11
"You look incredible." Steven Danvers sat in a booth at the Italian Bar and Grill in Detroit's eatery district. Bridget sat down before him in a black turtle-necked sweater and a long green skirt. A gold locket hung from her neck and her long hair had been brushed out long, cascading and flowing over her shoulders. She was beyond beautiful; she was exquisite. She could have been a movie star with those looks. Her bluer-than-blue eyes looked up to him with a godly and regal presence, and her dainty lips, lined with red lipstick, were drawn silent as her mind processed the praise he rained on her.
"Thanks…"
"We're finally alone together." Steven felt just a bit intimidated by her. Bridget was so out of his league, but after weeks of mustering his confidence, he finally had a date with her, and now, a second date. She was less talkative than their first date together. The last time together, Bridget had encouraged him to go to the mall to meet her friends, but this time, she was not quite as self-absorbed and much less self-involved. It was almost as if she were a new person. She seemed to genuinely want to be with him. He offered to take her to dinner and she accepted. She sat quietly listening as he talked about basketball and his after-school job, and didn't interrupt him once this time to talk on her cell phone. He liked this new Bridget Hennessy.
"You are hard to pin down these days." He continued.
"I am so much busier than I once was." Bridget spoke more eloquently and succinctly than Steven recalled. "You won't believe how much running around I'm doing plus Kerry is driving me nuts insinuating all this crazy stuff about my life." She lifted her Diet Pepsi to take a sip.
"Like what?"
"Oh, it's way too embarrassing…" Bridget didn't want to stick that thought in his head much less discuss that person. "So, how is the basketball team going? You think we're going to win over the Collinsport Cougars this time?"
"I think we have a really good shot this year." Steven continued. "Coach is running us ragged with exercises and new plays plus we got rid of Jesse Spanjers. You know he failed his biology test – he was like the worst guy on the team…"
There was another voice present. "I can't believe you're saying this in the restaurant…"
Bridget lightly looked over to another table as she started hearing other voices in the building. Pretending to listen to Steven, her mind began diffusing through the articulated banter and conversations of other people around her that her senses could detect. Not much interested in basketball in the least, she continued trying to be the courteous listener, occasionally stroking her hair or nodding her head, but something had sparked her interest. Resonating on wavelengths and frequencies around her, her nearly clairvoyant senses began shifting for the line of dialogue that had sparked her subconscious attention. Each voice she heard coming from somewhere in a five mile radius.
"Baby, it's not you, it's me…"
"Tell me again why we brought the kids with us?"
"Table Five wants even more bread?"
"Dad, are you sure Bridget is out on a date?"
"Kyle, stop grieving over Bridget and move on!"
"Donny, I hear Bridget's dating now…"
"Hey, your house still has Xmas decorations on it, right?"
"That's your kid, not mine…"
"Perp is now on foot near Cole and Decatur heading to Addison…."
"…. Can't believe how he ate the whole thing," Steven continued talking as Bridget woke from her subliminal cruise through the undetectable audio spectrum. "My dad wanted to take him to the vet, but mom just gave Buster vinegar in his water, and he coughed up the whole…"
"Steven…" Bridget interrupted him a minute. "Could you excuse me a minute? I want to freshen up before eating."
"Yeah, sure…" Steven lightly rose as Bridget stood and stepped out of the booth. He beamed like a lucky guy to be on a date with her, and she shined toward him as well, glowing even more beautiful. She turned slowly for the restrooms then noticed Steven sitting back down and looking away to the waitresses and in that second, she quickly dashed beyond the hostess podium and out the front door of the restaurant. Turning his gaze back, Steven looked back to the restrooms and saw no sight of Bridget. By his judgment, she had to be now in the restroom freshening her appearance. The waitress glided up and blocked his view.
"Are you ready to order?" Waitress Amanda Jennings wore a white blouse and black skirt with a brown apron embroidered with the Italian Grill name on it. Her dark hair was pulled into a ponytail as per the restaurant codes. She held up a yellow order pad with a black ballpoint pen.
"We'll each have a spaghetti dinner…" Steven looked back to the menu. "I'll have a small pepperoni pizza on the side with mushrooms and black olives and she wants a chef salad."
"Dressing?"
"Uh, I don't…." He looked for Bridget to return. "Uh, get her Italian… Ranch, maybe." He heard a flurry of sirens outside the window over his booth and turned to the site of police cars racing toward Addison at the nearby crossroads. Something was going on to upset the local police. Letting it slip from his attention, he turned back to the waitress.
"I'll bring her a variety." Amanda offered.
"Thanks," Steven gasped wondering about where this date was going. "Oh, and another Pepsi for myself and more bread."
"Be up in about seven minutes." Amanda collected the menus and Steven sat back to wait for Bridget.
"Steven Danvers?"
"Lisa?" Steven looked over to the source of the voice. It was Lisa Castellari from school. She and a group of girls he didn't recognize were at a table on the elevated sitting area in the middle of the dining room. She had long hair somewhere between blonde and light brown and garbed in a tank top and hip-hugging jeans. He had two classes with her, but he really didn't care much about her. Lisa was the reason a number of female classmates went on diets or went to therapy or male classmates were forced into empty relationships. They were good students, fair people but ruthless rumor creators. They pretended to be Bridget's friends when they wanted to reach up to her level, but they tore apart anyone who was poor, unlucky or just different.
"Don't tell me you're here by yourself." She stood above the basketball jock with her bust size hanging over him, knowing it turned the gentleman in him into a young boy.
"No," Steven looked away as a new waitress brought him another drink and more bread then departed. He took his new drink and sipped it. "I'm here with Bridget. She's in the restroom."
"Bridget Hennessy?" That affected Lisa's tone a bit. "Oh, honey, I don't want to break your heart, but I was just in the restroom, and there's no one in there."
"What?" He didn't want to believe it.
"Baby…" Lisa sat in Bridget's place. "I'd hate to have to tell you this, but Bridget is just a pretender. She doesn't go for nice guys like yourself. She goes for the bad boys. Please… Don't delude yourself by thinking you have a chance with her. Forget her and join me, Jenna, Amy and the girls."
"I don't…" Steven pretended to be distracted. He looked away hurt and dejected and forced a deep breath trying to keep from being too sensitive. "No, I'm just going to bail."
"Suit yourself…" Lisa rose up out of the booth to return to her friends. "But you're more than welcome to join us."
"Yeah, whatever…" Steven started looking round for his original waitress to cancel his order. A few drinks, some bread, he'd only lost a few dollars. Lisa and her coven shrieked laughing from their table as Lisa pulled out her chair to sit down. A gush of wind swung the hanging decorations of the dining room and the chair jumped aside and Lisa found herself hitting the floor. A waitress clung to her platter to keep from dropping an order and a dining patron lost his cigarette from his mouth.
"Sorry, it took so long…" Bridget appeared from nowhere and scooted into her seat in the booth. "I almost ran into Lisa Castellari in the restroom and had to hide in the stall to avoid her." She claimed nonchalantly. "She is such a pretender, you know." She sipped her soda. Steven was looking back and forth from her to the restrooms in confusion.
"I know…" Steven looked at Bridget then back to Lisa lifting herself off the floor. "She was just over here saying the same thing about you!"
"My god…" Bridget lightly shook her head. "She is just believable." Her right hand rose to brush her long hair back, but as she did so, something metal in her long locks fell out and hit the table, dancing and skimming up to under the rim of the empty wicker bread basket before them. Bridget's eyes rounded in shock as Steven reached to pick it up from her. It was a hollow copper-jacketed bullet with a steel tip had tumbled from her body. It was halfway pristine, but the tip was crushed and flattened as if it'd been fired into something harder than steel.
"It looks like an armor piercing shell." Steven knew his bullets from his father's old military books. He looked back at her a bit confused. "Look at how far it's impacted…"
"I found it." Bridget quickly improvised. "Last week, you know, that location where that figure everyone is calling Supergirl flipped over the SUV on Decatur." She leaned over the table dramatically. "I think it bounced off of her."
"Whoa…" Steven sat back in his seat. "You know, I think I know who she is."
"Who?" Bridget made a face like a deer in headlights.
"There's this incredible-looking blonde lady who moved into the house across the street from my dad." Steven started speaking covertly. "She looks almost exactly like Scarlet Johansson, and she appeared just before all these sightings started. I think it's her."
"I think you could be right." She echoed slightly over her breath. Steven started giving her the bullet back.
"No, keep it…" She insisted. "I was going to give it to my brother, but he's been such a brat lately…"
"Thanks…" Steven beamed his steeling grin to Bridget. She was shining back to him as well before noticing Lisa and her friends at their table.
"Oh, hello, Lisa…" The blonde one waved cheerfully. Lisa and the coven pretended to care by just barely acknowledging her back.
"Why does she have to stick them so high?!" The police department blocked off part of Addison and looked up to their burglary suspect hanging by his underwear waistband on the cell phone tower off Addison and Main Street. The perp wasn't talking. He was in too much pain. One minute, he was home clear and then he saw that blonde figure charging at him from out of the darkness. He had fired upon her, but it didn't slow her down. Next thing he knew, he was pulled off his feet and then hung up by his underwear on the tower. Looking down upon the city block, he looked down upon the police cars and officers looking up at him. In the distance, the fire truck with the long ladder came to bring him down.
Departing the late shift at the hospital, Cate Hennessy drove by the snarled traffic and officers guiding cars past the spectacle. She could only look at the scene of the figure hung up to dry and mumble the name of her daughter under breath. She wasn't sure if she believed anymore it was Bridget, but she wasn't sure if she believed it wasn't. There was evidence to suggest both ways, but which was right and which wasn't. She wasn't going to play the game anymore. If it weren't Bridget, Cate would still love her daughter, but if it were proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, that was when she'd spring on the girl with a vengeance.
Reaching home, she pulled into the driveway and parked even to the sidewalk rather than pulling into the garage. Tired, a bit hungry and the memories of the hospital still coursing through her mind, Cate took her purse from the passenger seat out of continued habit and swung the car door shut behind her. Her feet took the same path over the asphalt driveway, up the cobblestone walkway past Rory's bicycle dumped against the bushes and then hopping up onto the open wood porch. She tested the front door to see if it was unlocked, turning it easily and pushing through the opening door.
"Paul?" Cate entered her darkened home slowly. "Why are you sitting in the dark?"
"Sit by me, Cate." He answered to her.
"Oh no," She dropped her purse in the chair and hastened over to his side. "Your doctor's appointment. What did John say? Did you tell him Bridget wanted you to get a cardio-pulmonary arthroscopy of the aorta?" She chuckled at the notion.
"Yeah," Paul turned off the game on the TV. "And he agreed."
She dropped her jaw and looked at him in mild shock.
"He listened to my heart, Cate, and heard something he didn't like." Paul gasped, grasped his chin in his fingertips, briefly looked away and leaned forward to his lovely wife, taking her hands in his own. "He didn't like it so much that he brought in three doctors to hear my heart and the resident cardiologist. It seems that I might have some sort of… flaw – a dissection that could be getting worse." Cate covered her mouth in shock at the news. "They're putting me on special medicine and a special diet, but I have to take it easy. I've got a date for surgery next month. They're going to put a valve in me that should cover the defect."
"Oh my god, Paul." Cate pulled him closer.
"How did she know?" Paul asked out loud. "Somehow Bridget knew about it. How could she notice something that anyone else could barely detect?"
"That girl is really starting to scare me." Cate responded, placing her hand to her chest. "Her personality has changed, she's gotten smart, practically genius-level! There's all those you-know-what in the news. I wonder if Kerry and Rory might have something in their crazy stories."
"Where is that girl anyway?" Paul wondered.
Forty miles down Interstate 12, the state and local police were pursuing car thieves in a Ford SUV. The vehicle had a larger engine block than the patrol cars and could out run them, but it could not out run the police helicopter overhead. Two side tires had been blown away from spike strips and they were still reaching eighty miles per hour through the evening traffic on the highway running from the pulsating volley of red and blue lights behind them. One distraction car had staved off three patrol cars and wrecked a fourth, but now the lawful-impaired driver and his armed lookout had to content with two highway patrol cars and one local police car. Shells from an illegal AK-47 echoed through the night as officers ducked behind their steering wheels from bullets piercing the night. There was no way these officers were going to let a group of under-educated and illiterate high school drop-outs think that breaking the law was acceptable. They'd have to try yet another pit maneuver to take out the already damaged SUV. If it didn't roll, it would explode from the gas tank scraping the asphalt highway.
Delusional in the thought that he could still escape the law, Eldon Browerman kept his foot to the metal and wished he had stolen an SUV with a full tank of gas. He wasn't sure how long his last two wheels would hold, but his brother, Arthur, was still firing out the passenger door trying to preserve their criminal career. They had been on America's Most Wanted and had been on Detroit's top ten for three years. They had hoped that that was warning enough that they should not be messed with, but there was no way they were going back to prison. Stealing cars would get him a few years, but shooting at the cops was a definite life sentence. Even if he rolled this stolen vehicle, he could probably escape into the woods if he had to, but first he needed to make his freedom a certainty. As his eyes looked forward, he suddenly saw a figure in his path. Not interested in veering round it, he planned on slamming through her for being stupid enough to get in his way, but then he saw her too clearly too late. Her blonde hair, her bright blue costume in his headlights, the big red letter shaping her bosom…
Next thing he knew he was he was flying through the windshield and hitting the asphalt with his chest. The front of the SUV had caved in, pushing the engine through the middle of the cab. It felt like hitting a brick wall built across the highway. His brother dropped his gun and rolled a few feet into the ditch. Eldon lifted his bald head trying to get his breath back and looked to the girl in the red cape over him bending the stolen AK into bent metal components and tossing it away, but he was not going down because of some female reject from a comic convention. He stumbled and scrambled to his feet and tried to take a swing at her.
When the police cars finally stopped, they found Eldon and Arthur Browerman sitting in the center of the road, the tempered steel bumper from the stolen vehicle bent in an improvised shackle around their bodies. Dizzy, angry and delirious, they were at the center of multiple patrol cars stopping round them, revolvers being aimed at them and the ruins of a totaled SUV upside down at roadside. Their heads meanwhile turned up in unison to the strange blonde presence vanishing into the night sky returning to her date...