WE AGREED TO MEET at the rope wall after dismissal from the rec hall. It took candy to bribe children into guardian roles, but it took cash to bribe groundskeepers. It looked like this:
NATHAN: Where are you going? It’s lights-out.
MOSES: Out.
NATHAN: Might be easier for me to forget you sneaking out if I had some extra beer money. Be a shame if Mr. Test found out.
MOSES: No.
NATHAN: What?
MOSES: Tell whomever you want.
NATHAN (SURPRISED AND A LITTLE HUFFY): You’ll get kicked out, you little prick.
MOSES (PULLS OUT PHONE; BEGINS TO LIE): I just recorded you trying to blackmail me; I’m going out.
He would rat me out or he wouldn’t, but something insisted I make the effort.
I found the group and made sure to make noise when I came through the trees. Michael and Faisal raised their heads up and waved. Matty’s back was to me.
They nodded at each other and Matty turned to me, waving and smiling.
I stopped.
“Who—wait. When did you get massively pregnant?” I asked Matty. The only time it is okay to ask a girl if she’s pregnant is when she goes from Not At All Pregnant to My Water Will Burst If I Sneeze in the span of six hours.
Her smile dropped and brought her face crumbling after it as her eyes welled up. Michael put his arm around her and made shushing noises into her hair before looking at me and scolding, “What’s wrong with you?” Then, to her, “I love you despite your condition.”
The icy October air went hot and thick. The only noise except for the wind whistling through the pines was Matty choking air down and burying her face into Michael’s arm. It’s nearly—if not literally—impossible to calculate the exact number of words in the English language; there are, however, according to the Global Language Monitor, more than one million and twenty five thousand of them. Of those one million and twenty-five thousand–plus words, the only the two I could think of were a stuttered version of “Oh, fuck.”
“Look at his eyes,” Faisal said out of the corner of his mouth.
Matty looked up from Michael’s coat and wiped her tears away with the backs of her thumbs. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before,” she said, beaming and cracking up.
The air around me thinned but nothing made any more goddamn sense. Faisal walked over and flipped up the bottom of Matty’s shirt, revealing a pale and very pregnant stomach that wasn’t the same color as the rest of her. On the flanks of her belly were large elastic bands that held her womb in place. His fingers seemed to disappear into the topmost point of her enormous stomach before they pulled a flap open with a ripping Velcro noise. He reached in and pulled out a red can of Woodsmith’s beer.
“Want a Woody?” he asked.
“Okay, what?” The amount of effort and foresight it would take to get a replica stomach and convert it into a cooler big enough for multiple drinks and snacks was something I’d have expected contestants from the Olympiad to come up with.
They were the kind of weird I knew.
It was same kind of outlandish shit me and Charlie would have come up with.
“The pregnancy pouch!” she said, throwing her hands up. “We’ve been working on it for months and we finally get to use it for something other than getting good seats at Applebee’s,” she said, high-fiving her boyfriend.
“Did … how … you converted a fake pregnant stomach into a cooler? Where did you even get a fake pregnant stomach?”
“My mom works at a health center,” Faisal said. “And they had these for those presentations they give at high schools, but they upgraded. So I rescued one.”
“It’s great for sneaking food into movie theaters. Like lots of food. Like if you want to bring a whole roasted chicken and drinks.”
“This is amazing,” I said, more to myself than anyone else while checking out their invention. The inside was lined with silver insulation that kept the beers cold. I cracked one open. It’s hard to argue with extremely cheap beer from the inside of a uterus.
“Plus, if we get caught, bam: pregnant and crying,” she said, pointing to her face, which was legitimately puffy. “Thank you, Freshman Drama Club.”
“You guys are like an evil brain trust,” I said as we headed into the woods, putting more and more distance between ourselves and our responsibilities. Allegedly evil brain trusts were in my wheelhouse.
“How’s Lump?” Pregnant Matty asked as we worked our way through the trees.
“Oh, she actually wasn’t there. I think we just missed each other.”
Her brow knitted up for a second before she said, “Huh. All right.”
And before we could talk any more about it, Michael said, “We’ve got about a mile hike before the farm we have to trespass through, then we’re pretty much in town. Shouldn’t take too long to get there.”
We trekked into the night, winding down the utility roads that eventually spilled onto the backcountry highway. We followed the signs for the town of Bannister, back the way we drove in but before the freeway. It was dark and it was snowing.
“Hey, is there still a Snickers in there?” Faisal asked Matty.
She opened the pouch and poked around for a few seconds before holding up a bag of fun-size candies. “There are five little ones. It’s like a full-size one, but made up of fun little constituent parts that you have to painstakingly open one at a time. Here,” she said and held the bag out.
He pinched his face together. “I thought there was a full-size.” He shook his head after thinking for a second and said, “No, wait, I remember there being one. We bought it at the first stop on the way here.”
“Ate it,” Michael said from behind us.
“What?”
I smiled as I brought the can of utero beer to my mouth. Listening to them bounce back and forth—listening to them riff and play on each other—was like watching a stylus find the groove on an old record. One I hadn’t heard in a while.
“I ate it. Hence the bag full of little Snickers. To make up for it.”
“You think five little Snickers is the same as one big one? A king size?”
“Yes,” he said definitively.
“You have never been more wrong.” Faisal opened the bag and full-speed threw one of the candies at Michael, who managed to catch it while simultaneously ducking.
“That’s probably not true,” he said, opening the candy and eating it. “It’s math! It’s just fractions. Five-fifths is more than equal to one-ones. That’s algebra; I just algebra’d you.”
“You think you can verb your way out of this?” He threw another candy that Michael tried to catch.
“I can algebra.”
“No. Look: if I have half a cat and you have half a cat and we mush them together…” He brought his hands together, interlacing his fingers. “We don’t have a full cat; we have two floppy, dead halves of a cat.” His hands fell apart.
The beer and the miles between me and the town made me laugh out loud.
“I would say we have a full cat. Unless it’s two ass-halves; then we just have an ass-cat.” Michael said, sneaking a look at me and then making his face go deadpan when he saw I was laughing.
“I would say that just because the components are in place doesn’t mean the machine works, you candy-thieving motherfucker.”
“Wait. Is it a robot cat?”
“What? No.”
“I just thought components—two halves, even if they were ass-halves, of a robot cat might work.”
“No. This is a very dead, freshly sawed-in-half cat.”
I made a note in my head to tell Lump about the robo cat with two butts. As a kid with an unfortunate familiarity with feline trauma, I figured she’d appreciate the ass-cat.
Matty sipped on her beer, smiling, taking knee-high steps through the snowbank and leaving craters behind her. Partly because of lake effect, partly because of how far north we were, and partly because of freakish cold snaps, there was more snow in October than I’d ever seen.
But it didn’t seem to affect them. In the miles and miles of freezing expanse all around us, they were warmth. We were warmth.
Every quarter mile there were utility poles with dingy yellow lights fixed to them: old streetlamps that the county hadn’t upgraded to arc sodium. One of them winked out as we walked under it.
“There! See?” Matty said, pointing at the light with her fully extended free arm. The filament inside the glass was a glowing orange sliver. She pointed at Faisal with her hand holding the beer, shaking both arms for emphasis.
“Matty thinks she causes lights to turn out when she walks under them,” Faisal said to me. “She’s got powers.”
“I never said I have powers.” She said it in a way that made it sound like maybe she did, in fact, possibly at one point say that she had powers. Her face was red, but only from the cold, and she couldn’t stop smiling.
I remembered lying in bed when I was a little kid and thinking about my secret superpower. I’d lie there and imagine standing in line at a bank right when a man in a ski mask would burst in. Everybody would freeze or panic, but I’d puff out my chest and tell him he picked the wrong day to be a bank robber. And all of the bullets he fired at me would rain down off my chest, dented and crooked.
“Do it again,” Faisal said, nodding toward the next light down the road.
She turned to me. “I can’t do it on command. It just happens.”
All superhero origin stories are the same: it’s never by choice, it just happens. Sometimes you get bit by a radioactive spider and sometimes you’re a wealthy billionaire vigilante, but sometimes your cousin just happens to miss your heart.
“I looked it up once,” Michael said. “It’s called ‘streetlight interference phenomenon.’ People think it’s a thing.”
“See? Streetlight—what?”
“Interference phenomenon.”
“Interference phenomenon. I don’t make the rules. I just break them. The rules of physics and science—I destroy them.”
“Moses?” Faisal asked. “You’re the science-y one. Is Matty a wizard?”
“Could be. Maybe some people just operate on a different frequency or burn more cosmic energy than others. It’s not lights turning on, right? It’s them turning off. Maybe you’re just a magnet for energy. Like an X-Men villain. But for light bulbs.” I said the entire unfiltered thing without thinking, without reminding myself that this is how you talk to friends, not acquaintances.
“Like Dumbledore!” she said.
“Which X-Men villain do you think Dumbledore is?” Michael asked her. “This is very important for our relationship.”
I smiled into my beer.
“No, he’s got the light-switch spell thing! From the movie! It’s like the Clapper but for wizard sticks.”
“Wands,” Faisal said.
“Which reminds me: Moses, I have a question,”21 she said.
“Shoot,” the Human Bullseye said.
“Well. This is a conversation that we have a lot, which means it’s important to know where you stand, so be honest.”
“I know where she’s going with this one,” Michael said.
“If you could hav—”
“—kill one person and get away with it, who—” Michael said but stopped when we all looked at him. “I thought it was the murder freebie question. It’s not the murder freebie question?”
Even though I could still see Charlie’s head kicking back, a red-black hole appearing as Plastic Buddha ruptured …
Even though I wasn’t sure my ears were done ringing and I could still feel the wet red hitting me as Charlie crumpled over …
Somehow I heard the words and I expected more of a gut punch from them but there was something about the sound of all of us laughing that made the hit fall short.
“It’s never the murder freebie question, man,” Faisal said.
“Don’t you act like we haven’t talked about murder freebies. I would say murder fre—”
“Michael!” Matty said. “No one is talking about murder. That’s not my question. My question is what kind of superpower would you have?”
“An oldie but a goodie,” Faisal conceded. “You know Matty’s is turning light bulbs off and Mike’s is a weird blank check for murder—”
“Those aren’t the powers we chose!” Matty said.
“Yeah! That’s not the power Matty chose!” Michael said.
She glared at him but couldn’t hide the smile behind her eyes. Whatever cold snap was coming off of Lake Michigan wasn’t letting up but neither were we.
I could feel Charlie in the wind, but I was here. I was with people who wanted me here. I was standing up in the sideways wind.
“Also,” Matty said, holding up her hand while she started counting off on her fingers, “no flying, no invisibility, no Wolverine claws, and no time travel.”
“Wait, why can’t we choose Wolverine claws?” I asked.
“Too easy,” Faisal said, picking up a stick and whipping it into a field. “Same for the rest of them. No simple answers.”
“Mine, for example, is not actually lightbulb manipulation. It’s spiders,” she said with a slight nod.
“Spiders,” Michael said. “Which is why she wears the pants in this relationship.”
“How do spiders work as a superpower?” I asked.
Faisal grinned and Matty pointed at him. She said, “He’s smiling because he’s responsible for this and he knows it.”
An advantage to having a low alcohol tolerance is that it didn’t take much beer for me to start thinking that we were all best friends and that the night should go on forever.
That this is what normal felt like.
“I’m like the guy that shot Batman’s parents.” He didn’t look like this was regrettable.
“He showed me Arachnophobia when I was a little kid and now I’m terrified of spiders.”
“It’s a classic movie,” Faisal said.
“Yeah, except for the lifelong terror it induces.”
“One might argue, that’s why it’s a classic.”
“But so there’s this scene, right, where a photographer guy is in the Amazon on some spider-finding expedition or something and he goes to sleep in his tent that is on the ground. Where spiders live. And obviously a spider crawls into his tent and then crawls into his sleeping bag and bites him on the foot and then they find him in the morning and he’s all rotten and dead and claw-hand-y.” She grimaced the whole time she described the dead photographer.
“Because Oreo-sized monsters are apparently enough to terrorize a town in movies,” Faisal said, rolling his eyes.
“But, anyway, I still sleep with my blankets wrapped under my feet. It’s not even a conscious thing anymore; I don’t wrap myself up specifically to keep spiders from biting my ankles and killing me in my sleep, but it’s the underlying cause. It was a means to an end, and fuck that; I want the control back. I want to manage my monsters. That would be my superpower.”
Before I had a chance to answer—to tell them that if I could have any power in the world, it would be to not have a superpower, to be more than the unkillable aftermath, more than a walking reminder, and more than a machine that couldn’t be turned off—we saw it.
Faisal slowed down and craned his neck to look at the shape a little less than half a lamp’s length away. “Uh-oh,” he said, walking up ahead of us to the broken, spiky shape on the side of the road. “It’s our porcupine.”
We caught up to him and Matty squatted down, resting her hands on her massive stomach. “I get that you aren’t supposed to swerve if a deer goes running out. That makes sense—”
“Especially with a busload of kids,” Michael added.
“Right. That makes sense. But this little guy was walking down the road—which was the dumbest thing he ever did—the driver could have gone around him.” She said it quiet.
There was a pink landing strip down the length of the porcupine’s back where the bus had shaved its quills off and a thick dusting of snow on the rest of its spikes that made it almost indistinguishable from the white bank next to it. Michael tromped into the tree line and pulled out a thin branch.
“What are you doing?” Matty asked.
“Rolling him into the woods.” He finished his beer, belched, and handed the can to Faisal. He positioned the stick under the animal like a lever. “Porcupines are nature’s tire shredders. Like how banana peels are nature’s oil sl—”
The animal kicked its broken, pathetic leg at the stick pushing into its side. Matty jolted and fell onto her butt.
“Fuckfuckfuck,” Michael said, grabbing onto Matty’s coat and sliding her over to Faisal, who had his own hands pulled up and away from the animal.
It didn’t hiss or try to crawl away or do much of anything else.
The wind picked up and weaved between us and the not-dead animal, whisking away all the words that none of us said. We stared at it.
“Fuck,” Michael said once more, more consonant and glottal stop than fleshed-out word. “What do we do?” he finally asked.
No one said anything.
“I can’t believe it’s still alive,” Faisal said. “It got hit by a bus full of baby fat and luggage. Jesus Christ.”
“Can we fix him?” Matty asked. It had started to snow again and she was still sitting on the ground.
“If he hasn’t moved, it’s his back. His back is broken,” I said.
“So: can we fix him?” she asked again.
“No,” I said. Not without gleaming doctors and EKG tones that refused to monotone.
She stood up and pulled her hat off. “Then we have to put him out of his misery.”
Michael groaned. “Why did you have to walk down the road! What were you thinking?” he asked the porcupine, like he expected it to answer.
“He’s been out here for almost two days,” Faisal said. “I thought for sure he was dead.”
“Mike, I need you to find a big rock, okay? Can you do that for me? Or a big, big log,” she said.
He kept looking at us, one at a time. “Do we have to?”
“Yeah, we do,” she said.
He nodded and went looking for something heavy or something sharp. Faisal went stomping after him. They disappeared into the gloom beyond the moonlight.
Matty went over to the broken animal and whispered something to it. She petted its nose and stroked its quills, going with the grain and breezing her fingers through the sharp points. The animal’s eyes were glassy and far away but it managed to sniff at her hand.
“My dad had to do this years and years ago,” she said with her back to me. “Same kind of thing. He hit a possum and pretty much tore it in half.”
I crouched next to her and let the animal sniff me. It stopped paying her any attention and tried to lick my hand.
“He likes you.”
The darkness felt too complete, like it had swallowed Michael and Faisal and was just waiting for us to wander in after them. I couldn’t feel the snowflakes falling around us.
“Anyway. He got out of his car and realized he had to finish the thing off, even though he didn’t want to and never asked for it, you know? But he didn’t have his tools with him or his gun because he was just going to pick up lunch. Basically, all he had was a shovel in his trunk.”
I cleared my throat. “Does Michael know this story?”
“Oh, he knows it. Dad likes to tell this one. Turns out, possums are really hard to kill. And every few minutes when a car would go by he’d have to stop and pretend he was just shoveling some roadkill out of the way because he didn’t want the people driving by and seeing some lunatic going nuts on a possum with a shovel.” She let out a humorless little laugh. “It’s funnier when he tells it. Or it was, anyway, before I met this little guy.”
“Sounds like your dad has a lot of stories.” It sounded like her dad would fit right in at any of my family reunions.
“He does.” She kept stroking the porcupine’s nose. “He tells them all the time. It’s how he deals with things, I think.”
Michael and Faisal clawed their way out of the woods. Michael was out of breath, like he’d gone jogging around looking for the right tool. Faisal had an armful of small-to medium-sized sticks, and said, “We couldn’t find any big sticks or rocks. It’s all pines in there.”
“Okay. That’s okay,” Matty said. She unzipped her coat and pulled the pregnancy pouch open before fishing around and pulling her keys out. On the ring, surrounded by bronze- and silver-colored keys, between the drugstore scan card and the tiny flashlight, there was a small Swiss Army knife.
The blade was only two or so inches long.
“Moses, hold his head back.” When I hesitated, she looked me in the eyes and said, “If you can’t do it, it’s okay.”
The drums in my chest were pounding.
I let his nose follow my fingers up until his throat was fully exposed because I was exhausted from seeing Charlie in everything. She kept the porcupine’s chin up with the pinky on her left hand and went up on her elbows, pushing her weight into her hands and flicking the small blade. The porcupine clawed distantly at her sleeve. After a final push, she leaned back and brushed her hand through the animal’s quills until it went slack and stopped pawing at nothing.
She took a deep breath and wiped the hair out of her face with the heel of her hand. “You can move him off the road now.”