Xx: Chapter 12

Xx: Chapter 12

While many things happened in the month between Susan’s arrival and now, they are mostly banalities that need no more than a simple summation: Evangeline developed a means of marketing her “character” to both wealthy, widowed socialites and impoverished youth alike; Vince and Lloyd set to work on a CCTV camera that would specifically seek out upskirt shots (each for his own reasons); Roxanne managed to avoid slaughtering too many innocent civilians; Susan was, suddenly, cured of the narration in her brain.

“Until right now. Bollocks.” She muttered, wiping the gunk from her bleary eyes and opening up her closet. There was the typical gamut of teenage clothing hanging up—too-tight jeans, too-small shirts, the occasional giant cardigan for sick days, and one dress shirt in eggshell, at Eloise’s recommendation.

“Bone’s too dark for a ginger like you,” she had said. “You have to go close to white, not off-white.”
Not being the type to cause unnecessary conflict, Susan agreed. And anyway, it wasn’t as though she was doing much of anything with her new salary, other than buying food and paying Roxanne to get her the occasional carton of cheap cigarettes. Bending the law seemed no significant issue to an expat hired as an optihuman preformer, and anyway, wouldn’t they book Roxanne for murder before supplying tobacco to a minor?

“You never know,” she said, reaching toward the back of her closet, “This is America, after all.”

Deep within the bowels of the storage space, behind a hanging shoe rack and a pile of socks, there was an abomination of spandex and day-glo and nylon and bad taste. She had the pleasure of calling it her work uniform. It was an obnoxiously enthusiastic endorsement of the colour pink, if nothing else.

“If you think it looks bad, you should try wearing the damn thing.” Susan struggled with her leggings, heaving them up above her waist and grunting like a Ukranian weight lifter. Unlike a Ukranian weight lifter, when she let go, there was no relief: they snapped into place on her skin, leaving a nice red welt to compliment the pink of the leggings and the orange of her multitude of freckles. “I think I liked it better during the month that you weren’t here, disembodied narratorial voice. It was a lot more quiet.”

She didn’t mean that.
Susan missed me horribly when I was gone.
“No I didn’t. Not in the least.”
She said that, but... She wasn’t thinking.
She didn’t mean it. It was just morning angst, or teen angst, or one of those diseases that cause people to say horrible things about their friends that they haven’t spoken to in a month, not even bothering to call, or anything.

“You didn’t... Pop in, either, voice. You left me to do all of my preliminary training without so much as a snarky commen—“ Suddenly, she was stricken with a mysterious ailment that prevented her from speaking, that would only come to be cured when she started treating others with respect for a change. She glared angrily at the cieling, and continued dressing herself in silence while simultaneously making very rude gestures, bloody impudent child.

Then she proceeded to dress in silence, pulling on her white shirt (also spandex), black “over-knickers” to which optihumans were so prone, finishing up the ensemble with a gingham cape in neon pink and white. It was just about as gaudy, wretched and tacky as tacky could be—she was the perfect starter hero.
Her training had begun two weeks before, and was composed mostly of learning basic trick rolls, safe falls and simple acrobatics which would have embarassed the Power Rangers. In addition to the physical aspects of public herodom, she was required to take a few acting courses. They taught basic enunciation, so that she could successfully devote the next few years of her life delivering lines like: “Watch out, Midnight Blossom!” and “Justice is served!”

Susan tried to say something, but her mouth still wasn’t quite working.

In keeping with company policy, she had been assigned to an existing team—the hero/villain duo of Evangeline and Roxanne. Evangeline’d had an opening for a spunky young sidekick for a while, but ever since Butterfly Rainbow Sunshine Lass had left the position back in ‘06 due to “clinical depression,” there hadn’t been any applicants. The job wasn’t going to encompass much beyond tagging along to their “fights” and posing behind Evangeline in the promotional photoshoots, but she still had to wear the costume (even for training). As a result, everyday was an epic struggle between ass and leggings. The outcome was not easy to forsee.

There was a knock on the door—three gentle raps, followed by a jubilant cry of “Morning, fuckface!” Evidently, Roxanne had emerged from the basement hovel she called her home. “Y’all gonna let me in, or what?”

‘Or what’ was not a viable answer. Susan opened the door.
“What, no ‘how are you doing, my American comrade?’ I expected more from a cultured limey shit like yourself. Really letting me down here, kid.”

She responded by looking blankly at her shoes. Instead of their usual vulgar pleasantries, they stood in the doorway of the tiny apartment awkwardly, rocking on their heels, while Susan looked frantically around for a way to appease the unbelievably charismatic narrator into giving her voice back. I did, because I’m unbelievably charitable and a great person.

“Sorry about that,” Susan said, “I just kind of... Lost my voice. For no real reason.”
“It’s cool,” Roxanne replied, inspecting the contents of the open closet, “That kind of thing happens all the time. Like when you’re stuck in the badlands of Nevada with peyote, an aboriginal shaman, and a stolen convertible full of escorts, ya know?”
“I’m afraid I don’t, sorry.”
“I guess y’all had to be there. Nice costume, by the way—what dipshit designed that for you?”
“Evangeline” She sighed a hearty sigh. “She said it would make me more... Marketable, I think? Something about starting preformers needing to be obnoxious to get attention. Has she said that before? Is that true? Roxanne?”

Roxanne was in the shoe-cupboard of a kitchen, peering into the fridge with great interest. It was mostly empty, with one sad jar of marmalade and another sad jar of marmite, purchased at great cost from the British import shop. Small tokens of home were the best. The freezer was full of white bread.
“Cup of tea?” She offered, turning the kettle on.
“D’ja have anything, uh, stronger?”
“I’m seventeen. Legal drinking age here is twenty-one.” It’s amazing the things you pick up in your first month. “You’ve lived in America your whole life and it’s never changed. You should know that.”
“Rules are a little different in Texas. Some more than others.”
“If you say so. Tea?”
“With three sugars.”
They stood at the kitchen counter, consuming the first few drops of tea in silence. It wasn’t the tense, awkward kind of quiet that you want to break, but more like the kind of silence that kicks in on long car rides, after you’ve just had a too-large meal at some cheap and tacky family restaurant, and all you want to do is watch raindrops roll down your window. Everyone feels the same as you so they don’t talk either, and you’re secure in the knowledge that there’s nothing to discuss anyway.

Susan disagreed. She wanted to discuss something.
“So, Roxanne, what brings you up here?”
“Me?” She was pouring the contents of a snake-leather mickey into her mug. “I’m just supposed to see if you’re all ready and prepared for the show today. ‘S your first real one. You knew that, right?”
“Evangeline... Neglected to tell me that.”
“Big fuckin’ surprise there, huh?” Roxanne laughed, but she looked over her shoulder, too. “Let me tell you something as a friend, Limey: the less time you spend around that girl, the happier you’ll be. And another thing—watch what you think around her. She can read minds.”
“Isn’t that, like, her OptiHuman Ability?”

Confidently, she pushed up her sunglasses. They gleamed in the sunlight of the open window.
“Exactly.”
She paused to take a healthy swig of “tea,” and belched loudly.
Under any other set of circumstances, having an alcoholic Texan with built-in weapons stinking up her kitchen and communicating in disjointed sets of frontier-babble would have been worrying. Here, dressed like a very liberal advocate for wet suits as businesswear, it was vaguely comforting. “Anway, enough fuckin’ chit-chat. Y’all ready, or what?”

She was indeed ready, or at least close enough not to bother with arguing. Susan began clearing the dishes, while Roxanne stood up and began poking around the meagre apartment. It looked like the average fresh-out-of-mummy’s-house living environment, which meant two things: it was littered with vestiges of failed adolescent rebellion and it was also extremely ugly.

Two of the four walls had been painted blue rather poorly, resulting a splattering of periwinkle everywhere else in the room, from the baseboards to the cieling to the sofa to the window frames. She’d chosen a wretchedly feminine shade of blue, like women’s snowboards or the flowers on a white china vase.

“Well, we’d best be going, huh?” Said Roxanne, growing frustrated with the decor.
“I suppose we should, yeah.”