EXCERPT - Hero is a Four Letter Word

The Maddening Science - PART IV

I drop back down into my seat, knees giving way without my say-so. "Well, this is a turn," I admit.

"Everyone knows!" she spits. "It's hard to miss. Same eyes, same cheekbones."

"I've never seen your mother's eyes and cheekbones."

"What, were you living under a rock when she unmasked?"

I smile, and it's thin and bitter. "I was in solitary confinement for five years. By the time I got out, it must have been old news. And I had no stomach to look up my old nemesis."

Rachel looks away, and her eyes are bright with tears that don't skitter down her cheeks. I wonder if they are for her mother, or for herself, or because I've said such terrible things and her opinion of me has diminished. They are certainly not because she pities me.

Nobody pities me. I got, as I am quite often reminded, exactly what I deserved.

"What does your mother do now?" I ask, after the silence has become unbearable. There is nothing to count or calculate in the silence, besides the precise, quiet click of the second hand ticking ever onward, ever onward, while I am left behind.

"Socialite," Rachel says. "Cars. Money. Married a real estate developer."

"Is he your father?"

She swings her gaze back to me, sharp. "Why would you ask that?"

"Why does the notion that he might not be offend you?"

Her lips pucker, and with that scowl, I can see it: the pissy frown, the stubborn thrust of her chin. There is the Fantastic Floozy, hating me through her daughter.

"It doesn't," she lies. She twists her hands in front of her again. "Fine, it does. I don't know, okay? I don't think she knows. She wants it to be him."

"So do you," I press. "Because that would make you normal."

She looks up brusquely.

"Please, Rachel," I say. "I am quite clever. Don't insult us both by forgetting. The way you do your hair, your clothes, the law school ambitions, it all screams 'I don't want to be like my mother.' Which, if your mother is a superheroine, probably means that you are also desperate to not be one of...us."

"I'm not," she whispers.

"I dare say that if you have no desire to, then you won't be," I agree. I lean forward to impart my great secret. She's the first I've told and I don't know why I'm sharing it. Only, perhaps, that it will make her less miserable. "Here is something they never tell anyone: if you don't use your powers, if you don't flex that extra little muscle in your grey, squishy brain, it will not develop. It will atrophy and die. Why do you think there are so few of us now? Nobody wants to be a hero."

"Really?" she whispers, awed, hatred draining from her face.

"Really," I say. "Especially after the sort of example your mother set."

Rachel rocks back again, the furious line between her eyebrows returning, and yes, I recognize that, too, have seen that above a red domino mask before.

"Why do you say things like that?" she asks, hands thrown skyward in exasperation. She winces.

"Don't rip your stitches, my dear," I admonish.

"Don't change the subject! You wouldn't talk about the Kamelion Kid that way, or Wild West, or...any of them! You'd have respect! What about The Tesla? You respect him. I've seen the pictures on your wall and you—why are you laughing?"

And I am laughing. I am guffawing like the bawdy, brawling youth I resemble. "Because I am The Tesla!"

She rocks back on her heels, eyes comically wide and then suspiciously narrow. "But you...Prof killed The Tesla."