt. Without a word, we pushed them out the door and legged it east down Cary Street as sirens got louder and louder.

A few blocks later, Kaiser looked at James and his face hardened. “I could have gotten her out, James. That was a shitty trick to pull.”

Lauren looked up.  “Wait, that was you? Jeez, you couldn’t have made it a little easier for me? Kaiser almost yanked my shoulder out of my socket when I was pulling him out.”

James stopped running and leaned against a street sign to catch his breath. “It’s not that simple, OK? Not like trying to get a teenage girl to take her shirt off. His desire to save his sister was a little more urgent than your desire to remain chaste.”

“You asshole,” Lauren and I said at the same time.

“Either way, dude,” said James to Kaiser. “You’re not going back there until they put that fire out. No sense in your entire family dying in one night.”

“Fuck off,” said Kaiser. He began to climb the fire escape of the house nearest us. The rest of us followed. What the hell else were we going to do?

I had seen the guy who was currently trespassing on my property several times on my way home from work. Even if I hadn’t just seen him hold a saw to Lauren’s throat, I’d be able to tell you just from looking at his eyes that he wasn’t quite right in the head.

He stood in the doorway, one hand on the doorframe and the other in the pocket of his filthy coat. He let out a low growl, and suddenly I felt the energy drain from my limbs just as it had an hour earlier in the park. Yeah, I was tired, but I was also tired of wondering what was going on, tired of James’s incessant insults, and definitely, without a doubt, tired of bums. I saw the others around me nodding off or drooping even as they stood, but I fought it.

“Get…out…of…my…HOUSE!!” I picked up my leaden arms and planted them right in his chest. He was surprisingly little under all those layers as I pushed him backwards into the hall.

He laughed and grabbed my wrists, but it seemed I had distracted him enough to cause whatever effect he had on us to wear off a little, because a fist came out of nowhere over my left shoulder and before I knew it, Kaiser had tackled the bum to the ground, face down, and was straddling him, holding his hands behind his back.

I watched, stupefied, and Lauren knelt motionless on the floor, clutching the place where the saw had bit into her flesh earlier. “James,” rasped Kaiser, placing a knee on the back of the bum’s head. “Get the cops.”

“James, get the cops, James.” We could barely hear the bum through his matted dreads. “Get ‘em. Hang a donut outside the window and see how fast they come.” His voice was gravelly.

I looked over at James. His fists were clenched and he was biting his lip. Then, in a flash, he was on the floor in the hallway, pulling up the bum’s head by his dreadlocks. “What was that, motherfucker? What did you just say to me?”

The bum coughed, and Kaiser looked uneasy. “Dude, just get the cops. This guy is dangerous, seriously.”

“And how do you know that, Kaiser? Looking into my past a little, are you?” He laughed and then coughed so violently I thought for sure he was going to throw up.

“Yeah, asshole, I AM looking into your past,” Kaiser said, twisting his arm further. “And what I’m seeing there isn’t pretty.” So THAT’s how he knew about Ben. I saw him glance at me, apologetically, before he went on. “Seems like you’ve seen some shit in, what is that, the Gulf War? How old is that kid that I’m seeing you kill? Ten?”

The bum’s rocky voice was getting louder now. “Oh, you’re seeing images now too? Can you see where I was last night? Can you see the look on that little bitch’s face she saw I was making a noose for her?” James yanked his head back with renewed energy but he kept talking. “What about how hard it was to stuff that girl in the closet?”

Lauren let out an animalian scream from behind me, and that’s when the pennies that had been scattered on the floor earlier started to rattle. As we watched, each one changed from a flat copper disk to a shiny silver ball. She jumped up and ran past the bum into the kitchen and returned with a frying pan.

“You freak monster!” she yelled and held the pan in the air. It thickened from cheap tin into cast iron, until I could tell she was struggling to hold it up.

“Lauren, wait!” I said and knelt down among the pennies that were starting to fall by the bum’s head. “What are you doing here?” I asked him, and he sneered even as James pulled back on his hair in a way that could not have been comfortable. “What do you want from us?”

“I think you know,” he sneered. I felt myself getting tired again, this time so tired I could barely move, and I could see that Kaiser had relaxed his grip on the bum’s wrists. Lauren slumped against the wall, and the pan dropped to the floor with a heavy thud. Helpless, we watched him easily brush off Kaiser and James and stand up. I used every bit of energy I had left to push myself up, grabbing the knob of the open front door to steady myself.

The bum stepped close to me. His smell was overpowering, but I couldn’t move away. “They’ll all be next,” he whispered. “You’ll see. Everyone will see.”

He stepped back and looked around at our paralyzed forms. “You kids are pathetic. Privileged, pathetic, and soft. You make it too easy,” he spat. He curled his lips back so we could see the horror that was his set of teeth.

At that moment, a wavering voice called from the top of the stairs. “Amelia?”

The bum whipped his head around at me, with a look of fear in his eyes. I couldn’t speak. “Do not come down here, Dad,” I thought with all my strength. But without another word, the bum ran from the house.

“Amelia, honey?” called the voice, louder.

In the bum’s absence, we awoke from our half-sleeps, and everyone was beginning to shake themselves out of their respective stupors.

“Yeah, Dad, what do you need?” I yelled back, motioning to Kaiser to help out Lauren, who had run outside, wild with emotion. James looked at me, leaned back against the wall, and crossed his arms.

“Amelia, all the lights are on in the house. I can’t get any of them to shut off. Can you check the fuses?”

I hadn’t even noticed. “OK, Dad, I’ll take care of it!” I shouted. James shook his head in disgust, and walked out onto the front stoop, where Kaiser had his arm around a shaking Lauren. All three looked over as I came out and closed the door behind me.

“Why did you stop me? Didn’t you hear him? He killed Lily! He killed all of them!” Lauren shot her words at me.

“And that’s not even the half of it,” Kaiser shuddered. “I wish I could wipe what I saw from my mind.”

“I wonder why he took off like that,” I said. “I mean if he’s after us, why run away? Why not just stab us or saw us or whatever… right then and there?”

“Who cares!” Lauren cried and started walking down the steps. “I’m going to find him with or without you guys.”

We watched the iron railings turn to gold behind her.

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.

My walk home from work at 4 a.m. most mornings is something that would have caused my mother to lie awake in barely-controlled hysteria until she heard me walk in the door. The twelve blocks between the bar where I work and my house is not the nicest stretch of road, what with the bums who are constantly either asking me for cigarettes or loose change and that particular night I needed some air on my face, which would hopefully make my heart rate finally slow down.

I’m not going to pretend that I had some sort of clairvoyant knowledge that something was just around the corner, something huge. Let’s face it, I took a job that completely kills any possibility of a social life for a reason. I don’t mind being alone. I’m not ambitious. I just want to make sure my dad is taken care of, but I don’t want to be awake during the day when he tries to talk to me. I’d rather get up at 2 p.m., do some grocery shopping, clean a bathroom or two, and head off to work while at the same time congratulating myself for yet again avoiding Dad’s defeated, blank stare of grief. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve looked him fully in the eye since my mom died.

I’d become so accustomed to this routine that I thought I enjoyed it, I guess. At any rate, I wasn’t prepared at all for how impossibly elated I would feel when I met a teenage freak of nature who cried on a, thankfully, deserted sidewalk when she couldn’t get into a bar.

It wasn’t something I had been expecting, it wasn’t anything I had been waiting for, but I knew as soon as I saw the first ordinary, copper penny slide out from between her swollen eyelids that she wasn’t just any freak of nature, she was a fellow freak of nature.

I’d hazard a guess that a girl who cries pennies (and yes, in case you’re wondering, it is painful to witness) would be completely caught off guard by someone who threw back her head and laughed as penny after penny landed in my hands. But I couldn’t help it. I recognized that agonized look on her face. I even shed a few tears of my own (the normal, salty kind) before I resumed the grip I had on the poor girl’s wrist to keep her from bolting.

“What’s your problem?” she spat, using her free hand to cover her eyes and pulling with all of her skinny high school girl’s might. “Let me go!”

At this point the laughter and tears had fused together into loud gasping hiccups that I’m sure made me sound completely insane. “You can’t…” I panted. “Please, just hang on and let me catch my breath.” I didn’t mean to scare the kid, but she wouldn’t stop wriggling, and I needed to just cut to the chase. So when she didn’t seem to notice the scattered coins on the sidewalk flashing like crazy, I directed my attention to the streetlight above our heads, and I guess I thought harder than I meant to because the burst of light it produced lit up the street. Even hiding her eyes behind her hand, she couldn’t help but notice that.

“What the hell was that? Lightning or something?” There was still some rancor in her words but at least she’d stopped struggling. When I didn’t answer, realization dawned. “Did you do that?”

I couldn’t stop smiling long enough to answer, so I just nodded.

“What are you, some kind of freak?” she asked, but I could hear her voice catch on the last word. At this moment, somebody shouted from inside.

“Amelia! What the fuck! Come on! People are waiting!”

I hugged the girl as hard as I could, without hardly realizing what I was doing. She stiffened at first (when have I ever been smooth at anything?) and was probably still in shock when I grabbed the pen out of my back pocket and scribbled my name and number on the back of her hand. I glimpsed her out on the sidewalk later, gazing up at the streetlight, but the next time I checked, she had gone.

I’m not sure why I left her my information. All I know is that I didn’t realize how alone I was until I saw those pennies and I saw in her face that this wasn’t new, that she’d been dealing with this her whole life. Even if I never see her again, I will know that she exists, and if she exists, maybe other people exist who also have things that they’re ashamed of or that set them apart. The idea is so liberating, I can barely describe it.

Green. Yellow. Dazzle.

That’s the game I play with myself when I walk home, usually at the expense of some poor tired clubber, escaping the jaws of another one night stand by quietly fleeing home before the sun rises. If they’re not paying attention, bam, that red light will go off like a firecracker, and you can bet they stop the car then. I also pretend to be shocked, as I’m walking down the sidewalk. “Goodness gracious, did the city spring for some extra-watt bulbs with strobe effects? I must write the mayor a letter!” I peek into their car windows when I can, and I laugh to myself if they’re pale and trembling. I feel bad startling them, but I have so few vices that I feel like it’s okay to get away with this one tiny prank.

The night I met Lauren, I was playing the game with a little extra verve, adding some glimmering streetlights to the mix. I felt like skipping. Up ahead, a couple of dark figures sat on a low wall next to the sidewalk. Instead of pulling my bag closer to my body and hunching my shoulders like I usually do, I squared up and started fishing around for my pack of cigarettes. Tonight is cause for celebration, I thought. Ease up on the bums and give them a smoke if that’s all they want.

“Whoa, whoa, it’s the blonde that was in such a hurry to get rid of us!”

I slowed down a little and subtly cast more light in their direction from a nearby streetlight. Shit, it’s those two drunk assholes that we basically had to push out of the bar at closing, during which one of them had the grace to mention to me, yet again, that I could use a specific kind of plastic surgery.

I ducked my head down and tried to just ignore them. The dark one, the one who liked to comment on other people’s tits, got up and stood directly in front of me, and I noticed that the frat boy in the orange Tech shirt had been leaning on him, too wasted to sit up on his own. He slumped over sideways.

“Where are you going?” the dark one said.

“Home, if that’s all right with you.”

“What if it isn’t?”

Let me say one thing, I am really, really good at not making eye contact, but this guy looked at me with such hatred that it was impossible to look away even as I squirmed under his gaze.

The frat boy burst out laughing. I could tell from my lengthy experience with drunks that he was about just moments away from puking all over my feet. “James,” he said without opening his eyes. “That is not the way to talk to a honey.”

James flared his nostrils but didn’t get out of the way. There was complete silence until the frat boy burped so loud that I dropped the lighter I’d forgotten I was holding. He laughed again, and when I knelt to pick it up, he swung out his arm clumsily and brushed my shoulder.

“Amelia. February 4, 1998.”

I backed away and lit up the sidewalk with the streetlight even more. What in the world was going on here.

James’s jaw was set and the light made his eyes flash. The frat boy kept laughing and mumbling at the same time “His name was Ben and he took pictures of you.” What the fuck. “He took pictures of you while you were sleeping and showed them to all of his friends.” What the fuck what the fuck. The frat boy, still slumped over with his eyes closed and beginning to hiccup through his laughter was really pleased with himself now. “You thought he loved you and he fucking took pictures of you!! That is…classic!”

James’s mouth curved slightly upward and he finally stepped aside, but not in enough time for the frat boy’s inevitable vomit to miss my only comfortable work shoes. I was too angry to care. The stoplights began to show green, yellow, and red at the same time, and the streetlights flickered so violently that I barely noticed that James’s face was now illuminated by flashing blue. It wasn’t until I heard a car door slam that I realized a police car had pulled up.

“Are these guys bothering you, Amelia?” Oh thank God, it was the cop that comes in and hovers for us some nights when we have a particularly shady crowd.

“Oh, hi, yes…well, I’m just trying to go home.” How do I describe to him what just happened? A guy looked at me funny and another guy pulled one of my most humiliating memories out of nowhere? I don’t think so. “They’re just drunk and I just need to get by, my dad will be worried.”

The officer sighed and patted me on the back.

“You want a ride in the cruiser? Let me just see what these gentlemen have to say for themselves and I can take you straight home.”

That’s the last thing Dad needs, me pulling up in a cop car. “Oh, thanks, but no, I’m fine, really, I’ll just walk from here, it’s not too much farther.” It took me a few minutes to assure him that this was true, but finally he let me go with a worried look. I heard more vomiting behind me as I turned the corner, and I knelt down and untied my shoes and pitched them under a parked car. I’d rather let the penny in my pocket remind me of this evening, not the stench of a drunk asshole’s half-digested lager.

I have a secret.

 

It’s not a huge secret!! It’s not like I stole money or have a crush on my best friend’s boyfriend or anything! Although I did once forget to charge a guy I liked for his drinks and never said anything about it to my manager, but it wasn’t my fault! I was nervous, and I thought he was about to give me his number, but it turns out when he said “You’ve got my number!” he just meant that I had brought him his bottle of Stella without him even having to ask for it. I always forget to play it cool. So when he said I had his number, he meant it, you know, like a METAPHOR. “You’ve got my number!” “You really have me pegged!” “You sure are obsessed with me!”

 

I spent a good twenty minutes trying to figure out how to let him know that, actually, I didn’t have his number at all and I wasn’t sure why he thought I would have it in the first place, but that I was really interested in not only getting that number but calling it repeatedly and inevitably freaking him out by saying something retarded like “At what point am I allowed to call you ‘baby’?” As his beer dwindled, I decided to go over to his booth and casually slip him my number while I was bringing him a new bottle. Well, of course, I tripped and spilled the contents of that bottle into his lap. Frantic and fumbling, I started to wipe up the mess with the towel I keep tucked in my belt, and without even thinking about it spouted out the most offensive thing I could have possibly said.

 

“I am so so sorry. Oh my God, I hope these jeans weren’t a present from your mom or something.”

 

As soon as it was out of my mouth, I sensed it was the wrong thing to say, and it doesn’t help to say the wrong thing when you’re bending over the lap of the guy you have a crush on, aimlessly batting away with an already dirty towel at the parts of his anatomy that you fervently do not want to be frightened of you. I felt him freeze.

 

“My mom passed away last month. And these jeans were a present from her.” My heart stopped. Are you kidding me?

“I…”

“Just get me my check, please.”

 

The stammering ridiculous person in that exchange was me, obviously, and the guy roughly pushing me away and getting out his car keys was him, obviously. Then those demons that possess me and make me act ridiculous in front of nice, decent guys decided to gather together all their strength together for the grand finale. Without any further hesitation, I reached into my back pocket and blurted, “My mom’s dead too! Here’s my number!”

And with that, he left.

 

So I suppose I didn’t technically forget to charge him. He technically walked out on his tab. But it’s not like I ran after him. It’s not like I said “Sir, sir! Please! Wait, let’s just start over! My name’s Amelia, I know I’m sort of awkward, but I really mean well, and my mom really did die eight years ago, I didn’t just say that because YOUR mom died, I just meant that I totally understand how awful and crippling that experience is, and I really felt for your pain, and apart from that I really like you, even though you’re probably doing something really great and helpful for the world, and all I’ve done is to drop out of college to come back to Richmond and wait tables at a bar, and also you owe me $4.50!” I guess I could have tried to catch him.

 

But I didn’t. I just stood there, mortified, as the bartender – this vicious hipster kid that I hate more than anyone in the world – started singing that stupid old song “There She Goes” until he stopped short to shout, “Jesus Christ, whoever’s messing with the lights again needs to curl up and die, and I’m not even kidding!”

 

And that’s my secret. My stupid fucking secret. I can’t cook, I can’t play sports, I can’t talk to a guy I like without spilling beer on him, and I can’t get through a single night without waking up crying for my dead mother, but I can make light brighter and shiny things shinier just by thinking about it. Isn’t it just precious? I make things glitter. Isn’t it just adorable? I’m the most useless superhero in the world, and it’s absolutely fucking perfect.