The next few weeks were fairly normal, for the most part. Well, as normal as anyone’s life could be after all that.
I started training with Jesse again, and Brent ended up watching us train a couple times. At one point, Jesse and I were trying to outdo each other—I think we were working on our aim.
Aim and precision, to my surprise, was an area where I had a leg up on Jesse, which was, of course, a matter of great irritation for him.
I looked over as he was gloating about having beaten me during our silly precision training in the newly fireproofed basement and saw Brent clutching his sides, trying to hold in the peals of laughter I’d come to recognize as his trademark.
For me, that will probably forever be the memory that marks the period after I found out about my powers. Not the bus exploding, not the break-in—you would think that one of those two things would have stuck in my mind, but they were so hectic and high-stress that I can barely remember them at all. I know they happened, obviously, but if you asked me details about either event, I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything particularly interesting.
I wonder if Jesse experiences that too.
There was another thing that happened soon afterwards, though, and that sort of shaped my life—almost as much as the explosion of the transformer above me.
It was about a week after the break-in, and to be honest, it was the moment when…well, I’ll get to that.
I was walking around downtown after a late night out—I don’t remember where I’d ended up, since I was trying to walk off some of the drink. I hadn’t had much, but I’d wanted to take a walk, since a bus ride was still out of the question. I remember I was east of Yonge, and I think I was south of the Danforth, but that really doesn’t mean much, does it?
Regardless of where I was geographically, I had wandered into one of the less reputable parts of town. One of the sketchier areas that made me wish it had been a bit cooler so I’d been wearing a hood. As it was, I pulled my baseball cap down, hoping to shield my view from the world and avoid trouble. I’d be able to handle myself like literally no one else in the world could, but that knowledge had to battle with two decades of being told girls shouldn’t walk around alone at night.
Trouble seems to have this way of finding me, though, and when I heard a scream from a nearby alley, I couldn’t help but look in and see what was happening.
I mean, okay, Toronto’s a big city, and a scream doesn’t necessarily mean anything’s wrong. Hell, I’ve completely ignored them plenty of times before, without a second thought.
I guess I was feeling a little antsy, though, because I ran right to the mouth of the alley and looked in. There were two figures further down, one standing over the other, who was splayed out on the ground.
The one on the ground screamed again—still no words, just sheer terror, though the one who was standing over her didn’t seem to be doing anything. I took a few steps into the alleyway and hid behind a dumpster.
I remember thinking to myself how stupid this was. Come on, Holly, there’s no need to get yourself involved. You can walk away and call the police, let them deal with it. But I wanted to know what was going on. This was the first time since the break-in that I’d actually seen something happening, and…well, I guess I was eager to try out some of the things we’d been practicing.
Okay, I admit it. I wanted to be a superhero. I didn’t really know that I wanted to become well-known or anything, but I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives.
Y’know, other than making and selling tasty pastries.
I peeked out from behind the dumpster, the brim of my cap pulled low. He’d moved, leaning down over her body.
I could see by then what she was screaming about. His zipper was hanging open, and when she made a move to get away, he shoved her roughly back down to the ground.
I swallowed. I’d been hoping that this was a mugging—okay, that sounds a little weird, but it would be the lesser of two evils. Rape, though…
I held up my hand and let the electricity crackle over the surface for a second. I was ready to charge out and give him the shock of his life but decided to hold back for a second and whipped out my cell phone. He seemed to be having the time of his life tormenting her, and I wanted to get hold of Jesse, who was at a party nearby. At the time, I knew exactly where it was, though it’s slipped my mind since.
I texted Jesse, asking if he was still nearby, and then turned my cell phone to silent, keeping it out so that I didn’t alert the would-be-rapist to my presence.
Within seconds, Jesse texted me back, saying he was only a block away. I told him to get over to where I was as quickly as he could.
I shoved my phone back in my pocket and stepped out from behind the dumpster. He had made another move and was lying on top of her now, one hand over her mouth, the other groping her chest. Her dress was hiked up over her hips, but her underwear was still intact.
I breathed out a sigh of relief. At first, I thought I’d waited too long, wasted too much time asking Jesse to come back me up. I didn’t want something like the break-in to happen again, although if I’d actually used my powers…anyway, that’s an argument I’ve had with myself a number of times and will likely continue to have until I’m old, grey, and senile. It’s not one that I need to commit to paper.
I held up my hand and pointed at the ground next to them. Saying a silent thanks to whatever power was watching over me that I was the one with the amazing aim, I let off a small blast of lightning.
Even if I’d missed my mark, it wasn’t enough that it would have killed either of them, but the point became moot as soon as it hit the ground.
I’d thrown what I liked to call a sonic ball. While it was, obviously, made of the electricity I seemed to be able to keep jumping around in a little ball that would probably bring a physicist to tears, it didn’t pack much of a punch. It was sort of a hollow ball of electricity, and it crackled as it zoomed through the air, sounding a lot more menacing than it was.
It did what it was intended to do, though: it caught their attention. In retrospect, it probably looked a little stupid. I mean, there was a loud noise that suddenly erupted a couple feet away from their heads, and when they looked up, framed in a grotesque parody of sex, all they would have seen was a twenty-something girl wearing a baseball cap and a bright green tank top.
Yeah, that’d be terrifying.
The woman seemed to gain strength from my presence, though. While before she’d been silently crying and only half-heartedly struggling, now she was kicking and screaming as hard as she could. She bucked the man off and screamed at me to help her.
I put my hands together in front of me, palms flat against each other, as the guy sat up and swore at me—“Who the fuck do you think you are, interrupting this shit?” and “Do you have a death wish?” and threatening to kill me if I didn’t leave at exactly that moment. “And don’t tell the fucking police.”
I pulled my hands apart, and an arc of electricity spread from palm to palm, reaching about a foot above my head.
His eyes went wide, pupils dilating in the sudden bright light, and he started to scramble away. I wished I’d been paying attention to the woman, who had shuffled to the side of the alley, but I didn’t even register her pulling out her cell phone.
At least, that’s the only time she could have pulled it out.
When the guy made a run for it, I extended one hand, and a tendril of electricity shot out, hitting him in the back. He twitched and fell to the ground. I stopped the flow of energy, and he stopped twitching, but he stayed down.
I only resisted the urge to run over and check his pulse because a hand clapped on my shoulder.
“Hol, what happened?” Jesse was breathing heavily. He’d arrived quickly, but not soon enough.
“He was…” I shook my head. “I stopped him.” I felt very removed from the situation at the time. When I replay it in my head, I sound cold and detached, and I remember looking at it almost clinically. The guy had been committing one of the worst crimes on the planet; the only logical thing to do was stop him. There wasn’t any confusion or grey area there for me.
“Oh.” Jesse stared at the body.
I nodded and left him fumbling in his pockets, the change in one of them clinking together. I needed to know if I’d done it again.
The guy—the rapist—was still breathing, and his eyes, though glassy from pain, were open and possibly focused on me.
I stood over him, not even bothering to kick him or shock him again, but I took a step backwards. I wasn’t giving him the chance to do to me what the guy had done to Jesse during the break-in. I wasn’t sure I could pull off a bad-ass scar.
I turned around to see what Jesse was doing. He was on the phone. Given his hand was over the microphone and he was speaking with a passable Irish accent, he was probably on the phone with the police.
He hung up and immediately jogged over to me. “Okay, we’ve gotta get out of here.”
“What? Why?”
“Let’s put it this way. Do you really want people to know that you’re a superhero? We’ve gotta keep our secret identities…well, secret.”
Little did we know, eh? Although I haven’t gotten to that point, yet, have I?
I nodded, though I hated just leaving him there, lying on the ground, nothing keeping him from getting up and running away before the police arrived. But I hadn’t realized how resourceful Jesse was. He must have had the same thought, as he walked over to a pile of recycling next to the alley wall, untied a length of twine from a box and then roughly tied the guy’s hands behind his back, with me staring the guy in the eyes, daring him to move.
“All right.” I turned to the woman, who was sitting there with her cell phone out. She was still crying, her hair in her face. I walked over and squatted in front of her. “Listen, I need you to wait for the police, okay? Otherwise, he’s never going to pay for what…for what he almost did to you.”
She sniffed and nodded, clearly terrified. I didn’t really blame her, but I couldn’t deal with that at the moment.
“Good, then. We’re gone.” I grabbed Jesse’s arm and started running towards the night bus. We slowed after a block, just in time to see a cop car zip past, lights flashing but siren silent.
“Dude, you did it!” Jesse said, grinning from ear to ear and slapping me on the back.
I was a superhero!
Little did I know that, child of the digital age, the woman had pulled out her cell phone to take a grainy video of me. Within a day, I would be all over the news, pictured beneath headlines of “MYSTERIOUS SUPERHERO,” and the subject of talk shows, with physicists and scientists of all types denying the possibility of my existence.
Not that I can blame them, but hey, there’s video evidence. It’s a little harder for them to deny it when they have the eyewitness right there.
Jesse was pissed at me at first, but when neither of us ended up being talked to by police for a week or so, we calmed down—or, more precisely, he calmed down.
The way I see it? I’m a superhero. As long as I’m helping people, I don’t need to worry what anyone thinks of me.
At least, not until they know who I am, but that’s a different story.