Evolution Read online

  “About Peter’s—um—tennis lessons…”

  She smiled and nodded.

  “How—how do you know he actually covers every room in the house before going back to the start line? I mean, is there, like, a camera or temperature gauge or whatever hidden in the rooms that record his movements?” I scratched the back of my head while returning her smile with an embarrassed little grin.

  “You silly thing,” she said with a laugh. “Unfortunately, we don’t live in a comic book. Life isn’t that interesting in a superhero’s home. When I help him in his training, he tells me which rooms he goes to. That’s all I need.”

  “Okay.”

  “He sometimes goes way above ground and takes advantage of the rooftops. Did he mention that?”

  I nodded.

  “I guess it helps him, practicing in an environment that’s basically his, um, battleground, but knowing that my boy’s up there, zipping around three or four stories above the streets, gives me the hives.” She shook her head. “The choices he makes sometimes…”

  “And you’re able to keep track of his training when he goes outside? It’s a little more complicated, isn’t it?”

  Mrs. Barlow leveled me with an intense look. It was sudden. I wondered if I’d somehow offended her. Considering my current track record with my own parents, I wouldn’t be surprised if I had. “Peter doesn’t mess around, Eric. He isn’t capable of being dishonest.”

  I nodded and dropped my gaze to my hands on my lap, wondering if Peter wasn’t capable of dishonesty because he was naturally honest or if he was genetically manipulated into behaving a certain way.

  “Oh, God,” I whispered, mentally slapping myself and cussing like a sailor for thinking along those lines. I could be such an idiot. When I finally looked up and met Mrs. Barlow’s gaze, I found her watching me with a pretty weird, unreadable expression. If I’d felt nervous walking into the room with her, I now felt downright creeped out at being examined like that. So I defaulted to my trademark dimpled smile even while I was totally shrinking, all embarrassed, in front of her.

  Chapter 2

  No other place marked seasons the way Vintage City did. In short, it showed nothing other than sun and rain—more on the rain than the sun. Fog came in sometimes, too, but I think that was mostly for effect with its predictable drab grayness unless one of the factories had another accident. In that case, the fog took on a pretty interesting cast. It felt like walking through curtains of vaporized vomit, with the hospital’s urgent care suddenly enjoying a boom in its walk-in patient statistics. Actually, Dad would confirm that last part because, yeah, he’d been one of those walk-in patients and almost had to set up camp there, waiting for help, because the place was packed. Too bad patients couldn’t sue the weather.

  Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if my generation, having inhaled all kinds of gross chemical crap since we came into this world hairless, toothless, and broke, were doomed to give birth to three-headed babies. And then die hairless, toothless, and broke when the time came. God, what a life.

  Fact was, I’d been marking the days since Magnifiman first showed up and was floored by the realization it hadn’t been that long.

  “No way! Jeez, it feels like forever!” I muttered, scowling at the calendar that was tacked up on the wall beside the door, one of those cheap freebies that my dad got from his job. For this year, the calendar’s theme was Dogs Playing Poker, the current month being a reinterpretation using Michelangelo’s style. Nice to know that Dad’s hard work was appreciated.

  “What was that, honey?”

  “Oh, nothing.” I quickly shuffled over to the dining table, where Mom had been sitting for the last half hour or so, scribbling down a list of stuff for me to buy. It was more like repeated scribbling then scratching out. “Mom, you’re giving yourself a hernia writing a grocery list. What’re you planning to cook tonight?”

  She didn’t look up. I watched the pen scratch out a couple of words, hesitate, then go back and black them out with dark, jagged lines. “Spaghetti and garlic bread,” she finally said.

  “I can go and get us a frozen dinner. It’s no big deal. You should take it easy tonight and not even bother cooking anything from scratch.”

  “No, no, no, don’t be silly.”

  “I’m serious! You look pretty stressed out and tired. Don’t worry about cooking.” I moved away before she could stop me. “One family-sized frozen spaghetti dinner, coming up.”

  Mom sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Don’t get anything that’s not on special this week, okay?” She pulled her wallet out of her purse, which lay in a battered lump on the table, and fished around for some bills.

  “Okay.”

  “It’s been tough lately at work, and we can’t afford to be frivolous.” She handed me a twenty and patted my arm, giving me a wan smile before turning away and shuffling over to the cupboards for her coffee mug. “And be careful out there.”

  “Okay.” I smiled back at her, hoping she didn’t see through me.

  * * * *

  The Jumping Bean wasn’t hiring, and neither was Olivier’s. It was a bit of a blow, but after further thought, I figured I didn’t want to see my favorite hangouts de-glamorized from my perspective behind the counter.

  My three-block walk to the nearest supermarket turned into a zigzagging six-block trek with my book bag, in which I stuffed an old folder with extra copies of generic job application forms. Where’d I get them? I kind of just snagged a handful of those things from the holder in a random store. Don’t know if that counted for stealing, but I wasn’t tackled by store cops at least.

  It was also a zigzagging six-block trek of knocking on shop doors and looking my humblest or most confident, depending on the business. I only hoped my clothes didn’t count against me as it had been a while since I’d bought new gear. Then again, I also hoped people would take one look at my second-hand fashion sense and say, “Jesus, give this kid a job!”

  No one wanted me, though, and after buying frozen spaghetti and garlic bread, I was too bummed to go straight home. I wandered around for a bit, taking in the sight of Vintage City’s moon face façade, which looked more like an epic case of acne cross-breeding with chicken pox. Here and there, scars from Magnifiman’s battles with the Trill could be seen, despite all the money put into reconstruction and stuff. Thick steam rising through grates on the pavement barely hid the battered sections from the view of passersby.

  I passed near the aerial tracks and saw that construction was close to being done. God only knew how much of the city’s money went into all these repairs, but I could only imagine a near-empty treasury and our mayor still crying his eyes out over the shitty luck that kept coming his way. What the hell were those geneticists thinking, screwing around with people’s babies and turning them into destructive machines? What about Vintage City, where most of them, probably all of them, still lived? We’d been lucky so far that the bystander casualties had been few, and the injuries weren’t life-threatening. I sure didn’t expect that good luck to last, especially once superheroes and supervillains reached the top of their game. The damage to buildings and streets was more extensive, but maybe not as extensive as it could be, when all of those genetically-manipulated kids were to come into power, for good or bad. God, I couldn’t even wrap my mind around the craziness that their fights would cause.

  The aerial tracks passed over the main square, and I saw that the founder’s statue was still headless. Well, sort of. Someone had temporarily replaced the missing head with a pumpkin, which was well on its way to turning into organic mush, but what a gothic-looking thing it was!

  I looked around, and people were too busy scurrying from one place to another to notice. Either that or they didn’t care. It wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t. That pumpkin up there was the fourth to be perched on the headless statue after City Hall went into one meltdown after another and had the first vegetable removed. I guess people wanted something between
the shoulders of our city’s founder, and a good-sized pumpkin did the job while supervisors argued over the replacement head and where to find the right source for it. I sure didn’t blame the people of Vintage City. Who’d want a headless man for their founder? This time around, City Hall decided to leave the current pumpkin alone and let it rot itself into oblivion.

  I made a note to swing by the square at least twice a week to check on the pumpkin’s progress and see if it would be replaced by another vegetable. I hoped one of the Asian markets would donate a durian. Then we’d have a punk rocker for a founder, and that’d kick major ass. I heard that durians stank, too. That’d be way better!

  “Hey! Skinny boy!”

  I felt a rough tap against my shoulder and whirled around. Mrs. Zhang stared up at me from under her makeshift hat—a plastic grocery bag which she tied around her head and topped off with a garish scarf for aesthetics. Thick, colorful wool cocooned her pudgy figure against the weather, which didn’t at all do her black galoshes any justice.

  “Hi,” I said, smiling back despite my moroseness. “Been out shopping?”

  Mrs. Zhang tugged around a kid’s cart—in bright yellow—stuffed with grocery bags. “Yeah,” she said. “Not for restaurant, though—for home.”

  I suddenly felt embarrassed by the pathetic, half-filled plastic bag I carried and tried not to eye Mrs. Zhang’s treasure too much. Reminders of my parents’ current money issues came back, and with them were reminders of my job-hunting busts.

  “Why you out late? You don’t have homework to do? Or you run away from home?”

  “Oh, I went to the store for my mom.”

  “You should go home, then. Too dangerous out here. Bad guy with kinky small assistants still loose, and two nights ago, they left sticky nose prints on my restaurant’s windows. Bastards.”

  “Can I haul your groceries home for you, Mrs. Zhang?”

  “I’m going to restaurant first. If you want, you can escort me,” she said, nodding and grinning. “Though still too skinny to be any use in case of mugging. What the hell you doing? Fasting? You Catholic?”

  “I started out Catholic, yeah, but I’m at a crossroads right now. I’m leaning toward Buddhism, actually.”

  “Huh. Trying to get on my good side. Not working. Eat more, and I won’t be so grumpy with you.”

  I escorted Mrs. Zhang to her take-out place. We weren’t mugged, and bless her, she gave me complimentary Broccoli Beef for dinner. If she kept this up, she’d be bankrupt, and I had my genetics to blame.

  Mom was grateful for the freebie, but I could tell her pride was stung. “You really should turn down Mrs. Zhang whenever she does this, Eric,” she said while I helped her set the table. “She’s too generous, and I’d hate to eat into her profits. I know she likes you a lot and treats you like her own son, but you need to be more firm with her.”

  “She’s only trying to be nice, Mom,” I said.

  She stared at me, her eyes narrowing. “I know she is. But we’re not a charity case, either. Your father and I can take care of us well enough.”

  “Okay, okay. Sorry. I’ll say no next time.”

  She snorted and left the kitchen. The spaghetti was in the middle of being nuked, and I carefully measured out the rice into our old rice cooker. I wish I could tell my parents about my job-hunting, but I just couldn’t bring up the subject. Mom would be offended, I was sure. An occasional freebie from Mrs. Zhang’s kitchen was enough to get her dander up. What more if she found out I was tiptoeing around, looking for a job because my Dad’s hours had been cut back since last week, and Mom had been passed over for a promotion in favor of some brown-nosing jerk who was hired only a year ago?

  I’d worked hard enough in school to raise my grades a little, but all of that time and dedication was in danger of being eaten up by a part-time, minimum-wage job that my parents hadn’t approved. Of course, I’d yet to land a job, but that was neither here nor there. Better yet, I’d yet to land a job that wouldn’t require parental permission because I was only sixteen, according to my state’s labor laws. And that most likely meant getting something underhanded that would send me to lurking in dark alleys wearing a trench coat and a hat and selling passersby black market merchandise.

  Whatever. I was determined to help out, no matter what. I’d deal with parental wrath when the moment came.

  * * * *

  There’s a lingerie boutique in the hoity-toity district that’s looking for employees.

  “I can tell you’re enjoying this,” I growled at my computer screen, crossing my arms over my chest—skinny-ass chest, as Mrs. Zhang called it.

  Oh, come on, Eric. Don’t tell me helping women look sexy intimidates you.

  “Uh, no, but I’d guess they’d freak out, seeing a boy in the middle of all that lace and silk and perfume.”

  But you’re gay!

  “Shut up, Althea.”

  What, aren’t you?

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s not a good match. Is there anything else out there?”

  I’ll bet you you’ll look good in drag. Peter agrees, but he still prefers you looking like a boy.

  “What? You two have been talking about me in drag? What the heck?”

  Nah. It just came up in conversation during our online game. I was trying to create a new character, and I thought of someone in drag, but somehow mutated barbarian drag queens weren’t even an option when I went through my dashboard. Well, so I bitched about it, and somehow you came up in conversation, and Peter started getting a little kinky.

  I could’ve boiled water right then and there with all the heat I must’ve generated, blushing. “Okay, I think we’re treading Too Much Information waters here. Time to move on.”

  But don’t you want to know what Peter said about you in makeup?

  “No! Hell no! I don’t do makeup!”

  You used to wear eyeliner, duh.

  “That’s not the same.”

  Yeah, well, Peter loves it, in case you didn’t know.

  I paused. “Really?”

  Really, really.

  “You mean, like, full makeup?”

  Eyeliner only. He said it’s very 1980s. You know, I should be paid a consultation fee for gay boy beauty tips. Now, are you going to try out that lingerie boutique or not?

  “Uh—no.”

  We’re in a recession. You shouldn’t be so damn picky. Okay, how about this. A little antique shop just opened up in Fourth Street. Mom and I have been there a couple of times, and I think you’ll like it. It’s a tiny shop, and it’s crammed with all kinds of creepy old junk—just your thing, Eric. The owner’s this woman who makes me think of gypsies. Like old-time gypsies that you read about in books from, like, two hundred years ago.

  “She said that she’s hiring?”

  She complained of being the only one in the shop, so I figured she was being a little passive-aggressive on the hiring issue. Mom put a hold on a couple of chairs, you know, like a layaway thing. I can go back and put more money into it, and you can come with me to check the place out.

  I mulled things over. Fourth Street wasn’t too far from where I lived. It wasn’t in the downtown area, which meant less traffic, but hopefully it also didn’t mean less business, especially if the shop was a small one.

  “Okay. Just let me know when. No one around here knows about my job-hunting, so don’t say a word about it.”

  Wait a second! Your parents don’t know? How’re you going to get their permission?

  “I don’t intend to. If I have to, I’ll forge their signatures on whatever stupid forms the school gives me,” I replied with growing impatience. Damn these child labor laws! Yeah, life suckage just extended itself to the state level.

  Oh, great. Your parents will have a cow, and I’ll be blamed for helping you sneak behind their backs and pull something illegal.

  “I promise you that won’t happen.”

  You’ll be breaking the law! You’re a scummy criminal, and you’re not even an adult!


  “No, I’m desperate, and no one understands. My parents won’t. Anyway, I gotta go. I want to turn in early tonight. It’s been a long, depressing day.”

  You mean to say you’re kicking me out because Peter’s due to fly into your room and sweep you off your feet for another kinky spandex moment?

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  Whatever. Okay, I’m going. Just don’t forget the pill, all right? I’d hate to be a godmother at sixteen.

  “I hope you find a boyfriend soon. Like, right now.”

  Don’t you threaten me!

  “Thanks for helping out, Althea. I really appreciate it. Now beat it.”

  I’m not helping you again, scumbucket! You got me this time, but no more.

  “I love you, too, Honeybunch.”

  You suck. See you in school tomorrow.

  The screen blinked and then turned black. As I tended to do after an online chat with Althea, I pushed my chair back and bent down, double-checking my computer and confirming that, ayup, the darn thing was unplugged the whole time. I shivered, all weirded out. I’d yet to get used to some aspects of Althea’s powers. Communicating with her while my computer was dead was at the top of my list.

  I shuffled over to my bed and plopped down, turning my attention to the antique shop. It was sure worth a try. At this point, after so many dead ends in my after-school job searches, I was willing to try anything. Well, anything but lingerie, that is.

  Chapter 3

  Unfortunately I was out of eyeliner—tossed the stupid thing out after I got called into the principal’s office over my cosmetic preferences a long time ago. Then we had a bit of a pink eye scare in school at one point, and I refused to have anything but my glasses come anywhere near my eyeballs. Now look at me—sniffing around for something borderline carcinogenic that could cause total blindness. I’d risk shriveled eyeballs and eyelids that’d be fused shut from so many infections and for what? Yep. Funny how love worked. On my way to school the following morning, I stopped by the 24-hour supermarket for my favorite Not Even God Can Smudge This Shit Out Of Your Eyes brand, the cheap, made-for-penny-pinching-teenagers cosmetic line called Gingham Girl.