Power Trip

PROLOGUE/PLOT:

Sadie, Lydia, and Jaz are on a power trip. The events of a freak-accident summer party turn the girls from bitter liberal arts students into self made superheroes – strange science and bad beer leave them with impossible abilities. Comic book enthusiasts and strong, independent women, it seems like the right thing to do when they don a mask and take the night shift kicking around their community bad-apples. But it doesn’t take long for them to realize they’ve taken a few steps too far into a dangerous world: someone seems to know more about these powers than they do, and someone is very, very interested. As Sadie and her friends stumble their way through mishap and misadventure, they struggle with their new “super” identity – what it is, who wants it, and how to stay super without a mask.

Our story starts with a bit of friction. Not the kind of dramatic friction that pushes people to the emotional breaking point or drives the plot forward, and probably not the kind of friction anyone wants to hear about...

But friction. My thighs are rubbing together as I haul ass down the pavement, and it feels disgusting. Those little balls of fat on the inside of my legs are slick with summer sweat and I can hear them giving each other big, sloppy kisses with every step. Slurp. That was the handful of Oreos I ate for breakfast. Slick. The consequence of carbs. Smooch. My fat, stubby little legs are reminding me that I have terrible eating habits and I am lazy, lazy, lazy.

My phone – suffocating in the tiny pocket of my shorts – starts buzzing, reminding me that I am also late, late, late.

I wrench it from its place and stick it to my ear. “What?” I wheeze, unable to walk and talk without stretching my lungs. I am so out of shape.

“Sadie?” starts Jaz in her stern voice. She’s hardly the poster-child for punctuality, but it drives her crazy when someone else is late. From her end of the phone I can hear an air conditioner running in the background. Jealous. “Do you know what time it is?”

A car cuts a sharp right as I’m in the crosswalk, and nearly takes my toes off as it zooms in front of me. I can feel my face puff up with anger and I lift my middle finger at his rear-view mirror. My thighs continue with the slap-slap-slapping and there’s a knot in the back of my hair big enough to host a mouse family and there’s sweat building up in the crease of my eyelids.

The walk to work is my own personal hell.

“Yes, yes,” I growl. “I’m almost there. Our dearest Lydia was being a princess in the the bathroom for a literal hour.”

“And?” asks Jaz. It’s apparent that her angular eyebrows are on the rise and that she’s getting very, very impatient.

“And I had to piss sooooo bad! I had like four cups of coffee today and it all basically dropped right into my bladder.” I go silent as a halfway becoming male marches his dog by me, and try to appear collected, and try to breathe through my nose so it doesn’t sound like I’m an anti-athletic mess. “Seriously, I was peeing for like, forty seconds straight.”

“Ew…”

“I’m kinda proud.”

“Sadie.”

“You should’ve heard it. I’m an idiot for not timing it.”

“You’re an idiot, anyways. Please just get here. My shift ended ten minutes ago,” barks Jaz, and hangs up before she can hear any more of my bathroom adventures.

“Fine,” I say to an empty line, and hustle – really hustle – the last few blocks. I dive through the door with a big puff. The air conditioner is on high-blast and it feels like I’ve opened a portal to Alaska.

Jaz is sitting behind the counter drumming her fingers and counting her teeth with her tongue. Her eyes are trained on me as I catch my breath, cool my sweat, and waddle back to relieve her from duty.

“Why Jaz, my dear, your bangs are looking very indie-queen today,” I observe in my sweetest voice – an attempt to fend off whatever bitter remark she’s about to skewer me with.

She punches her employee ID into the cash register and clocks out, seamlessly folding in the inevitable retort: “You don’t really have bangs… nor should you.”

I wince, feeling the ghosts of haircuts past drape unflatteringly across my forehead. Jaz is mean. But then, she’s mean to everyone. Even Lydia, who’s too air-headed to be intentionally bothersome. There’s no friend too close or acquaintance too distant exempt from Jaz’s honesty.

She drops the register key onto the table and offers me a half-hearted wave over her shoulder as she slips into the heat. “I’ll tell Lydia to bring you an iced coffee or something,” she calls out. I watch as her lanky, ectomorph body stalks down the pavement without wilting like my fat deposits did.

The skinny bitch.

I grumble as I enter my ID, committing myself to the next eight hours ahead of me; a glorious shift as a glorious gas station attendant (with a glorious, center-part haircut that doesn’t need bangs).

I sit for three minutes eyeballing the magazine someone left, then decide immediately I can’t wait to leave…

This is probably a boring start – which, mind you, is entirely intentional. Because every incredible story starts somewhere boring. And Jaz, Lydia, and I are, at this point, the epitome of boring. Seriously, there is nothing special about any of us. We aren’t rich girls in a big-city playground. And Jaz likes to think she’s a genius, but none of us are really that smart. We aren’t the pretty girls – though Lydia has this killer cat-eye liner trick, Jaz has some beautifully sleek hair, and if I do say so myself I have some knockout jugs… We aren’t even that funny or cute or tragically hip. Two of us work in a gas station. And Lydia works the gelato stand at the local pool. We’re just three twenty-year-old girls with slightly-above-average pop culture literacy, en route to getting English degrees or something equally as useless…

So, what I’m saying is, we’re basically the perfect protagonists for an incredible story.

Now let me tell you about how we all get super powers.