Hero Stalker

Part Fourteen

Amanda dropped me off at the Sushi Queen flagship store on Cable Street. We exchanged phone numbers. "See you tomorrow," she said, and a shiver ran down my spine. It's really happening to me.

The rest of my work day went by in a blur. How could I be expected to concentrate after that? Thankfully, Valerie was meeting with her investors, and I only had to fill their plates with sushi. My boss only stopped the meeting once to scream at me for bringing up chopsticks instead of forks. Afterwards, she dragged Morgan Randolph, the youngest of her investors, out to dinner. So I got the evening off. I caught the thirty-two bus and made it back to home in time for dinner.

Ten other women had arrived there before me.

They and their small children occupied my living room when I returned. The smell of casserole hung thick in the air. Someone had also brought tamales.

"Gloria!" Mom shouted when I walked in. She was sandwiched on our ratty blue couch between a young Latina woman in a Bayton Heroes sweatshirt and a skinny white woman with a large tattoo of a pterodactyl poking out of her v-neck. I wondered if it went all the way over her breasts. "Come in! You know Maria and Janice, right?"

Young Single Mothers Community Support Dinner. Another community outreach program, courtesy of WSOC. Mom had been hosting it ever since she traded the Victims of Psi-Crime Support Dinner with her co-worker. Thirteen-year-old me had asked the victims too many inappropriate questions.

 "Hi, Maria. Hi, Janice," I said. Her three-year-old son was digging around the base of Mom's fake ficus. Maria's daughter was chewing on a dirty sock she'd ripped off the foot of a smaller toddler, who was crying under the coffee table. Half the women here were younger than me. I quietly thanked God that Mom's insurance covered my birth control.

 "I was just talking about James. About how proud we all were when he got his scholarship."

James had been three years ahead of me in school. He'd always been good at math. That, plus being gay, made him a target. I'd gotten in my one and only fight of high school with a girl who'd called him a fag. I'd lost. But James had snagged an engineering scholarship and graduated with honors from BaytonUniversity. Now he designed sailboats and made a hundred thousand dollars a year. We were all proud of him. The way Mom talked, you'd think he was the only child she was proud of.

 "It's important to look for talents in your children and encourage those." Mom sipped her coffee. "That's the best way to prepare them for a successful career."

Janice leaned forward. The pterodactyl leered at me. "Do you have a talent, Gloria?"

"I have an associate's degree in business management," I snapped. "Do you have a degree, Janice?" 

 "Gloria. Be nice." Mom's eyes narrowed. I winced, realizing just how mean I'd been.

The door flew open. A young woman ran in, sobbing. Laura Palmer—she lead the church choir and worked at the Wawa's up the street. I saw her every time I went to buy gum. She'd had her baby when her fiancé was in Afghanistan and he'd broken up with her via Skype two months later.

"A man stole my purse!" she wailed. "He grabbed me by the corner. It had my rent money in it!"

I knew that purse. It was covered in shiny light pink fabric clamshells. She carried it everywhere. Ugliest purse I'd ever seen.

A black eye was blooming on Laura's face. I wasn't sure if she was crying because of the pain or because she and her son might get evicted, but that didn't matter. The world snapped around me like a rubber band.

I'd heard a dozen stories like that from my mom, from my friends, from afternoons making sandwiches at the shelter. Lives shattered by single, cruel acts. The police didn't care about a missing purse. Heck, when I'd been a kid, they hadn't cared about murder south of The Vineyard.

But Dark Justice had. He'd done something. He'd been a hero. He'd stood against evil.

I ran up to my room and locked the door behind me. The old black sweatshirt Annabelle had bought me at BayCon was jammed under my bed. I yanked it out and turned it inside-out to hide the logo. My old, stinky sneakers lay in the back of my closet. I pulled them on.

Then I clambered out the window, braced my foot on an old pipe, and dropped down into the garden. I'd perfected the move back whenever I wanted to sneak over to Jake's for the night, but this time the ground felt a thousand times more solid under my feet.

A light rain had begun. I pulled my hood up over my face and slunk out of the garden, hoping like crazy Mom didn't decide to look out the side window. Mud squished under my sneakers. I noticed my begonias had perked up, and my black-eyed-susans needed to be trimmed.

The gate squeaked as I closed it behind me.