Growing Pains • Ben 10 [On Hold]

Chapter 6: The Elephant In the Living Room

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Outside, the sun loomed hot and heavy. Paper-thin sheets of white clouds stood stark against the azure gleam of the afternoon sky, and on the road below, it appeared that all of Bellwood was out for the day.

Cars were reduced to indistinct smudges as they zoomed by the sidewalk. Children on their bikes and skateboards road in zig-zags on the pavement next to the Friday peak hour traffic. Leaves fell, as they were inclined to. Birds chirped, as bird tended to do. And standing in a loose triangle in the cramped kitchen of the Levin household, three teenagers conversed about the weather, school, and the consequences of time crimes.

About whether or not not-really-but-really abducting someone from a different dimension with no way of rectifying things by sending said person back constituted as a time crime. It could and it couldn’t. With Professor Paradox, connoisseur of all things pertaining to the laws of time and space, unaccounted for, there was no way to know. Not for sure anyways, as Gwen, nibbling on an apple core, told her cousin and her boyfriend while a lesson in French played through her headphones into her right ear.

She and Ben had arrived at Kevin’s earlier in the morning and heard his harrowing tale of Lennox fleeing from his bedroom window like a bird set free. Kevin had waxed poetic about the property damage the girl had been responsible for, and the irritation of having the pull the Plumber card with the local police; a modern-day Atlas bearing on his shoulders the burden of the sky. Or of a sixteen-year-old girl. According to Kevin, there was no real difference between the two.

He’d raised an eyebrow, skeptic, as Gwen told him he wasn’t the only one in their little trio to forfeit the pleasure of sleep in favor of doing something Lennox-related.

She had just barely held herself together by a single thread during the flight back to Earth from Galvan Prime, and as soon as Kevin dropped her off at her house the night before, Gwen had waited until he disappeared down the street to fall apart. Tears blurred her vision to the extent that her keys kept sliding past the lock to the front door, kept misaligning. On the sixth try and on her last legs, she managed to unlock the door and hobble to the living room couch before she really lost it.

Gwen would have given credence to pigs flying before she ever believed she, out of everyone in the entire universe, would be the perpetrator of such a careless action. That she could drop the pocketwatch.

For as long as she could remember, responsibility had been branded onto her prefrontal cortex with a stamp heated in a pot of coals. Her mother, stringent and coarse, had attended an all-girls’ Catholic school when she was Gwen’s age, and the lessons of accountability and reliability she crammed in those halls, she passed on to her only daughter. Whether she wanted to learn them or not.

As tiresome as it was having to hear day in and day out how important it was to disregard the self and make decisions that would benefit the whole, how smart it was to be smart, Gwen couldn’t say with a straight face the core values that were instilled in her as a child hadn’t ever come in handy. Especially when ten-year-old Ben, suddenly imbued with a ridiculous amount of power and a dwindled supply of sense on how to utilize that power ran pole to pole, brushing with death as he would a toothbrush.