Clueless Captain
By Alejandro Gonzalez
CHAPTER ONE
"Fuck this is pissing me off!"
Tiffany's shout temporarily drowned out the radio. Joey rolled his eyes as he brought the car to a stop. "Look, you should know better," he said. "I told you we had to leave almost an hour earlier, because the traffic would be bad. You were the one who had to spend two hours working on your hair."
"Man, shove it, little bro!" she shouted. "You haven't, like, ever actually dealt with your hair, so you might as well shut up!" She patted her hair to make sure it was still straight. "After all, my first day of college shouldn't be too bad, if we could ever fucking get there!"
The bumper to bumper traffic showed a bit of hope, and Joey could not be happier to be less than thirty minutes away from freeing himself from his older sister's presence. "Look, it's clearing up, and you need to chill," he advised. "You're twenty-four years old, you're not living with mom and dad anymore, and, holy shit, you even manage to have a fucking scholarship. I don't know how you ever managed to pull off four years of three-point-nine-five GPA what with your near constant worry about looks, gossip, and what not." He took a deep breath. "This is college. There are no more cliques, and nobody gives a shit about your hair. I fucking guarantee it."
"How would you…" She stopped mid-sentence after he shot her a look. "Oh yeah, early graduation and what-not. How did you pull off graduating high school at sixteen?"
He took a deep breath, resisting the urge to scream. "Remember? I won a science fair so hard it got me a meeting with a guy from the National Academy of Sciences."
She twirled one of her bangs. "So, what's college like?"
"If you actually ignore bullshit like clothing fashion, hair, and dating crap," he explained, "you learn quite a lot. You even might learn why high school sucks at teaching you anything."
She laughed. "Yeah, like, how it wasn't the guns that won the settlers America."
He raised an eyebrow and coughed up a laugh. "You actually read up on American history? Wow. I guess a broken clock, huh?"
"Hey, I might look like a bimbo," she argued, "but I'm not."
He laughed again. "Looks can be deceiving."
"So, today I only have two classes, so, it should only take about two and a half hours," she said. "You got somewhere to hang out so you can pick me up?"
"Yeah, yeah," he said. "Why am I doing this today and tomorrow, again?"
"Because my motorcycle's being worked on again, idiot," she remarked. "I thought I told you that."
"Yeah, I got it," he replied. A thought occurred to him. "Why don't you have a car like normal people?"
She huffed. "What, you mean that piece of shit used car mom and dad talked me into buying five years ago?" He nodded. "That thing always broke down. This motorcycle works a lot better and it gets hella gas mileage."
"Except when it rains," he commented.
"Well, don't fucking worry about it," she said. "I've got other people who can give me rides when it rains."
They finally broke free from the traffic and he drove towards the campus, taking the off-ramp. He pulled to a stop in a spot near the front, letting her get out and grab her backpack. "I'll be here at twelve," he said, waving her off. The door shut. "She'd fucking die without me."
He drove off. Fifteen minutes away from the campus, next to some old-fashioned spooky antique shop, was a comic book store he'd been looking for. He stopped in and began perusing the shelves. After reading the latest issue of several series, he bought a graphic novel compiling several Thor stories he'd been wanting to read.
He decided, on a whim, to stop by the antique store. Inside, an old man sat behind a decrepit, dust-covered wooden desk smoking a cigar. "Hey, kid, look around, if you need anything, just ask," he said, barely looking up from his newspaper.
"Just out of curiosity, do you have any sort of," he paused to think as he spoke, "I don't know, antique drawing desk or anything?"
The old man blew a puff of smoke, leaned back, and thought a moment. "Yeah," he said, his voice raspy. He pointed to the back. "There's one of those things you put on a desk to draw. You know, the weird-angled thing?"
Joey walked over and studied it. It was sitting on an old marble table. The wood appeared to be polished oak recently dusted and waxed. "Hey, uh, any story behind this?"
The man shrugged. "Been in my family since before my grandmother," he admitted. "Only thing I ever heard about the damn thing was that someone went crazy and died and my grandma bought it." He raised his eyebrows and lowered them. "Honestly, nobody ever drew anything in my family, so I thought, what the hell. Everybody who buys from this shop wants old plates, tables, silverware. You want it? Twenty-five bucks."
Joey almost gasped. "Twenty-five bucks? For oak? You got it!" He carried it to the front counter. He pulled a twenty and a five from his wallet.
The man put down his paper and rang up the sale on an old cash register. "First person in a month not wanting some plates or china cabinets," he said. "Here ya go."
Bored out of his mind, he drove back to campus, parked in a visitor's spot, and plugged his phone charger in and played Facebook games until he saw his older sister walking from the front entrance. He started the car and drove off.
Pulling up to the sidewalk to pick her up, she set her bag in the back and sat down. He noticed a wet spot in her long, black hair. "Hey, sis, um, anything I should know?"
She rolled her eyes. "You're so stupid," she countered. "It's from the break between classes. A bird shit in my hair and I washed it off."
He laughed a bit. "Nice."
"Oh, go fuck yourself!" She folded her arms. "Other than that, pretty interesting. I had inorganic chemistry and introductory physics." She looked in the back. "What's with the drawing board?"
"Antique shop next to the comic store," he replied. "Less than thirty for polished oak."
She shot him a look. "How do you know it's oak?"
"Because I had to help Uncle Ray paint cabinets for his carpentry business one time," Joey explained.
After a twenty-eight-minute drive, he stopped in front of her apartment building. She got her stuff and exited. "Pick me up at eight tomorrow," she said, "and that's my long day. After that, my ride should be done."
"I got it," he said. "Hey, do you still work at that office?"
"No," she replied. "That was a temporary internship. I work for a moving company now."
"How do you move stuff for a living?" he asked.
"I mostly drive the truck, you know," she said. "Well I'll see you."
"Yeah, good luck," he said, driving off.
She went upstairs, to her tiny apartment and washed her makeup off. She microwaved an instant meal and ate, then slipped into her work uniform. Picking up her phone, she called her coworker and friend. "Hey, Melissa?" she said. "I'm ready. Could you pick me up at the usual?" She waited for an answer. "That's great. Hey, are we working to ten or just eight?" Once more she waited. "Okay, eight it is." She got ready for her rounds.
Joey arrived back at his apartment and set the drawing board on his writing desk. He set his graphic novel on his bookshelf, sitting at his bed and daydreaming for a moment. He glanced over and looked at his academic award. His sister might not have been a dumb bimbo with big breasts, he thought, but she wasn't going to get a job at a research lab at eighteen like he did. No, she was a smart bimbo with big breasts. He laughed at the thought, and at the memory of all the dumbass boyfriends she had in high school.
He looked at his comic collection. It had various graphic novels in it collecting decades of Marvel and DC Comics. He saw his Essential Captain America volumes and had a funny idea.
"This ought to be good," he whispered. He set the big book on the side. He rifled through his collection of drawings and found a blank sheet of sketch paper. He hadn't drawn comics in a long time. It was one of his loves, but science was the field that came knocking first. He knew at the age of seventeen that, even though he loved drawing, he wasn't going to make a living out of it. He looked at some of his sister's selfies on her Facebook page and found a Captain America pose that fit the direction her head and neck faced.
He looked at the clock on his computer. Two-fifteen. He expected a fully shaded pencil drawing would take at least two and a half more hours. He grabbed a drawing pencil and a sharpener and began working.
Wow, he thought. The form of his sister, dressed in Cap's traditional suit and trousers, carrying the shield, slowly appeared. With careful strokes, he brought her feminine figure a new collection of muscles. While making effort not to exaggerate the musculature as the comic, he brought into mind the movies and used that as a mental reference. She had just enough muscle to look threatening, and not so much as to look cartoony. After completing it, he leaned back and laughed at his work. It made him laugh; the silly smile of her face didn't match the action pose that well, and that only made it funnier. He set his pencil down and went to turn on his scanner.
He froze in his tracks. The clock on the computer read two-twenty.
"What?" He raced to his phone. It read the same time. He thought out loud. "How the hell could that be five minutes? That's a two hour drawing, at least!"
As he looked over to the paper, a brilliant light shot out of the pencil markings. A copy of the drawing, in the form of a glowing light, circled above the paper before vanishing. What was left on the paper was not his drawing at all. Instead, it was a pencil drawing of her, exactly as she was currently, in a similar pose.
He dropped his pencil, backing away from the drawing board. Nope. This isn't happening, he thought. I'm going crazy. He turned away and raced to his computer, watching Youtube videos in a desperate attempt to forget the freak show that just happened, and pretend he imagined the whole thing.
On the other side of town, Tiffany was helping move light objects from a large house into the back of a twenty-five foot moving truck. She placed a pair of lamps in a box with some packing peanuts to avoid breakage. A familiar voice got her attention.
"Watersley!" Her boss yelled. "Come help Adams move the piano!"
She walked down the truck ramp and into the living room. Five people were positioned around the client's grand piano. "We're not moving this thing," Steve Adams, a coworker, thought out loud. "Not unless all eight of us take part."
To his left, a black guy, new hire, looked it up and down. "I'm wondering about the leverage, but you might be right," he admitted.
"The other three are moving stuff," Tiffany countered. "Let's just see if we can move this thing. If we can't, we'll get the others."
"One, two, three, heave!" Steve said.
Gripping underneath carefully, she lifted. She found it a lot lighter than she expected. She, not one of the heavier lifters of the group, found it confusing when her effort made it easier for everyone else. "Guys," she said, "I think we can carry this."
They meticulously carried it into the truck, making absolutely sure not to slip or drop it. After securing it with straps and padding, as well as other items, she went back in the house and went for the washing machine and dryer. There was no way she could carry these, she knew. She was about to signal for help, when a thought occurred to her.
Why was the piano so much lighter to her than she expected?
She bent down with her knees and wrapped her arms around the washing machine. This would be murder. With a quick push she was standing up. She looked at it from different angles, confused. The machine felt like it weighed almost nothing. She walked out of the laundry room, careful not to bang anything with it, and set it in the truck. After securing it, everyone stopped and stared.
"Damn, girl!" Steve replied. "You carried that thing all by yourself?"
"I've been working here four months," she said. "You learn all the leverage tricks." She noticed her lie satisfied his curiosity and that of the others. Honestly, she was mystified. Had she grown stronger? If so, how? She went back for the dryer. Once more, it felt nearly weightless to her. She might not have known where the strength came from, but it surely helped, she noticed. She got the chest of drawers, and several filing cabinets, and none of them posed the slightest problem. Her back, usually aching, felt fine. She hadn't broken a sweat either. In stark contrast to how her normal shifts went, she felt as though she could do this all day.
She sat in the truck after several hours of packing was done, and took a break. Her boss was driving this time, so she leaned back and let out a sigh. He glanced over. "Hey, Watersley," he said. "After that, where you worked almost twice as much as anyone else in the same shift, I'm giving you a dollar an hour raise." He started the diesel engine. "And I'm ordering you a new uniform."
She tilted her head over. "Why?"
"Look at how tight it is," he replied.
She hadn't even paid attention, but her arms were stretching the uniform. She stared at her relatively thick musculature, in disbelief. Had she really worked that hard at this job? How could she not have noticed? She coughed and pretended like it didn't bother her, so as not to attract attention. "Yeah, you're right," she said.
They drove back to the office, where a separate team would drive it across country to the new home. She hitched a ride back with the only other female coworker, her friend, Melissa. "Hey, great job back there," she told Tiffany. "You're working hard and getting stronger."
Tiffany shook her head. "Yeah, I guess I'm working a lot harder than I thought," she said. "I might have to buy new clothes."
After being dropped off at her apartment, she ran upstairs, threw off her uniform and stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Her mouth hung open in disbelief. Before, she prided herself in her sexy figure, slender yet curvy, with thin arms and legs but a very pronounced chest and butt. Now, her posterior and her bust were the same, except her entire frame had become thick with muscles.
She flexed a bicep in disbelief. While not ludicrously large, and thankfully, with no disgusting bulgy veins, it was thicker than any woman's bicep she'd ever seen. It was almost on par with some men she'd seen in the gym. Her abs were now noticeable, and her slender legs now had thunder thighs, with quadriceps featuring detectable lines. Her calves were huge compared to what they were before.
Then, the hunger hit.
Oh boy, did it hit her.
She had never felt so hungry. She microwaved and ate six separate meals before it went away. Based on her knowledge of health, that likely meant her metabolism had been boosted. But, how, she wondered? And furthermore, what was happening to her? This definitely didn't bode well. She would have to talk to Joey about it. He might know. After all, he was the brains of the family, no matter how smart she felt.
She dialed his cell. "Joey, you there?"
He clicked. "Yeah, sis, I'm here," he said. "What's up?"
"You aren't going to believe this," she explained, freaking out, "but, like, I know I've been working in a very physical job, but you know, I looked in the mirror just now, my shift's been over for an hour, and I'm really strong."
He initially felt confused, but then, remembering the weirdness of the drawing, froze. He took a ragged breath. "Oh…really," he muttered, stammering. "Please, explain."
"I'm, like, really jacked!" she shouted. "Like, bodybuilder jacked! And, at work, I helped move this big-ass piano and a lot of heavy furniture, and it was, you know, almost weightless!" She paused to breathe. "And, oh God, I'm so hungry. I just now got the hunger to go away after eating half the meals in my freezer! Joey! What's going on?" A pause followed. "Do I need to see a doctor?"
He lowered his head. Somehow, despite his skepticism firing on all eight cylinders, he found himself drawn back to the events of earlier. "You're really hungry, as well as suddenly muscular. Was the backpack this morning heavy?"
She paused. "Now that you mention it, it was! How could I get so strong in five hours?"
He shook his head. Scientifically, he was displaying idiocy. Supernatural explanations didn't exist. Yet, he had no credible scientific explanation, either biologically or physically, for the events. What he saw could be possible, and currently, had his attention as the likely cause. It meant magic existed, which sent his mind into a tailspin, but he pushed it aside. "You don't need to see a doctor," he said. "I have an explanation. How you got so hungry, so strong, and were able to lift such heavy objects."
"What, Joey? What!"
He took a deep breath and let it out.
"You're Captain America."