Just Super

I rush into my bathroom, close the door, and turn the shower on.

“Frank?” Emily’s voice asks again.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I hold the phone right up to my face and whisper.

“Why are you whispering?”

“I don’t want my mom to hear. She locked my regular phone.”

“What did you do now?”

“I told her I’m trans and refused to change back.”

“Shit.”

I’ve never heard Emily curse before.

“I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed—”

“No, it was a fair question. I’ve done a lot of shit that I’d deserve that for.”

“Ugh. I’m still sorry.”

“I will survive your unforgivable cruelty,” I say, deadpan, “but if we really get into the apologies, we’ll be here all day.”

“Next question—how?”

“I’m pretty sure a guy I met on my transuniversal layover did something to our phones. I didn’t realize it until just now. I picked up this phone to take a pic, since mine is locked, and, signal.”

“Okay. I want to hear more details on this layover, but not now. Last question—Why?”

“That’s the same as ‘how’ isn’t it?”

“No, I mean why did you message me?”

I don’t answer right away. I could say ‘to see if it worked,’ and that would be at least partially true.

“You’ve been avoiding me since we got back, so it’s a little surprising to hear from you now, is all,” she continues.

“I just—” I paused. I didn’t know what came next, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you. I should hang up anyway. Mom might hear me.”

“It’s okay. I don’t mind. If we can’t talk on the phone, want to meet up?”

“Where are you, even?”

“Austin, Texas. I’m assuming you could reach here.”

“Of course, but, I’m grounded.”

“And you’re actually staying put? You are a changed girl.”

That gives me a little burst of warmth, which fades quickly when I think about my situation.

“She’s so angry. I don’t know what she’s going to do. She wants me to change back, of course.”

“Bad luck for her, then.”

She doesn’t even ask if I’m considering it.

“I really better go. Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For answering.”

“Any time.”

“Sure.”

“I do mean it. I’ll keep this phone nearby. Good luck.”

I hang up.

I’m getting hungry. No, I am hungry. I haven’t eaten since breakfast and it’s getting close to dinner time. 

I leave the bathroom and go to open my bedroom door to call to Mom, but before I reach it, I see that there’s something on the doorknob. It looks like a round shell, secured with a small padlock. I walk over to take a closer look.

It’s clearly designed to keep me from turning the doorknob. Mom must have done this while she thought I was in the shower.

“Mom!” I call out, through the door.

No answer.

I call again, louder. I pound on the door and call again. I don’t get it. She knows she can’t actually keep me in here. She’s either daring me to teleport out for some reason, or making some kind of symbolic gesture?

It feels like there’s some reason she wants me to teleport out. So I’ll have broken her rule? Just walking out would do the same thing. It has to be some weird grown-up dominance thing.

I message Emily.

        Me: She put this on my doorknob while we were talking

I add a picture of the device.

        Em: WTF? You’re locked in? What if there’s a fire

        Em: Oh. nvm. but, still

        Me: she must want me to teleport out. Idk why

        Em: Sorry ugh

        Em: You going to tough it out?

        Me: for now

        Em: Address?

        Me: Why?

        Em: ik someone who can get you a pizza

        Me: On the fifth floor, through a locked door?

        Em: Where do we go to school?

        Me: Who then?

        Em: tell me ur address and find out

I send her my address.

        Em: It’ll be a minute. toppings?

        Me: pepperoni. Any olives.

        Em: got it. brb

Who is she going to get to bring it? There are at least twenty other teleporters at school, but I don’t know if any of them either live close enough or have the range to get here. Can any of them even teleport from just an address?

The more important question, though, is ‘why?’.

        Em: ETA 7:10pm. Can you survive that long?

That’s just over an hour away.

        Me: Uh sure. Mom might give in by then, though

        Em: K. lmk if you want to cancel.

        Me: 👍🏼

I spend the next forty minutes browsing Instagram and crafting my first post. I look through a bunch first to get a feel for it. It’s pretty much like it would be here, except they use a pound sign instead of a caret to tag things.

I choose my three favorite pics from my earlier selfie session, paste in the text I’ve chosen, and post them.

I consider pounding on my door again, but decide against it. Then I think about flickering into the living room for just a sec to see if Mom is there. But, if she is, she wins. 

Instead I sit on my bed and scroll through other Earth’s Internet. I get absorbed enough in that, that I nearly jump off my bed when there’s a knock at my window.

Floating there, pizza box in one hand, is Emily.

“May I come in?”

“DId you just fly a thousand miles to bring me a pizza?”

“No.”

I wait.

“It was only nine-hundred-eighty-three miles—give or take.”

“Uh-huh. Look, I’m grateful and everything, but I thought you were going to just have someone drop it off. You coming in sort of defeats the purpose of me not teleporting out. Part of me being grounded is not having friends over.”

Emily raises an eyebrow. She needs to cut that out.

“What do the rules say about having enemies over?”

“I thought you didn’t want to be enemies anymore.”

“For old times’ sake.”

Hmm. She has a point.

“Come in.”

I take the offered pizza and step to my bed.

“Hold on,” she says.

She slips off her backpack and pulls out a tablecloth, which she trades me for the pizza. I spread the tablecloth out on top of my comforter. When I turn back, I catch her looking away quickly. 

“I think that’s my favorite thing I’ve seen you wear,” she says.

I’m still wearing the goth-punk-princess outfit. I hope my makeup is heavy enough that she can’t see me blush.

“Thanks,” I mumble. I take the pizza box and put it on the cloth. She hands me a can of fizzy water.

“I got plain,” she said, “I didn’t know what flavor you’d want.”

“Plain is fine.” I gesture at the bed. “Have a seat.”

We both sit down. The pizza is from The Science of Pizza. How did she know?

“Thank you,” I say, and take my first bite. So good.

She got it half with pepperoni, half with mushrooms, and the whole thing with kalamata olives. She takes a slice from her half.

“So good,” she says.

We eat our first slices in silence. Then our second.

“Why?” I ask.

“If I told you I stopped a mugging by the pizza place, would you believe me?”

“Absolutely. Did you?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Is that why you came?”

“No.”

I wait.

“I want to talk,” she finally says.

“We could have done that on the phone.”

“You could have hung up on me.”

“I could teleport away.”

“Usually, sure. But now I have you trapped.”

“I could ask you to leave.”

“Are you going to?”

I shake my head. We avoid each other’s eyes for what feels like forever. Finally I have to speak.

“I’m sorry,” we both say at the same time.

“Wait, what?” Again, both of us.

Emily holds up her hand to stop me. “What are you sorry for?”

“Whatever I did to make you so angry during the, you know.”

“You idiot,” she mutters, then seems to realize she said that out loud.  “Me, not you. Well, maybe you a little bit, too. But mainly me.”

“What?” I’m confused.

“I wasn’t angry at you. I was—still am, I guess—mad at myself. I knew dragging you along could put you in danger, but I did it anyway, and I didn’t even warn you. And then I stupidly let myself get knocked out and left you to face that nutjob on your own.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that. That’s the fault of the asshole who shot you.”

“I should have known it was coming.”

That triggers a memory—one of the videos I saw from the shooting. I pick up the phone from the bed where I’d left it when she showed up. When Emily asks what I’m doing, I hold up a hand. I find the video I’m looking for pretty quickly. It’s hard to watch.

“You did,” I say.

“I did what?”

“You knew it was coming. You pitched forward a split second before you were shot,” I say. “If you hadn’t, the girl at the button table would have been the one hit.”

“You can’t know that.”

“You can watch the video yourself, but I think that’s a terrible idea, at least for the next year or so. But I’m ninety-nine percent sure. When the bullet hit you, you fell straight toward her. That’s why you hit the table.”

She stares straight ahead for a second, then lunges toward me so fast that I couldn’t dodge if I wanted to. She wraps me in an inescapable hug and buries her face in my shoulder.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

I don’t know what to do, and just leave my arms hanging at my sides.

She lets go and pulls away.

“Sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay.” I slide my phone into my purse on the nightstand so that I don’t pick it up and start fiddling with it.

She looks like she’s holding something back—like she’s still feeling guilty about something, but I don't press.

“I guess I know why you’ve been avoiding me,” she says.

“I haven’t been—”

She raises an eyebrow.

“Fine,” I say. “Yeah, I thought you were mad at me and I’m a coward. You were at least a little mad at me though, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said I was going back to talk to the reporters to show off.”

“That’s not what I said, not what I was trying to say. I wasn’t mad at you. I was worried about you.”

She closes her eyes and I can see them moving under her lids.

“I was trying to say, before you blipped away, that your ego wouldn’t let you see the danger you’d be putting yourself in. I’m sorry about that, since apparently there wasn’t any danger, and I should have minded my own business, but I never thought you were doing it to show off.”

Oh. 

“About that…”

She waits.

“I may have gotten shot by some kind of dart.”

“May have gotten shot?”

“Was shot. I’m not sure if that had anything to do with my side trip or not. I’m glad I did the news thing, though. I checked their Internet while I was waiting for you. It didn’t stop the false flag claims, but a lot fewer people are taking those seriously.”

“You could have been killed!” she almost yells.

“You almost were killed!” I yell back.

I hear footsteps approaching in the hallway.

“Shit,” I whisper, “She’s been here the whole time.”

“Do you want me to leave?” Emily asks, moving toward the window.

“I don’t know. I’m not going to lie and say you weren’t here.”

She floats through the window and stops.

“I’ll be on the roof,” she says. “Message me, or just shout, if you need me.”

“Frank!” Mom’s voice comes through the door, “Do you have someone in there with you?”

“No,” I answer; she’s never learned to ask the right questions, “But I did.”

The door slams open.

Skip to summary

Mom’s eyes immediately go to the pizza box open on the bed.

“You did have someone in here!”

“I know. I just told you that, Mom.”

“Or did you teleport out and buy it yourself?”

“A friend from school brought it to me.”

“No friends over while you’re grounded, young man!”

“I was hungry, and you wouldn’t answer. I couldn’t eat without breaking at least one rule, so that’s the one I chose, and if you call me ‘young man’ again, I’m leaving.”

I trip over the words, but I get them out. 

“If you want to leave, leave, but don’t bother coming back!”

“I don’t want to leave, Mom.”

Tears are streaming down my face.

“Now you’re crying? Your father would roll over in his grave at the sissy you’ve turned out to be.”

“I love you, Mom. Why can’t you let me be who I am?”

“Who you are is a boy! You may be a fa—”

Emily is on the roof, true to her word.

I collapse onto its surface, sobbing.

Emily sits down next to me, her leg just touching mine. I lean against her and keep crying. From below, through my open window, I can hear Mom calling my name. A minute later I hear a crash from the ground below. Emily rushes to the edge of the roof.

“She’s throwing your stuff out the window.”

I flicker back into my room.

“Stop it! Mom!”

She’s approaching the window with an armful of my clothes. Not any of the remaining boy clothes, but my real clothes. She ignores me, but when she reaches the window, she stops with a gasp. 

Emily is floating there, arms crossed.

I’m scared. I don’t know what Emily is going to say, or how my mom will react. Even a small threat from Emily could get her in trouble, since she has powers.

“Thanks, Ms. Doyle, I’ll take those for you,” she says, in a sunny voice, holding out her hands.

Mom reflexively hands them over. Emily shoots up out of sight, but is back a few seconds later.

“Frank, you want to grab your stuff from the bathroom?” she says.

I take my backpack from its hook and go into the bathroom. I shove my makeup and face care stuff in, then go back out to my dresser. Mom has started on the top drawer, so I go straight to the bottom one, where I keep my jewelry. I dump it into the backpack with my makeup.

Both my phones were in my purse, which is nowhere to be seen. I hope it provided enough padding to safely break their fall. My computer is gone, too, so there isn’t really that much left I care about. I wrap my arms around the clothes hanging in my closet and flicker to the roof.

I drop the clothes, then flicker back to my room. Mom is staring at Emily. Emily is smiling cheerfully at her. I’ve been around Emily enough now to see the ice behind that smile. Mom is off balance and processing Emily’s unexpected presence, but doesn’t seem worried. If Emily were looking at me like that, I’d be terrified.

I get the rest of my clothes to the roof in two more trips. I move the pizza box, then toss all my shoes onto the picnic blanket, grab its corners, and make one more trip to the roof.

I’m weirdly calm when I flicker back to my room.

I step between Mom and Emily, so that Mom has to look at me. I’ve got all my stuff, but I don’t want to go. I want her to understand.

“Mom, please? I know it’s hard to understand, but this is who—”

“Get out.”

“I love you,” I plead.

“Get out!” she screams.

So I do.

Emily meets me on the roof a few seconds later. She walks up to me and opens her arms. I fall into them and let myself collapse again. After a while, I pull myself together enough to speak.

“Does breaking the sound barrier get snot off your jacket?” I ask.

Emily gives me a half smile.

“Do you have somewhere to go?”

“If I can borrow your phone, I can call The School. They can get me into a shelter.”

“Hold on.”

She takes out her phone and makes a call.

“Mum,” she says, “Can a friend sleep over tonight?”

I can’t hear the other side of the conversation.

“Yes, it’s her. Her mother kicked her out.”

Another pause.

“Thanks. Is it okay if she gets there before me? K. Thanks. I love you.”

She puts away her phone.

“Don’t worry, we have a guest bedroom,” she says.

I hadn’t really thought about it.

“Are you sure it’s okay?”

“I’m sure.”

“It’s only for tonight,” I say. “I’ll talk to the office at school tomorrow. They’ll set me up with something.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“Right. I can still call the emergency line.”

“We survived in the same house without killing each other for almost a week. I think we can manage two nights.”

She unlocks her phone and swipes around, then holds it up and shows me two pictures—one of the front of her house, one of a bedroom.

“We could have done this last night,” she says.

It takes me a second. She’s pointing out that it would be totally possible for me to be in Austin already.

“Thanks.”

“Just pile your stuff in the guest bedroom. You can go out and meet my moms, or you can wait for me to get there. Your choice.”

“I’ll probably wait.”

“Oh, hold on a sec.” She jumps off the side of the building. 

She’s back a minute later with an armful of clothes, and my purse slung over her shoulder. She drops the clothes with the others and hands me my purse.

“This and some of the clothes got caught in a tree. Your computer was smashed to pieces, but I found the hard drive and stuck it in the purse, in case anything can be saved.”

“Thank you. Again.”

She nods and swipes on her phone again.

“They know you’ll be there in a minute. See you soon,” she says.

And she’s gone.