Super Powereds: Year 3 (15 page)

“Gotcha. And what is your relationship with Angela?”

“She is the sister of my best friend, something of a student mentor to me, and someone I regard as a good friend as well.”

“That’s it?”

“I think I covered everything,” Chad reiterated. They paused again to set up an array of shots for a group of girls that had been working their way around the bar all night. Once that was attended to, the conversation resumed.

“Last question. That emotional chemical-balance stuff, you’re doing it right now, aren’t you?”

“Of course. I always keep myself in check.”

“Stop,” Roy ordered.

“Stop what?”

“Stop holding yourself together,” Roy explained. “I don’t mean go on a psycho killing spree or anything, just stop mandating what you’re feeling. Let whatever happens, happen.”

“I fail to see what good that will do,” Chad protested.

“Give me a little credit here.”

“Very well,” Chad said begrudgingly. He closed his eyes for half of a second; anyone watching would have thought it was just a long blink. “It’s done. For now, my brain will react to stimulus in the same way as anyone else’s.”

“Glad to hear it,” Roy said. “Now, I want you to look over at Angela. She’s leaning on the far wall by the speaker booth.”

Chad obliged, turning his head to take in the girl he’d seen countless times and could have easily mentally reconstructed using his enhanced memory. This seemed like a pointless exercise, and Chad held on to the sentiment for exactly as long as it took for Angela to enter his field of vision.

The twisting feeling in his stomach vanished, replaced by a sense of it dropping away. He dimly remembered going on roller coasters in his youth, before his power blossomed, and that they had given him a similar sensation. His skin felt a touch warmer, but when he assessed it, he found no change in actual temperature. Oddly, he could feel his heartbeat, as though it was striking against his chest more vigorously.

This was not a normal reaction to looking at a person. Chad was sure of it. He began looking back through his memories of Angela, checking for other instances of this happening. As he replayed each though, the strange feelings only grew stronger. He nearly flushed at one memory of sitting atop her after winning a rough grappling session. The emotional piece of Chad, long accustomed to being silenced, seized the opportunity to be heard and roared with all it had. More memories, more strange sensations, a compounding seizure of emotion that had been bubbling under the surface but unable to crest the shore until now.

“Hey, Chad, you okay, man?” Roy asked.

Chad finally yanked his eyes away from Angela and turned them back to his fellow bartender. This helped quell the influx of strange sentiment, but not by as much as he’d hoped it would.

“I . . . I suspect I have feelings for Angela. A very large amount of them.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured too. What you were feeling earlier was jealousy at the idea of another dude tapping the girl you like.”

“Oh,” Chad said, turning back to look at her once more, against his better judgment. She noticed him looking and gave him a wave and a flirty wink. She did that sort of thing all the time, but now Chad found himself almost paralyzed by the innocuous gesture. He mustered up the will to wave back only because of his special ability.

There was no skirting it now; Roy was right. He cared far more for her than he’d realized, than he’d wanted to realize. He admired her, respected her, and desired her. His friend. His mentor.

His best friend’s sister.

“Oh,” Chad repeated, not for the final time that evening.

24.

Vince, Mary, and Camille found the wait to get into Six-Shooter long, but quick-moving. Despite his misgivings about college bars, at least the bouncers understood that every moment the customers spent standing in line was time not spent hurling alcoholic beverages down their throats. Once they reached the front, a large man in a dark t-shirt examined their IDs (some real, some leftover forgeries from Nick and the beach trip), then directed Vince to the closest register to pay the cover fee. This led to a slight bit of confusion, where Mary had to explain to her friend why girls weren’t charged for entry at places like this. Once Vince got the concept, he forked over his five dollars, and all three received wrist bands.

Camille’s first thought upon entering the club was that the insulation in the front area must be fantastic, because the waves of sound hadn’t been this powerful before they crossed through. Then she realized she was standing next to the speaker, and found that, with a little distance, the music dimmed to where conversation was possible. Unlike the club they went to freshman year, this was a place where talking while dancing was an option, though what implications that carried she couldn’t really guess. Instead, she focused on staying close to Vince and Mary while they navigated the sea of bodies in desperate search of a place to sit and set up shop. Despite their roving eyes, the trio was found by someone else before they could spot their friends.

“Hey there!” Angela greeted, clapping a hand on Mary and Camille’s shoulders. “I didn’t expect to see you three tonight.”

“Roy and Alice are working, aren’t they?” Mary asked politely.

“They sure are. Come on, let me get you to a table, and then I’ll let them know you’re here.” Angela’s ability to part crowds wasn’t dulled by even this hectic environment, the forms of fellow college students moving away instinctively at her approach. Camille would have given quite a bit to be able to pull off such a trick; however, she suspected it required something she knew deep down that she didn’t possess. Angela exuded confidence, just as she always had, and the rest of the world seemed to pick up on that.

After a brief walk, Angela deposited them at a high-top table with four stools, then made her way back into the crowd, assuring them she’d fetch their friends for them.

“I didn’t know she worked here,” Vince said, once their escort had departed.

“Alice mentioned it,” Mary replied. “Evidently, she’s a shot girl, and very good at it.”

“What’s a shot girl?” Vince asked.

Mary weighed how much to tell him. Sometimes, explaining things to Vince could lead down a rabbit’s hole of questions, revealing how little he knew of the outside world. She decided to keep it simple and hope he just accepted what he was told.

“A shot girl is someone whose specific job is to walk around giving people shots of liquor,” Mary explained. “Since shots are in high demand, it lets the waitresses and bartenders focus on cocktails, while still giving the customers what they want.”

“Like how ranged combat and close combat specialists can work in tandem to maximize the effectiveness of their attacks,” Camille chimed in.

“Oh, well that makes sense.”

Mary said a prayer of thanks that Camille had tagged along, then turned her attention to the club that surrounded them. Normally, she kept her telepathy suppressed in places like this; the swell of voices wasn’t so bad, but the loud music made it nearly impossible to hear anything useful. Professor Stone had been on her about pushing her limits though, so while there was downtime, she decided to do a little mental eavesdropping.

At first, it was just what she was used to: the cacophony of voices, mixed together with the blasting bass, scrambling everything into a garbled mess. Mary took some deep breaths and sharpened her focus. She sifted through thoughts like a prospector scanning for gold. It was slow going; however, bit by bit, she began finding patterns and putting together cohesive thoughts.

The young man two tables over was trying to work up the courage to ask a redhead at the bar to dance.

Two girls in the corner were wondering if their friend was drunk and needed to be hauled off the dance floor.

A bartender near the front was wondering what the odds were of being able to bang that new blonde shot girl.

Mary pulled away from that last thought; she’d gotten a bit of his sentiment along with the words in his head, and it wasn’t a feeling she much cared for. Sexual attraction was nothing new to Mary, she’d overheard that sort of thing many times a day. But there was a feeling to this that disturbed her. Something unpleasant in the way the intentions were strung together. Given that Alice was blonde, new, and looked the way she did, it seemed a fair bet that she was the shot girl in question. Mary made a note to give her friend fair warning not to accept dinner invitations from that guy.

She’d almost gotten her telepathy completely turned off again when a nearby thought grabbed her attention. It was an impulse of attraction, but this one lacked the creepy taint of the bartender eyeing Alice. This thought was admiring how cute the short girl with the pale hair sitting at the nearby table was. It wondered whether the muscly guy with the silver hair was her boyfriend, or maybe he was with the girl with the mousy brown hair who was making weird faces.

The last part of that made Mary very conscious of her own expression; she’d probably let more show than she should have. As nonchalantly as possible, she turned around and looked off toward one of the bars, like she was searching for someone. Instead, she allowed her peripheral vision to find the mind she’d been listening to. He was cute, she had to give him that. Dark hair, nice blue plaid shirt, lean frame that would have passed as fit outside of HCP standards. The other men around him were similarly attired, and they all seemed to be talking and laughing and having a good time.

An idea formed instantly.

“Hey, Camille,” Mary said, turning back around. “Looks like someone has an admirer.”

“I do?”

“Yup. That guy over my left shoulder thinks you’re cute. He can barely take his eyes off you.”

25.

Before Camille (or anyone else at the table who might possibly have had a reaction to Mary’s declaration) could say a word, Alice materialized out of the crowd next to their table.

“Well, isn’t this a surprise?” Alice said, though the girls at the table noticed a distinct lack of descriptors, such as “good,” or “pleasant.” Still, she greeted them with a round of hugs that were made awkward by the height of the stools, paired with the relative shortness of Camille and Mary. “What brings you all out?”

“We wanted to come show support for you and Roy on your first day of work,” Mary quickly explained. “Angela was a pleasant addition.”

“Get ready for another then. Guess who Roy is bartending with?” Alice prompted. “And Mary, no cheating.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Um, I’ll say Violet,” Vince ventured. “She seems like she would enjoy bartending.”

“A well-reasoned attempt,” Alice complimented. “But wrong.”

“Alex? No, he would have mentioned something to us,” Camille said, talking herself out of her own attempt.

“How about you just tell us,” Mary encouraged.

Alice stuck her tongue out at her dormmate in presumed retribution for killing her fun, then complied. “It’s Chad. He and Roy are both new bartenders here.”

“Darn, I should have guessed that. I did see him go talk to Mr. Mears on the first day,” Vince chided himself.

“A lot of people talked to Mr. Mears,” Camille reminded him. “I never would have guessed Chad either.”

“It is surprising,” Mary concurred. “So, how is the first day, or should I say night, going?”

“It’s still a little early, but if the last hour is any indication of what to expect, then I definitely don’t think it’s going to be boring,” Alice told her. “I’ve sold like forty shots without doing much besides walking around.”

“That’s really impressive,” Vince said.

Alice gave him a light shrug. “I think Angela has tripled that. Then again, she’s more proactive than I am.”

Almost perfectly on cue, Angela appeared across the bar, visible because she had leapt on top of a table. She held up one of the test-tube shots from her tray—one glowing a bright, toxic-looking color— and began to speak. Though the distance was far from what would stay audible in a club (read: greater than five feet away), it was still clear from contextual clues that she was making some sort of toast. When she concluded, there was a loud holler of agreement, and the large cluster of males congregated around her lifted their shots up toward the ceiling, then downed them all as a group. Angela let out a yelp of enjoyment, took steps toward the edge of the table, and leapt into the arms of one of the more muscular young men around her. In many bars, this would have been an unacceptable spectacle, however, given the rowdy nature of Six-Shooter and the number of shots she’d just sold, no manager was going to come running to chastise her actions.

“Yeah, so, it looks like I’ve still got a lot to learn,” Alice said, once The Angela Show had concluded.

“I am so incredibly glad Mr. Mears didn’t send me to interview here,” Mary mumbled, more to herself than the others.

“Well, we don’t want you to fall behind from talking to us. How about a round for the table?”

This suggestion was met with staggering silence, because it had come from the mouth of Vince Reynolds. All three women stared at him, eyes wide as each contemplated various scenarios involving doppelgangers and mind control.