Just Super

“Emily seems really nice.”

Denise and I are sitting on her bed. 

Emily and I hung out at her house until I needed to go home to help with dinner, which was not nearly as tense as it was last night. Then, after cleanup, Denise asked if I could hang out for a little bit. I wanted to see if Emily was free, but I also didn’t want to be a bad friend, so here I am.

“I’m glad she has the Denise stamp of approval. She likes you, too.”

“No jealousy that you’re hanging out with another girl? Especially one as devastatingly gorgeous as me?”

“Maybe a little, but she’s holding up okay.”

“Did she end up staying for dinner?”

“Yeah.”

“Do your aunt and uncle approve of her?”

“Yeah, but…”

I tell her about ‘the talk,’ and the followup talk with Emily. I leave out the whole thing about the incursion. I’m not sure how much Emily wants people in general to know that she does that sort of thing, and I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging.

“You’re pretty lucky,” Denise says.

“I know.”

My phone chirps with a message from Emily. I ignore it.

“You can check.” Denise rolls her eyes.

Maybe I wasn’t ignoring it as thoroughly as I thought.

Em: whatcha doing?

Me: Hanging with Denise. She says I’m lucky.

Em: I knew I liked her. tell her I said hi

“Emily says ‘Hi.’”

“Hi, Emily.”

Me: She says hi back. What’s up?

Em: nothing. Message when you’re home

Me: ❤️

“Ooh,” Denise says, “give her my number. I want to ask her something.”

I give her the side eye.

“Oh stop. Just give it,” she says.

I send Emily Denise’s contact info and a couple seconds later Denises’s phone buzzes. Denise types something. At least two or three messages go rapidly back and forth.

“I’m going to regret introducing you two, aren’t I?”

Denise gives me Bambi eyes. I glare back at her.

When she’s done laughing, we chat for another twenty minutes or so, then I flicker home. There’s still homework to do.

Wednesday morning, I email Ms. Beatriz about maybe doing some other community service besides just tutoring, so that I can be done more quickly. She replies with a link to a website where I can look up community service opportunities by zip code.

None of those are going to happen immediately, so my lunch hour is spent tutoring Sasha. She’s doing better in history than Simon was, but not by a lot. 

Yesterday, Emily, Denise, and homework (but mainly Emily) kept me too distracted to sign up, so I don’t have a testing room reserved for this afternoon. I don’t think I really need one for the next stuff I want to try, but I reserve one for tomorrow afternoon anyway, just in case.

After school, I flicker home and work on homework for a half hour, then flicker to Emily’s front door. I ring the bell, and a couple seconds later the door opens.

“You can flicker to my room, you know, when I’m expecting you.”

“But then you wouldn’t have to come let me in.”

Emily rolls her eyes and walks away. I follow her, locking the door behind me. We stop in the living room.

“My room or down here?” she asks.

“Is your room safe? Or will a stack of books and clothes fall on me?”

That earns me a glare.

“Your room’s fine,” I concede.

It’s much, much less messy than the last time I saw it. I wouldn’t call it neat or tidy, but it is definitely not the disaster area it was before.

“Oh, wow. You cleaned up. It looks good.” That’s stretching it, but she’s my girlfriend.

“Thanks!” She beams at me. “Where do we start?”

“First, what did you mean when you said that I was making your brain itch?”

“I can’t think of a better way to describe it. There was an uncomfortable feeling, and it was coming from you doing that constant flicker. It was sort of like loud static, but silent.”

“Okay. I don’t think that tells me anything.”

“Sorry.”

“What? No. No worries.”

“Okay. So what about the nose boop?” she asks.

“Oh, I figured that one out last night.”

“And?”

“I don’t want to get hit in the head with an eraser, so since there was a chance I wouldn’t be in the spot where you threw it, I wasn’t.”

“But the nose boop?”

“In what world wouldn't I want you to touch me?”

Ooh. I got her with that one. She blushes. I almost lean in for a kiss, but if I do, I know we won’t get to the other thing. For the moment, I watch her.

She collects herself and asks, “What’s next?”

“I want to know if I can flicker to other worlds, not just back to this one.”

“Are you sure that’s safe? What if you go and can’t get back?”

“Well, I’ve made it home twice now, once without even messing with a portal. I don’t see much chance of me making it there but not home. Plus, we have our phones—” I pull mine out and wiggle it “—to keep us connected if something goes wrong.”

“Why does it need to be now?”

“It doesn’t need to be now, specifically, but I’d sort of like to find out what I can do when it’s not a life or death situation.”

That seems to be what persuades her, even though we go back and forth a few times. When I tell her I’m trying for Jane’s Earth, she tries to get me to go for other Tiara’s world instead, but if something does go wrong, I feel like I’d have a better chance of getting help in Jane’s.

“I wish I could come with you.”

“You want to punch Darius, don’t you?”

“Just a little. Like, one light punch in the stomach. Maybe two.”

“I plan to stay out of his way.”

We hug.

“You’re going to need to let go,” I say, into her shoulder.

“Ugh. Fine. Go play in your parallel universe. See if I care.”

“Do you?”

“So much.”

I call her on my otherPhone and drop it in my pocket. My earbud is already in place.

I picture the spot in Death Valley where I met Jane and her less pleasant coworker. I don’t feel anything. I could have stayed in that world. Obviously, I couldn’t have survived in Death Valley for weeks, but maybe I could have convinced Jane to take me with her, and bring me back later. I apply pressure through my mark. Still nothing. I let it build for almost a minute, then stop. I wasn’t feeling any sense that I might get somewhere. I take a short break, then try a couple more times. Nothing.

“We were on the phone when you came back last time. Maybe you followed its connection?”

“Huh. I hope not. But maybe it wasn’t the phone. I wasn’t trying to get back to this world. I was trying to get back to you.”

That earns another blush.

“Okay,” I continue, “yes. I bet I can always get to you, but maybe I can get to someone else, too.”

“Other Tiara?”

“I was thinking Jane.”

“What if she’s with that asshole?”

“Then I flicker right back home.”

“Uh-uh. Away first, then home. You said it takes you longer to do this universe jumping stuff, and I don’t want you around him for a millisecond longer than you have to be.”

“Good point. Here goes.”

I focus on my mark. I could have been more persuasive and talked Jane into bringing me back to her base, wherever that is. I could have not accidentally antagonized Darius. I could have cleared quarantine, I could be with Jane wherever she is right now. I fall.

“Holy fuck!” 

That’s Jane. She’s at a desk. Her hand is about to slam down on a button.

“Wait! It’s me, Frank! I mean no harm to your planet!”

“I guess you made it?” Emily says in my ear.

Jane pauses.

“The girl from Death Valley, right?”

“Yep,” answering her and Emily both.

“Did the portal not get you home?”

“Oh, no. It did. I just wanted to pop in to see if I could.”

“Tell her I said thanks for not letting Darius try to kill you more than once.”

“My girlfriend—”

Emily giggles, then says “See? it’s not so hard to say.”

“—wants me to thank you for your help. Which I was going to do anyway.”

“Hmmph, close enough.” I can imagine Emily’s slightly annoyed expression in my head.

I explain to Jane what’s going on. I tell her about how I was able to use my mark to make the portal take me home from this world, about how I got myself home from hexapod mecha world. About how I’m trying to figure things out when it’s not an emergency. I even tell her about the phones.

“Daniel is going to be so mad when I tell him about those. He’d love to take one apart and see how it’s communicating across universes.”

“I’d rather he not. I wouldn’t want them to stop working.”

“I figured. He could do it without breaking them, though. Extratech is his specialty.”

“Maybe next time.”

“There shouldn’t be a next time. There shouldn’t be a this time. I should have hit the button as soon as you appeared. Hell, alarms should be blaring through the whole building now even without me hitting the button. Then there’s the whole germ thing.”

“Oh, I thought of the germ thing. If I hadn’t left this world, y’all would have quarantined me, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And at some point I’d have cleared quarantine, and wouldn’t be carrying any otherworldly germs.”

“Yeah, but—”

“So I’m not.”

“You can’t really be sure.”

I glance down at myself. “I’m pretty sure. I wasn’t wearing these clothes when I left. These aren’t even mine.”

I’m wearing some ripped jeans and a scoop neck t-shirt. I was wearing ripped jeans and a scooped neck t-shirt back home, too, but not these jeans and not this t-shirt.

“So,” I continue, “these are the clothes I would have been wearing if I had stayed here.”

“That makes my head hurt.”

“Mine too!” Emily chimes in. “You should come home now,” she adds.

“Emily says hers, too.”

“Look, Frank. How old are you?”

“Seventeen in a couple of weeks.”

“Jumping between universes is dangerous. When it’s done at all, it should be by well prepared, highly experienced teams. Not a sixteen year old on her own. Even if her girlfriend is talking in her ear.”

“She has a point,” Emily says.

They’re ganging up on me.

“Okay, okay. I’ll go home.”

“Actually, just a sec.” Jane holds up a hand to stop me.  “Since you were able to ignore Darius’s forcefields—”

“Only when I teleport,” I interrupt.

“—and your power doesn’t show up on our scans, there was a lot of research to do after your visit. I ended up with a nice bonus for getting a picture of your mark, so it only seems fair that I share what we found.”

“Ooh, people are paying for pictures of you! We’ve found your future career. Frank Doyle, model.” Emily is not helping.

She picks up a phone from her desk, swipes a few times, and waves it in my general direction. Both my otherPhone and my regular phone ping with an incoming message notification.

I check my regular phone. There’s a message with a file attached.

“How did you do that? There’s no way your phone is compatible with either of mine, let alone both.”

“I told you; Daniel is good.”

“Oh, man. I really want a way to have my otherPhone connect to stuff in my world.”

She considers something. “Hold on.” She swipes around on her phone. It pings.

“He’d need to take a pretty deep look at both your phones. Interested?”

“But yours did it with no problem.”

She holds up her phone. “One of a kind. He picked it up from an incursion and got it working. In two more years he might be able to replicate it.”

“Oh. Cool.”

We arrange a time this coming Saturday evening and she shows me pictures of the inside and outside of their apartment. She also makes it clear that I should not visit her here in her office again. If anyone else had been here, things could have gone very badly.

We say our goodbyes, and I flicker back to Emily.

By the time her moms get home, we have not done any more experimenting. Not with my mark, anyway.

When Emily gets to school Thursday morning, I’ve already been there for an hour. I’m not the only one annoyed at missing free time at lunch, it turns out; Sasha asked if we could meet before school for our tutoring session. It isn’t a problem for me, so now I get to spend more lunch time with Emily. Except it’s a B day, so that won’t be happening this afternoon.

“What’s the matter?” Emily hugs me from behind. I didn’t even know she was there.

“Oh, I got my lunch period cleared, but we don’t have the same lunch today.”

“That is pretty sad.”

I flicker out of her arms to behind her, so that I’m hugging her, instead. I plant a quick kiss on top of her head. PDAs are discouraged at The School, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.

“Hey, Frank, hey, Emily.” Cat is walking toward us, with a big smile on her face. “Y’all are so cute together.”

I can’t see Emily’s face from this angle, but I bet she’s blushing as hard as I am. She wriggles a little in my arms, and I can’t tell if she’s trying to get closer to me or further away. I hold on anyway. If she wanted out of my arms, there’s absolutely nothing I could do to stop her.

“Uh, hi,” I squeak. 

Emily manages a less timid sounding “Good morning.”

“Would you two like to hang out sometime? I’m in San Antonio, so it wouldn’t be too hard.”

“Um…” I have no idea how to handle this.

“Maybe?” Emily saves the day again. “We’ve got a lot going on right now—”

Cat smirks at that.

“—but we’ll talk it over and let you know, okay?”

“Sure. No rush.”

We wait for her to get out of earshot (which is pretty far for her), before saying anything. In the meantime, we look at each other awkwardly.

“She was definitely flirting with you,” I note.

“She was flirting with us. She didn’t ask me out. She asked us out.”

“Wait, that was like, asking us out on a date?”

“Duh. She even shifted to girl-shape before she came over to us. Didn’t you notice?”

“I was busy smelling your hair. My eyes were closed.”

Yay! I earned another blush! I choose to ignore the eye roll that comes with it.

“So.”

“So.”

“I don’t think I’m ready to share you right now,” I say. “Is that okay?”

“It is definitely okay. I don’t want to share you right now, either.”

I feel extremely warm and fuzzy inside right now. We hold hands as we walk into the school.

“Did you look at that file Jane gave you when you got home last night?” Emily asks.

“I went straight to bed when I got home last night.”

Emily’s moms invited me for dinner, then we went back up to her room to “work on homework” after. I don’t think either of her moms actually bought it, but they played along. I think they like me for some reason.

We chat about other stuff until the five minute bell rings, then we chat some more as I walk her to class. A couple seconds before the late bell rings, I flicker to my own class.

“Frank!” Bella is waving me over to her table. I haven’t really talked to her or her friends since before I nearly killed everyone, so I’m a little wary about going over there. On the other hand, I don’t have any other great ideas, so I head that way.

“Hi. How’s everybody?” I ask.

Lisa and Bella are fine, but Haley doesn’t answer. She looks away and doesn’t say anything to me. 

Bella notices Haley’s silence and rolls her eyes. “Don’t mind her, she’s in a mood.”

I’m not sure what to do in a situation like this. Ignore her? Ask how she’s doing?

“Sorry to hear that,” is the best that I come up with. I slide into the open seat. Of course, it’s across from Haley. She spares me a glance as I sit, but otherwise continues to ignore me.

I catch up with the others for a while. They mainly want to know how Emily and I ended up dating. I give them a short version, and as I wrap up, Haley emits a loud sob.

“It’s not fair. You almost destroy the school, and end up happily dating her. I haven’t done anything wrong, and I’m going to be old and alone.” Haley finally speaks.

It takes me a second. “Oh, you let Lora Lee do her thing, didn’t you?”

Bella answers for her. “Apparently she’s still going to be single at twenty-eight. The horror!”

Lora Lee’s mark lets her, by touching you, give you three visions of possible futures. With each one further in the future than the previous.

“Twenty-nine, and I’ll have a cat. A cat!” Haley sobs some more.

I decided a long time ago never to let Lora use her power on me. Who wants to know what horrible future lies ahead? Or, even worse, what boring future? Haley is not making me regret that decision.

“Being single at twenty-nine isn’t bad,” I say. “Besides, they’re only possible futures.”

Lisa shakes her head. “Don’t bother, we’ve tried.”

“I still have the cat when I’m fifty!” Haley will not be comforted.

“That doesn’t mean you’re still single,” Bella says.

Haley puts her head down on the table and cries to herself.

The three of us ignore Haley and talk about other stuff for the rest of lunch. She eventually calms down and eats, and even joins in the conversation toward the end.

As we’re leaving the table she pulls me aside. “Sorry about going off on you like that.”

“It’s okay. I’m sorry I almost destroyed the school.”

She shrugs. “Shit happens.”

That should be The School’s motto.

School is out for the day, but Emily and I are still here. We’re in the testing room I reserved. I tried to convince her that we should release it (there’s always a waiting list) and go snuggle somewhere, but she decided to be the strong one this time.

“You were right. You need to know what you can do. Around here, something could go terribly wrong at the drop of a hat.”

We don’t get to work right away. While we do the check (we’re supposed to report any damage that was here when we got here so that we don’t get blamed) I tell her about the thing with Haley.

“I don’t see why anyone would go to her,” I say.

“I did. We probably wouldn’t be dating if I hadn’t.”

I instantly revise my opinion of Lora Lee. “How? What did she show you?”

“The first one already hasn’t happened—”

“What do you mean ‘it already hasn’t happened’? Couldn’t it still happen?”

She shakes her head. “Nope. I am one hundred percent sure that it won’t. The time has passed. As I was saying, that one didn’t happen, and the last one was very far away, and seems really unlikely.” She shudders. “I might tell you about them sometime.”

“So what was the second one?”

She sighs. “I don’t really want to tell you about that one, either. It’s… private.” 

It seems like, in this case, ‘private’ means ‘embarrassing.’ 

She goes on before I can press. “But it did make me decide that it was okay to date.”

That's good enough for me. I’m very curious, but I’ll take the win. “I’m going to send Lora flowers and a note apologizing for all the mean things I’ve thought about her.”

“Maybe skip the note.”

“Yeah.”

“You said you had something in mind to test,” I say as we finish the check-in procedures.

“Yeah, the whole ‘things that aren’t part of you’ bit—like your outfit changes and when you gave me the rose.” She pauses to smile at that. “Depending on exactly what you can do, that stuff could be useful in a tough situation.”

“Oh, I’ve narrowed a lot of that down.”

I tell her about things I’ve tried with clothes. If I have the clothes somewhere I could theoretically get to them without my mark, I can flicker into them easily. I can do sort of a mini outfit roulette by not thinking about any specific clothes when I flicker, but I’ll only get something that’s already mine.

The original outfit roulette only works with clothes I had before my change, or ones Mom bought me after. I tried buying a pair of cheap guy jeans and upgrading them with outfit roulette, but they just stayed what they were. 

“What’s special about the clothes you had before? Or the ones your mom bought?” Emily seems almost offended. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

I’ve had more time to think about this than she has. “I think if I buy boy clothes, then, obviously, I would have bought boy clothes, so they don’t change. But clothes from before are clothes I wouldn’t have had if I’d been presenting as a girl all along. And my mom definitely wouldn’t have bought me boy clothes if she’d always thought I was a girl.”

“That almost makes sense, sort of.”

“As for the rose trick…” I explain my preparations for that.

“Why did you buy it if you could just flicker it into existence?”

“I wanted to buy you a rose.”

“But could you do that without buying it first?”

I try that. I could have bought another rose this morning. I could have left it in a plastic water bottle in my locker again. I could have brought it with me here. I flicker.

I show my empty hand. “I guess not.”

“Why? Why doesn't that work?”

“I don’t know.”

“How about your baseball bat from your bedroom?”

“That’s Van’s.”

“Then it’s a good test.”

I don’t bother creating the chain of events in my head. It’s pretty obvious how I could have it. I picture it in my hand and flicker.

“Cool. Can you put it back?”

I flicker again. No bat.

“Now, that creepy stuffed gargoyle Mr. Mercer keeps on his desk.” Emily suggests.

“It’s not creepy, it’s cute.”

She rolls her eyes.

I give it several tries before giving up.

“Hmm. How about Ms. Mungo?”

“Who’s Ms. Mungo?”

“My stuffed lion? Who you almost crushed to death last night?”

“I didn’t know she was there!”

I’m able to summon Ms. Mungo on my first try. Emily grabs her from me immediately.

“It’s okay, Ms. Mungo, I won’t let her hurt you.”

“Hey, you’re the one who asked me to bring her.” Purely for the sake of science, I try to flicker the lion back into my hand. That doesn’t work. I report the results to Emily.

“Okay, ignoring that you just tried to steal my lion, how does any of this make sense?”

“I don’t know, but I have sort of the beginnings of a why.”

“Please share.”

“During history I looked at the notes Jane gave me. First off, they’re all plain text. It’s a pain to read. There’s even some ASCII art. It—”

Emily glares at me.

“Fine.”

I explain what I found.

“Jane’s people think (like, ninety-percent sure) that my mark represents a word, or partial word, or maybe concept—there were a lot of footnotes which were hard to follow in plain text. If they’d just—”

Emily clears her throat.

“Right. Apparently my mark, and the rest of them, I guess, looks like a symbol from the language of the gods.”