There was an intimacy you had with your enemies that you would never have with your lovers.
Taylor's mother first imparted this wisdom to her after picking Taylor up from daycare when she complained that the other kids pulled her hair and kicked over her block fortress. She whispered it into Taylor's ear when she was a child, lulling her to sleep, concluding their nightly ritual of reading pages from Lustrum's prison journal together. She said it again one Monday morning when Taylor was so sick with nerves at the thought of going back to Winslow that she was dry-heaving into her backpack.
It ran through Taylor's head now, as she stood in the doorway of her classroom and watched her arch-nemesis giggle herself into a stupor with her posse.
If pressed to describe Victoria Dallon in one word, most would say 'radiant'. This much was preordained. In case it wasn't, Taylor had anonymously posted a poll in the comments of the school blog to confirm it. Another twelve percent voted for 'regal', a solid seven percent for some variation of 'exquisite', and three students submitted the uncensored text of their unspeakably graphic yet utterly jejune X-rated capefic, but Taylor refused to acknowledge the rights of people who didn't know what an adjective was.
Radiant. Taylor's thin lips framed the syllables as they would a swearword. Who could fault the admirers? Who could resist, when her aura was slithering in through the gaps between your ribs, caressing the parts of you that were made to be caressed? When those wily phantom appendages had already plunged their hooks into your heart, exhilarating the muscle as vigorously as any defibrillator? Like the sun's rays, her love-me beams projected ever outwards, and their tendrils lured in any straggler who might object.
If you focused on all of that, you might forget that however infinitely those rays extended as you followed them out, they must narrow to a single point when you followed them in. You might forget about the lump of coal smouldering at the monster's core, the anglerfish at the end of the bulb in the endless black.
You might forget that Victoria Dallon was a fucking cunt.
Victoria glanced Taylor's way as she approached the desk, flashing her a smile. A sincere, infectious, thousand-megawatt smile. A smile that made you know deep down in your soul that everything was going to be all right.
Blood boiled in Taylor's veins.
"Excuse me," she said. "You're in my seat."
She expected Victoria to respond with 'I don't see your name on it', whereupon Taylor could triumphantly point out the initials she'd carved into the plastic underside for this express situation.
Victoria just cocked her head, her shit-eating grin getting wider and shit-eating-er. "I thought you usually sat somewhere else."
"No," Taylor said. "I don't."
"Yeah, you do. Your seat's in the corner." Victoria indicated a chair at the back.
Stereotyping, cool. "Just because I sometimes sit there doesn't make it my seat."
"By that logic, you sometimes sitting here doesn't make it your seat," Victoria teased, like they were on teasing terms.
Taylor shut that down quick. "It's still my seat. I'd like it back, please."
"Fine, no problem." Victoria rose to her feet. Lush cornsilk hair cascaded over her shoulders, straight as blown glass with a wheat-furrow part down the middle. It caught the light just so. "I like being next to the window anyway."
Victoria was shorter than Taylor by inches, but Taylor swore she floated just to loom over her. She made certain to brush against Taylor's side when there was plenty of space around her in the aisle.
Through lice and gnats, Taylor noticed heads turning in their direction. There were rules to social interaction, she understood. The barely perceptible elevation of an eyebrow could determine whether a gesture was interpreted as a slight or a compliment. This pulse of electricity, this static fizz against her skin that Victoria had purposefully inflicted on her… it demanded an immediate response.
If Taylor sulked and glared as she took her seat back, the peanut gallery would dub her antisocial and Victoria a saint for putting up with this surly, spiteful creature. Victoria would win.
If Taylor nudged back and fired off a cheery quip, it would neatly transform their exchange into lighthearted banter. Victoria would take it as an olive branch. Retroactively, there would be no hard feelings.
But that was what Victoria wanted, wasn't it—for them to be best friends, for Taylor to become yet another one of her obsequious little bottomfeeders, nibbling on the scraps of attention she deigned to toss their way. Victoria couldn't countenance the possibility of someone not being obsessed with her.
So Taylor did the only thing she could. She picked her chair up by the legs and swung it into Victoria Dallon's stupid smiling face.
It was a slow detention day. Taylor was the only student in the classroom—not a shocker considering how well Arcadia High students behaved on average. She stared at a blank page, her pen poised over the paper, feeling as though she was on death row. Finishing her homework had taken all of thirty minutes, and all she had left to eat up the remaining half-hour was the mandatory written apology to Victoria Dallon.
How to even begin?
Dear Vicky Dee,
I'm sorry that everyone worships you and that the only person with the balls to take you down a peg is me. I heard Dean dumped you last week because even he couldn't deal with your drama anymore, so maybe you don't have EVERYONE fooled. It must be sooo hard to be sooo hot and popular and be able to sit wherever you want
She scratched everything out. Victoria might detect the passive-aggression.
The teacher manning the guillotine that afternoon was Mr. Cruz, the lanky bearded head of the Special Ed Division. He lounged back in his chair at a precarious angle, swiping on his tablet. Notably, he had not muted it. Cheerful background music and the juicy sounds of a katana slashing through watermelons and pears tinkled away in the otherwise quiet classroom, the volume too low to mark the passage of time and too high to keep from niggling at the edges of Taylor's awareness.
She clamped her free hand over her ear. An idea occurred to her. She'd keep her true feelings bunkered in a Trojan horse of politesse. Victoria would never know the rage simmering behind each word.
Dear Victoria,
What I did was inexcusable. I should never have resorted to violence to express my frustration with the situation, especially when you were so accommodating in the first place.
That would show her. Taylor leaned back, satisfied with her opening sentences.
"May I speak to Ms. Hebert? Alone?" The principal's voice from the door prompted Taylor to look up.
Mr. Cruz acquiesced, taking his tablet and stepping outside to give them privacy. Principal Howell pulled up a seat in front of Taylor's desk. Despite her brisk and business-like demeanour, the woman preferred these heart-to-hearts to interrogating students in an office. This grassroots approach might work on Taylor's less worldly peers, but not on her. She'd experienced firsthand how corrupt authorities could coax confessions out of innocents.
"Ms. Hebert," Principal Howell said. "Most kids your age are collecting cape merch and STIs, not pink slips. You do know you can't cash them in for a free decoder ring at the end of the year?"
Taylor said nothing. She fiddled with her pen.
"I spoke to Victoria. She requested leniency because she wasn't actually injured in the slightest."
"Oh, how magnanimous."
Principal Howell frowned. "I am inclined to insist otherwise. It sets a bad precedent, letting you off with a slap on the wrist for something as serious as attempted aggravated assault. I will have to call your mother, again, and you will reimburse the school for the chair you broke, again. Then we need to get into the matter of more community service hours."
"Victoria broke that chair," Taylor mumbled.
"Pardon?"
"I said, Victoria broke that chair. With her face. She should have to pay for it. She should have to fix it herself."
"This is getting to be a bit much." The principal rubbed at the grooves on her forehead. "Ms. Hebert, you are not a bad student."
"Gee, thanks."
"I mean it. Despite your… much-publicised struggles, you've made remarkable progress catching up academically. Your English grades speak for themselves. Mr. Enomoto says you're a very capable essayist, Mrs. Thorpe thinks that with some extra tutoring you'll be where you should be in Math soon enough. And the librarian sings your praises—she's never had a volunteer who memorised the Dewey Decimal System, or one who read Pynchon. But these reports of fighting? Of theft? Of vandalism?"
"Alleged vandalism."
Principal Howell shook her head, sighing. "I'll be frank. When the librarian asks if you can be her permanent assistant, I hesitate. When Mr. Enomoto talks about sending you as a representative for the History Bee & Bowl, I think twice before recommending you."
Taylor recognised what she was doing: guilting her by spelling out how her behaviour was costing her opportunities. Unluckily for the principal, Taylor's guilt glands had been surgically altered from childhood and now secreted for no ordinary woman. The time she'd spent around Emma Barnes and Victoria Dallon had inoculated her against even the subtlest of manipulations. To say nothing of Annette Hebert—at her father's wake she'd told Taylor that if she didn't sing the hymns loud enough, Daddy wouldn't go to Heaven.
She would be more worried about expulsion, but last term Arcadia had to reevaluate their zero tolerance policy when their wealthy white male quarterback nearly perforated a freshman's spleen in a hazing session gone wrong. Besides, she was Arcadia's charity case, the transfer student on scholarship. They weren't going to kick her out for a few minor behavioural issues and risk their reputation. Not after doing that whole sympathetic song and dance routine when the Winslow bullying scandal made national news.
"You don't understand," Taylor said, matter-of-factly. She did not stoop to Principal Howell's level, didn't inject a single cubic centimetre of emotion into her expression or take a chisel to her voice.
But the principal must have heard something there anyway, because she was irritatingly earnest: "So explain. Help me understand."
"You want to know what she did to me?" Now she couldn't help the slight quiver of her bottom lip, the clenching of her fist around her pen. Her mother would've smacked her upside the head for it. "Really."
The principal nodded, her gaze piercing.
"Then I'll tell you. There are… so many things," Taylor said. So many things she was saving for the thirteen tell-all audio diaries to be released upon her death. "But I'll start with February 8th. Tater Tot Tuesday. You know the tater tot rule?"
Another nod. "I invented the tater tot rule."
"You can't take more than one scoop," Taylor said, "or there won't be enough for everybody. It's common courtesy. Of course there are kids who define 'one scoop' more loosely, but I'm a potato allotment stickler. Let me paint you a picture." She leaned forward, pitching her voice low and confidential. "February 8th. Victoria and I don't usually share a lunch period, but fates collide—her class lets out early and I'm done with my library shift. We line up to grab our gruel. Victoria's in front, and there are exactly three people between me and her. She sees me, she knows I'm there, she smirks at me. She reaches the counter, lifts the sneeze guard. Guess what she does?"
"She takes more than one scoop?"
"She takes more than one scoop," Taylor affirmed. "She takes four scoops. She takes the last four scoops, dumps them into the biggest available bowl, and then she and the three girls behind her get the rest of their food and go off together. By the time I'm at the counter, there aren't any tater tots left."
"It was a legal move." Principal Howell arched a calculative eyebrow, drumming her fingers on the desk. "She was dividing them up among her friends."
"No. Well, yes. But it goes deeper," Taylor said. "You see, those three girls? Thanh, Meryl, Felicity. Thanh started keto because her boyfriend gave her beluga-shaped earrings and said they reminded him of her. Meryl had a Spanish test next period and wouldn't risk a carb coma; Felicity breaks out if she has too much grease. Not one of them would have taken full scoops given the choice, and if I knew that, Victoria knew that too. And she knows that if they'd scooped for themselves, I would have gotten my tots."
"And your conclusion is…?"
Taylor swallowed hard. "Victoria Dallon deliberately and with great malice aforethought deprived me of delicious fried potatoes for no other reason than to hurt me."
"I'm going to need another example," Principal Howell said.
The floodgates opened.
Her first day at Arcadia, she was accosted in front of the administrative office.
"Taylor, right? I heard your student guide couldn't make it, so I'll be picking up the slack. Victoria Dallon. This is my boyfriend."
"I'm Dean," the guy next to her said.
The two of them took Taylor to the cafeteria, the gym, the auditorium, and finally the roof.
"Between you and me, this is the best spot to have lunch. I don't know why more kids don't come up here. Why do you think that is, Dean?"
"I'm Dean," Dean said.
Taylor spent her lunch periods on the roof for the first few weeks of the term. It was the best spot in the school—for peace, for space to meditate and talk to Lisa over the phone.
Victoria made the occasional appearance, usually accompanied by Dean, but her path did not cross with Taylor's. Taylor tended to wear clothing that blended in with her surroundings, like a Target employee, and it didn't help that she would hide behind a HVAC unit the moment her bugs sensed someone coming. They were ships passing in the night, the way Taylor liked it.
One cold day in January Taylor climbed up to find six separate groups of students picnicking on the concrete. Music blared from someone's twin portable speakers.
And there was Victoria, legs swinging over the edge of the roof, chatting guilelessly with her boyfriend.
"So I figured out why people didn't come up here," she said to Taylor when confronted. "They thought roof access was restricted. I told them it was fine and we could all hang out here every day! Isn't that great, Taylor?"
"I'm Dean," Dean said.
Winter break. Taylor perused her favourite little mom-and-pop shop for new stationery to kick off the start of term.
The shop wasn't great. Objectively, it was pretty shitty. Its wares were all off-brand and of miserable quality—Taylor could get any of them for much cheaper on Z-Bay should she so desire. But the owner was so friendly to her, and being a supervillain didn't mean she couldn't support family-owned businesses.
A girl suddenly charged into the store with her friend, setting off the entrance's two-tone chime, and made a beeline for the shelf across from the one Taylor was browsing. Taylor was spooked for a second. Nobody shopped here but her.
"Oh my god," said the girl, whose name Taylor instantly decided was Tiffany. "They sell the cutest stress balls!"
"We have to get them," her friend Chanel declared. She already had her smartphone out and filming.
With that, Taylor understood.
Two weeks ago in an interview with Ellen the Generous, Glory Girl was asked about how she balanced hero life with civilian life. She reflected on the challenges of juggling extracurriculars and crime-fighting, and as a gag Ellen brought out a generic palm-sized stress ball for her to squeeze. Glory Girl gave it a few test squishes before pulping it, to roars of laughter from the studio audience.
The clip promptly went viral, sparking a social media challenge where the goal was to pulverise stress balls in unique, often explosive ways. The dopier the stress ball and the wilder the destruction method, the more views each video accrued. Taylor refused to click on a single one. She didn't want to live in a world where one braggart's rude, wasteful, and unnecessary demonstration of strength was both celebrated and re-enacted over and over by impressionable young teens.
"'Scuse me, sir, can we take your whole stock?" Tiffany called the owner over, and he grinned toothily behind her as she held a bloated rubber mermaid up to Chanel's phone camera. "I'm thinking we stuff this one in the garbage disposal, or maybe my uncle's hydraulic press—"
Taylor ducked out of frame and left the shop without her usual bag of bits and bobs, seething. How fucking dare Victoria Dallon singlehandedly save this struggling small business?
Even as Taylor's heart thumped in her chest like a snared rabbit, each account of cruelty and flagrant disregard for human decency slipped easily off her tongue. Victoria Dallon asked her how a math test went when she knew trigonometric functions were Taylor's weakness. Victoria Dallon gatekept a water fountain from her, invoking an unfalsifiable rumour about copper contamination. Victoria Dallon sabotaged her titration experiment in Chem by distracting her at a crucial moment, making her milliseconds late in closing the spigot on the burette. Yes, the reagent had only been diluted sodium hydroxide, but what if it had been industrial strength hydrazine?
Principal Howell asked many questions at first, fishing for details, trying to justify Victoria's actions. Those questions became fewer and farther between. And then she was speechless for a long time.
At last she said, "I'd like you to meet with the school counsellor."
Taylor's heart hit bedrock. The woman hadn't been listening at all. It was Winslow all over again, Winslow a thousand times over. Except back at Winslow, Taylor could take comfort in the understanding that people witnessed her suffering—they were just too cowardly to intervene, or they approved of it in some twisted social darwinistic way, or they were being hushed up by bureaucratic machinations behind the scenes that Taylor had never investigated herself. There were so many potential explanations. None of them forgivable, but they were there.
Here she'd found nothing to explain Victoria Dallon's vise grip on both the faculty and the student body. The heroine was hardly an Emma Barnes-tier schemer, yet that only made her popularity more suspicious: was it her airbrushed supermodel beauty? Her palpable charisma? The fact that when Behemoth struck New Hampshire last year, Victoria had volunteered to fire from the midlines, and then went on to perform search-and-rescue well within the radius of the Endbringer's insta-kill zone, and somehow this selfless act had evaded reportage, and Taylor had only found out from an offhand remark made by her sister in the girls' bathroom?
It had to be that damned aura.
Principal Howell was still talking. "I know mental health resources were nonexistent at Winslow, but here we try our best to provide students with the help they need. In any form."
Taylor glowered at her. "I'm not crazy."
"Ultimately it's your decision, but I highly suggest—"
"I'm not crazy," Taylor repeated. "Have you ever seen the seminal 1944 movie Gaslight?"
"Ms. Hebert—"
"Principal Howell, she's a master. And she's a master-class cape! It is literally public information that she controls minds. I don't know how no one sees it. Or maybe they do and they don't care."
"Ms. Hebert, please, for both our sakes—lay off the PHO."
Another facet of mind control, Taylor reminded herself. The perception filter.
Taylor detested locker rooms, and girls' locker rooms could be worse than boys' at times. She'd checked. Today the girls' basketball team had left behind frothy mucus trails of soap and shampoo on the floor, similar in viscosity to hagfish slime. She stepped over puddles, using spiders to feel out areas of stickiness and guide her towards the lockers.
The plan? Get in, shove the apology letter into Victoria's locker through a vent—where it would hopefully moulder untouched until they all graduated and left Brockton Bay for college—and get out before anyone spotted her.
She waded through the deodorant miasma suffusing the central bench area. No combination of perfumes and body sprays was able to mask the underlying note of day-old sweat, and their flowery-fruity scents lent the air a rotten tropical stench.
Fuck Victoria for making her come here. Fuck her for sealing the vents in her book locker just because someone kept using black-widow-grade dragline silk to unlock it from the inside and then used that same silk to heist her possessions and store them in a disused crawlspace under the third-floor stairwell.
Taylor's bugs crawled along the borders of Victoria Dallon's gym locker door, casing the joint. She wanted to cram scorpions into Victoria's designer sneakers, as many as could fit. But their stingers would only scrape harmlessly at the nigh-indestructible cellophane sheet coating her soles, and anyway the bitch was so rich she'd just toss them out and buy another pair.
She stopped in her tracks.
A girl sat hunched over on the bench directly in front of Victoria's locker, her identity obscured by the wad of nylon cloth she was tenderly nuzzling. But the frizzy mop of mouse-brown hair, the freckle-spattered hands, the pudgy misshapen frame girdled by a Red Cross fanny pack—it could only be one person.
"Amy?"
Victoria's younger sister yelped, lifting her face. "Taylor!? What the hell are you doing here?"
"I could ask you the same," Taylor said, taking a cautious step back while her more incapacitating spiders assembled in nooks and crannies. This kitty had biokinetic claws.
"I'm just waiting for Vicky," Amy retorted. "She's showering. I have a valid excuse to be here. Unlike you."
"What's that? Are those—" Taylor flared her nostrils, suddenly alert. "Are those your sister's gym shorts!?"
"No!" Amy scrambled to hide them behind her back. "No, they're mine. I'm just… I'm doing the sniff test. To see if I can rewear them."
"Let me," Taylor said, grabbing at them.
"Wha—get away, freak!"
Amy's skinny-fat T-rex arms were no match for a pair of jointed broomsticks and a significant height advantage—Taylor seized the shorts and buried her own nose in them. She took a deep, almost longing drag, taking in a heady and complex feminine musk that must have been refined by years of superhuman athletic feats.
"I knew it! These are Victoria's!" she announced. She sneered at Amy. "You can't rewear them."
Scowling, Amy snatched the shorts back and squirrelled them away into the depths of her fanny pack. "What are you doing here? Come to harass my sister again, you rancid shitstain? Come to club her with a two-by-four? Try it, skank."
Taylor paid no heed to the girl's rabid hissing and spitting, too distracted by the thoughts that always popped into mind when she saw Amy Dallon's face in its entirety. Chief among them: If Panacea were indeed as powerful a biology manipulator as the Brockton Gazette puff pieces claimed, why was she still ugly?
Taylor had asked this question once on PHO using her trusty sockpuppet, only to be shot down by accusations of misogyny along with meticulously cited well ackshuallys regarding Panacea's limitations. But Taylor was genuinely curious. She was not blind to her own corporeal shortcomings, from her homely features to her mantis-like physique. If she had the ability to make healing 'plagues' (as Panacea was authorised to do during flu season) surely she had the ability to design plagues that modified external appearance à la smallpox and leprosy. And if ethics were the concern, she could just infect herself with a sort of personal pan plague that other consenting folks could grab a slice of. The hotness could come from inside the house.
Unless of course she was unable to infect herself at all. In that case, besides make-up, a more stylish wardrobe, an exercise regimen, posture training, and cosmetic surgery, there was no way for Amy Dallon to make herself physically or spiritually attractive.
The thought made Taylor sad, but also relieved. God had already played favourites when it came to the other Dallon sister; any more would just be unfair.
Maybe, just maybe, today would be the day she finally convinced Amy of Victoria's misdeeds and recruited her to join the cause.
"Amy," Taylor said, "do you have a minute to talk about aura theory?"
"I have a minute to turn your insides into luncheon meat."
"Don't act like you don't know," Taylor said. "I've seen you looking at the threads."
"Thanks for reminding me to set my viewing activity to private," Amy said. "Look, dickface, I only browse PHO during my breaks so people won't try to talk to me. Like you're doing now. If I happen to glance at the same threads as you, it's a coincidence."
Taylor soldiered on. "So you know how the prevalent theory is that she is Pavloving everyone around her into loving her? My hypothesis is that I'm built different and she is Pav-loathing me."
"You have to stop doing this." Amy placed her face in her now-shortsless hands. "Do you even know how insane you sound? Because you sound insane."
"This isn't cutting-edge stuff, Amy," Taylor said. "It's a documented phenomenon among parahumans with master powers. Take a peek at a research paper on power side-effects sometime."
"Please never speak to me ever again," Amy begged. "Every moment I spend interacting with you is hell."
"I actually think you might be a prime case study."
"I can't affect myself and I can't affect brains, and yet whenever you tell me a new bullshit theory I feel each and every one of my neurons committing autolysis."
"Well, that's just fine because you don't need that many brain cells to talk to me anyway!" Taylor said, exasperated. Her exasperation doubled when she realised that wasn't quite the burn she thought it was. She jerked a thumb in the direction of the showers. "Is Victoria really still in there?"
"Yes," Amy said.
"Long fucking shower," Taylor said. "I'm not surprised. Have to get that 'self-care' in."
"She conditions, you moron."
"That's what I've been saying."
Brian was at the movies with Aisha and her new girlfriend Missy. Alec was at the local arcade fucking with kids by making them lose at air hockey. Rachel was out walking dogs or mauling abusive pet owners or both. So it came to be that on Saturday evening, Taylor and Lisa had the loft all to themselves.
They were making friendship bracelets.
The activity had begun as an ironic joke to commemorate Taylor's departure from Winslow and attendant escape from her ex-best friend, but gradually it had become a soothing afterschool hobby they indulged in together when there was nothing good on cable.
"So no shit, there I was," Taylor said, propped up against a mound of sofa cushions on the floor. "Trying to get the vending machine to give me my candy bar. I'm jiggling the machine, sending in beetles to dislodge it, but it's just stuck."
"Uh-huh." Lisa rested her head against Taylor's shoulder, her eyes closed. Blonde strands of hair tickled Taylor's neck with every exhale.
A hexagonal plastic case lay in front of them, filled with an assortment of charms and beads of different shapes, sizes, and colours divided into compartments. Taylor reached into several sections at once with her bugs, scooping up distinctive charms and stringing them together.
"And then she comes up," Taylor went on, "she's been watching the whole thing from the sidelines, snickering with her posse, but for whatever reason she chooses now to come up. She hip-checks me out of her way, then she lifts the whole machine into the air and shakes it. I'm like, okay, whatever, at least I'll get my snack. She succeeds in shaking out my candy bar, it falls onto the floor. I'm about to reach for it… then she spits on it, dead centre, and she just steps on it. It's totally crushed. I'm pretty sure she says, 'Hope you like floor chocolate, dweeb!' And then she laughs at me and floats away."
"What an asshole," Lisa said.
"I know."
"Wait. You're talking about Emma and the other bitches, right?" Lisa sat up, turning to face Taylor. Her green eyes sharpened, betraying the ice behind them. "I thought all that crap was dealt with. Is it not?"
"Yeah… no…" Taylor trailed off.
Lisa studied her for a moment, cogs turning. "Ah. Victoria Dallon," she said flatly.
"Sorry," Taylor said, looking away, rolling a fishbone-shaped charm over in her hands. This was exactly the kind of thing she always did that pushed people away.
"Nope. No sorries. Listen." Lisa tilted Taylor's chin up and looked her in the eyes. The flatness had vanished. "I believe you. Unconditionally. If you tell me Victoria Dallon stomped on your Snickers bar, she did. If you tell me Victoria Dallon threw you in a dumpster, or hit you with a paintball, or made your favourite brand of toothpaste go out of stock, then she did. No further questions."
Taylor could have shaken her jaw free of Lisa's grasp. She didn't, momentarily transfixed by the solid warmth of her fingers. "All of those things happened."
"Good to know! I'm no fan of ol' Glory Hole myself. However." Lisa let go of Taylor's chin to raise her pointer finger for dramatic effect. "That doesn't change how you have been acting cuckoo for cocoa puffs lately. Clobbering her over the head with a chair? At school, in front of everybody? Mm-mm. Bad look. Psycho look."
"Hey, at least I didn't use my bugs. I wanted to."
"That's the bare minimum I'd expect."
"You're being a terrible friend," Taylor groused, without much heart to it. "Completely undeserving of this."
She caught Lisa's hand by the finger and dangled it limply, showing off the bracelet encircling her slender wrist. The charms clinked together. Lisa rolled her eyes and snuggled up closer, nestling into the hollow of Taylor's shoulder.
"Okay," she said, "I've thought of just the thing to take your mind off the flying Barbie. Next Friday evening, six thirty-ish? Do not get detention."
"Is it another bank robbery? No more bank robberies. Remember what happened last time? She was there."
"Nope. We're gonna go bowling. Dinner too, probably. Dress nice."
They talked for a while longer. About school, about life when Taylor didn't want to think about school anymore, then about work when Taylor didn't want to think about life anymore. The sun set outside the window, painting the loft in violet-orange hues and drawing out long shadows from behind the furniture.
"It's getting late," Lisa said. She looped the three bracelets she'd made that afternoon around Taylor's left wrist.
Lisa seemed so careless choosing charms, yet they always came together so beautifully once threaded—a fox chasing a butterfly chasing a sun. Intellectually Taylor knew that the charms were designed to look good together no matter the permutation. But in so many ways, Lisa gave Taylor the impression of a blindfolded chessmaster tossing a piece in the air and landing on the right square every time.
"It is," Taylor said.
"Your curfew."
"Yeah."
"You're not coming back later?"
Taylor shook her head. "Mom didn't say she'd be working late. She'll notice I'm gone. Can I just stay a little longer?"
"Always," Lisa said. She patted the couch behind her. "Wanna watch Parahumans and Paramours? The season finale's out on Betflix."
"Yeah." Taylor cracked a small smile. "Remind me which blonde white girl we like and which one we hate again?"
Lisa got up to plug in the HDMI cable. "Okay, so, the answer to that's become complicated because Marlene doesn't date tinkers anymore—"
They settled into the couch together, Taylor on one end and Lisa on the other. While Lisa went over her updated relationship chart in detail, Taylor retrieved a large perfumed pillowcase from under the couch, opened it up between them, and issued the summons.
Bugs, swarming colonies of them, flew in through the window and into the gaping end of the pillowcase. Larger beetles scurried in from dark crevices and unseen cracks to give the sack mass. Next to Taylor, the pillowcase swelled and bulged until it assumed a curvaceous humanoid shape. It molded to her hipbone, humming against her skin, embracing her. She embraced it back.
If Lisa had opinions, she didn't voice them.