Prepare to Die! (26 page)

“We just need to find something we can steal,” I said. “We shouldn’t stay long.”

“I’m a pirate,” Laura said. “I steal innocence.”

“Nobody here has any of that,” I said. “Except Adele.”

“Hmm. And that particular booty is clearly marked as yours.”

“Watch it, sis,” Adele said. “And keep it down.” I noted that Adele hadn’t actually disagreed with Laura’s statement. It made me think of the next few days. Of what might happen. It made me happy. It made me sad.

I tried not to look at Tom’s room when we walked upstairs. The door was open, and I could see the posters on the wall. I couldn’t help but look to see if the world map was still there. It was. There were still thumbtacks on all the places he’d wanted to visit. Sorry, Tom.

Beyond the glance at the map, I moved on. Apple and Laura started to go into the room, but Adele gestured them back, whispering, “Tom’s room,” in a voice that I wasn’t supposed to hear, but I did, of course. I gave them no hint that I had heard them (I have a good poker face) and we moved on down the hall.

My key hadn’t fit in the front door. I hadn’t thought that it would, after so many years, but faced with the realization of the failure (I’d had to make sure not to twist the key too strongly, because breaking locks and/or keys is child’s play for a man of my strength) I’d become momentarily maudlin (it changed the years that I had carried the key away from being utilitarian into some sort of desperate grasping for the past) and then suddenly happy… because when your key doesn’t fit in a door, then it feels more like stealing, and I very much wanted to steal.

“This is on your list, right?” Laura asked. “Going through your old house, stealing things? Nice!” She was moving through my bedroom doorway along with me, pressing into my room. Because she was topless, because she was squeezing through a narrow space, and because she was Laura, and because she was a pirate, her breasts moved against me. It made me feel like I’d done something wrong (it’s often terrible, the training that men go through in life… the hoops through which nurture forces us to jump, even when nature thinks everything is fine, just fine) and I quickly (at three times normal human speed) looked to Adele. She just rolled her eyes. She’d lived a long time with her sister. Apparently, this wasn’t anything new.

There wasn’t much that was new in my room, either. My bed was still there. It was the same bed, because it had the same scratches where I had put in the initials of all the girls in town that I’d wanted to date. It was a code that nobody else could have cracked, not even Checkmate himself. Sure, “
AL
” (the largest letters) might be linked with Adele Layton, and “
LL
” might refer to Laura Layton (sorry about that, future Adele) but how could “
TTG
” be linked with anyone? What girl had “
RHT
” for her initials? The answers (
Ticket Taker Girl
&
Red Haired Tourist
) were known only to myself. I wondered if Adele had written about these coded mysteries in any of her blogs, articles, or books. I couldn’t possibly ask, though, without giving away all the codes, including GTO (
Gorner Twins, Obviously
) and that damning LL, so I just ignored my (seemingly ancient) bedpost scratchings and fondly ran my fingers along a set of Sherlock Holmes novels, editions from the 1950’s that had been my grandfather’s. They were still on my bookshelf, still the same books (my grandfather’s name, Roger, was written with faded letters on each of their spines) but now arranged with several books that hadn’t been mine. Books on science. Medicine. Philosophy.

“Some of these books aren’t mine,” I told the three women in my childhood bedroom.

“I know,” Adele said. “I was the first one to spot it. Of course, I’d been here before.” Laura started to say something, but Adele continued, drowning her out with, “And then when I came back, a few years ago, I saw that there were different books. Nobody is willing to admit it, but I think it’s because you were supposed to be a shining light, retroactively superhuman and superhero, so SRD planted books that made it look like you were a whole hell of a lot more studious than the average teen boy.”

“I was studious, but it was for war stories and how to get girls into bed. Which reminds me…” I trailed off (it was probably a poor moment to trail off, in that situation) and went into my closet. There used to be a folder in there that had a collection of photographs (torn out from the worst/best of my Uncle Buzz’s selections of decidedly odd porno magazines) and a paperback copy of
Teenage Time Hero
, an “Erotica House” publication concerning a boy who learned how to stop time, and who then went on to save the world from a nuclear holocaust, meanwhile stripping a good number of girls naked and waking them up from their time freezes when he already had them in compromising positions. The women (sometimes in groups) were always happier about it than I suspected most women would be, but I did love that book. Tom had given it to me. I’d kept it tucked beneath the winter blankets and the board games in my closet.

It was gone. The folder was gone. Was it more of SRD’s intervention? It might have been, but at the same time my parents might have done something with the folder and the book; they’d had plenty of time when I was laid up in the hospital, and then afterwards while I was training at SRD.

“Looking for something?” Adele asked.

“Old perverted things. A folder. A book. Somebody threw them out.”

“Damn,” Laura said. “We never get to hold onto the perversions of our youth.
That’s
what’s truly perverted.”

Adele said, “It would have been weird to break into your old home and steal your teenage porno stash, anyway. Don’t you want to take something of value? I mean, personal value?”

“You’ve never been a teenage boy. That book had immense personal value. But… what I really want is some of my parents’ pictures. A horse painting, maybe. Some old photographs. By the way, you look sexy as a ninja.”

“Thanks. I feel sensuously sneaky. Should we go to your parents’ room?”

“Can Laura and I stay here?” Apple asked. She was spread out on my bed. A pretty Cleopatra was on my bed. She was tugging a pirate to her side.

“No!” Adele answered for me. She could see exactly why her sister and her somewhat-of-a-date wanted to stay, for a bit, in my room.

“Don’t destroy my childhood dreams,” I told Adele, tugging her from the room. I think if I would have done anything else, my childhood self would have ejected himself from the past and soared into the future to give me a well-deserved bitch slap. That bedpost wasn’t covered with initials for nothing. As I pulled Adele from the room (I closed the door, because it would have just been weird, otherwise, or at least it would have been tipping the scales to the much-too-weird, otherwise) I resolved to sometime return (I had a short few days for a window of opportunity) to carve a “:P” behind the “LL” on the bedpost (meaning Laura Layton: Pirate) and then add on an “AQN,” meaning
Apple, Queen of the Nile
.

Adele and I, two ninjas who were now alone, crept into my parents’ bedroom. It was much as I remembered it. The queen-sized bed. The dresser drawers. The exercise bike. The small table where Dad liked to read the morning paper and have his breakfast on days when my mom was out of town working on video shoots. She’d been the aide to a videographer specializing in political commercials. She hadn’t been political herself. She’d once told me that, having met so many politicians, she’d come to a conclusion that they were all just bundles of shit packed in boxes of arrogance.

There weren’t as many personal items in my parents’ bedroom. There weren’t any personal photos at all. I suppose I should have expected that. They’d had time to pack what they wanted, in those initial few weeks of my becoming Reaver, when I was first training at SRD, and before they had moved to the
Mysterious Place That They Moved To
. They would have taken anything that meant a lot to them, although I’d heard they’d been instructed to destroy any pictures of me. There was no way they could take the chance of someone looking at their family pictures and saying, “
How adorable. Your son looks just like a young Steve Clarke, which makes you his parents, which means I should call Octagon right now, or maybe the tabloids, and either way I guess you’re royally fucked. And… oh! Steve looks so adorable in those short pants
!” Likewise, they’d taken every photo of themselves or the rest of the family. Couldn’t have anybody touring this house and saying, “
What a nice photo of that couple, who are, incidentally, dead ringers for that couple I saw in XXXXXX
.”

Paladin had mentioned to me, several times, that it was lucky, for him, that he’d run into the accident at the sheep farm, busting his nose right before coming into his powers, because that one thing… that one slight disfiguration, was enough that people never really connected the two faces. Well, in his case, it was
that one thing
, and the fact that nobody could believe Paladin had ever been human, or, better put, couldn’t believe that there was a time when he
hadn’t
been
superhuman
. In my own case, people wanted to believe in scandals, in things that would strip me down to size… to make me level with the masses. Or below. Anyway… the photos were gone.

Besides all the photos, my parents’ clothes were gone, which was fine by me, because there are probably men who would want examples of their dad’s undershorts or their mother’s lingerie as a memento, but I don’t number myself among that ilk.

“Here’s a good painting,” Adele the Ninja said. The painting was one of a horse munching on meadow grass. A mountain in the background. A setting sun. Bright colors. I looked for anything menacing (Mom had told me that the painters of such subjects, the professional ones, would often get bored and therefore subversive) but there were no clouds formed into suspect shapes, or open barn doors from where glowing red eyes were peering from the darkness, or any groups of flowers that had been slyly arranged to form any vulgar words or body parts. I couldn’t remember the painting from when I’d lived there, though. The thought of Mom finding it at a garage sale, spotting it all by herself, buying it while I was laid up in the hospital or punching a lion and thereby stealing a year of its life, that was heart-rending for me.

I said, “No. Another one. I can’t remember that one.” My eyes were already on a simple painting of a peasant woman holding up a bouquet of flowers so that a horse (only its head and front shoulders were depicted) could nibble away at the petals and stems. It was a painting that my mother had loved. She’d wondered about the story. Had the woman picked the flowers for the horse, or had someone given the flowers to her, and she’d afterwards decided to feed them to the horse? If that latter… why?

The painting now had a plaque that read, “Unknown Artist: Circa 1950’s.” I thought about taking the plaque as well, but decided against it. It belonged to nobody but those who had decided to turn my house into a tourist attraction. I wasn’t exactly angry about that, and from a legal standpoint I had every right to be in the house, and every right to take what I wanted, but… there was still a part of me that was very glad that I wasn’t asking for what was mine; I was taking it.

The painting had a simple wire hanger, but one that was wound around a screw that was bolted to the wall. It would have taken a normal man a good tug to tear it loose. For me, it wasn’t much of a fight.

“This is nice,” Adele said. She was inspecting a rock in her hands, moving it around in her fingers. It was a fossil of some sort. I’ve always loved fossils. The tabloids would probably say that’s because I have a desperate desire for the past. The tabloids never let anyone love anything out of love. It’s always desperation.

The fossil was a complete ammonite. Looked to be from the Cretaceous period. It was about the size of my hand, with the shell appearing like a tightly curved ram’s horn. It was very familiar to me, and when Adele, noting my interest, handed it to me, the memory came flooding back.

It was the fossil I had found on my last (real) day in Greenway. The one I’d pocketed out at the quarry with Tom and Greg. I’d put it in my bedroom before sneaking off to the Selood Brothers Sheep Farm to see if we could find out any secret information concerning Warp living in Greenway. Instead, we’d found sheep shit and that ubiquitous date with destiny that the poets like to talk about. I hate poets, and I hate most dates with destiny. One thing about destiny is that it only ever goes on blind dates.

“We have to take that,” I told Adele. I told her what it was, and when I had found it. She nodded, eyes wide, as if it was suddenly an artifact rather than a fossil. The house abruptly became smaller to me, more oppressive, and I realized how many mental land mines were inside, waiting for me to stomp my big fat foot right on them.

“Does your sister usually take long to… do… things?” I asked Adele, losing momentum in the description.

“You mean… do I think her and Apple are done in your bedroom? Probably not. But I can roust them if you need me to. Are you okay?”

“There are a lot of memories here. They’re suddenly grabbing at me.” Adele was the only person in the world to whom I would have told that truth. No wonder I stayed away from her for nine years. Telling the truth is a difficult thing.

“Let’s get you out of here, then,” she said, understanding what I was talking about. That helped. Being who I am, being Reaver, it’s easy to think that I’m the only one with certain types of problems, as if it takes being doused in radioactive stem cells in order to want to forget the mistakes you’ve made in life, and the things you’ve lost.

We moved down the hall (not looking at Tom’s room… not looking at Tom’s room… not looking at Tom’s room) on our way to my oldest sanctuary. We didn’t reach its safety before Adele put a hand on my shoulder (it seemed stronger than Paladin’s hand had almost ever felt) and, then, without looking at me, she said, “Your list. The will. It’s like, you’re closing your life down. You better not be coming back to me just so that you can leave again, Steve Clarke. You better not be doing that.”