Jinx spent the weekend fairly quietly. She was invited to one party, on Saturday, courtesy of her temporary landlord, her cousin's friend. She showed despite her ambivalence and felt out of place. It was a music and drinks and smokes party in one of the hip neighborhoods of the city. It was the people across the hall from the boyfriend of the girl in whose apartment she was staying. Everybody had the right clothes and the right drinks and they played the right music. Cool as could be. But Jinx didn't feel particularly cool that evening. For one thing, everyone she ran into either smirked made a remark that was the equivalent of a smirk about her goth clothes. Soooooo last year!
She stayed off in one corner of the apartment with a drink in hand talking a bit to whoever came by but mostly just thinking. After a while, a blond guy came by and offered apologies for the "morticia" jokes his friends had made. He made a joke about each of his callous friends and sat next to her on the window sill. He talked about knowing a goth girl in school. He went on. It might have been genuine, but Jinx couldn't shake the suspicion that if she'd been the prissy type he'd have told about knowing a girl with a hundred stuffed animals. Girl jock type? Cue up the tape of knowing the school tennis champ. Musician type? I knew Clara the clarinetist. Zoroastrian vegetarian mime? Ya know, I used to know a girl who . . .
He was smooth. And with each successive ingratiation, he moved a little closer, touched her a little more openly, stared a little more brazenly at her.
Jinx let him go on mostly out of curiosity. When would his rap go off track? He kept talking and talking, joke, observation, mild compliment, smile. Lather rinse repeat. He got her another drink from a passerby and eventually worked his hand onto her thigh. It was now or never for sensitive player boy. He offered to take her to his place. Just the next building over he said then affected a bashful expression. She wasn't saying yes.
"Hey, you could do worse" he offered softly. He had no idea why that set her off, but it did. Her face completely changed in an instant and he was shocked to see her eyes glow pink like a demon's as she stared angrily at him.
"What!" she snarled. "Worse! Why not better!"
He jumped away from the window sill and nearly ran across the room and then into the next room to get away.
Jinx found her cousin's friend, told her that she was going back to the apartment and left.
She was glad she hadn't hexed him because the whole idea of her power had been at the center of her thoughts. How had he put it? We're influenced by our powers more than we realize. She chuckled and shook her head. Him! Insights from a boy like that! She shook her head at the unlikelihood. And I thought he might be a himbo with that face and body. The buns! God. She sighed. Who wouldn't expect a boy like that to be a bit of a dope? Surprising enough that he's a hero type without being an uptight jerk like that Robin. Titans Go . . . go screw yourself, she added.
But he wasn't that far from being one of them, was he, she asked herself as she walked the mile and a half to the disreputable neighborhood where she was staying. Or was he? Would Robin crash a party like that? Would Beast Boy get off on expensive books like he did? God! Expensive books and his motor races. Cyborg was another story.
She didn't have any bad feeling toward him. Somehow it just hadn't been the same as with Kid Flash, though. Dropping it all for him just hadn't been possible. But our powers influence us. Our powers influence us. And what'd he say? He said that he didn't get his power till he was 11 years old and that he realized how lucky he was for that.
God! If you knew! If you knew, pretty boy! She realized she was blinking almost non-stop as she made her way down the cracked sidewalks of her neighborhood thinking of the possibilities, but only saw how watery her eyes looked in her reflection in the door to enter the building. If I hadn't gotten my powers till age 11! She thought of it walking up the stairs. Maybe Mom would've . . and-and . . Dad.
She shut the door amid tears and tossed herself down on the futon shedding a squall of tears over regrets not fully considered for years. Afterward she sat up and wiped her eyes as another feeling grew.
". . not gonna be some after school special, movie of the week freaking melodrama!" she muttered angrily then finished wiping and jumped to her feet. The opposite of wallowing in self pity was action. She went for the first opportunity. Spying a tree swaying gently in the apartment courtyard outside a window, she flung the window open and fired two bolts of hex energy at it neatly shearing off two thick branches to fall 20 feet to the ground.
She was immediately whipsawed by two conflicting emotions, visceral pleasure at using her power and worry that the branches would kill someone below. She leaned out the window to see what the effect had been.
"Please! Don't let there be anyone . . "
There wasn't. The two leaf covered branches had fallen harmlessly to the grass beside the tree's trunk with a great rustle of leaves but no casualties. She let out a long exhale and resolved to hold off on any more hexes at least until after meeting him again Monday.
"How lucky is he?" she thought as she was going to sleep. "His deal makes him happy, so happy that he doesn't seem bright. Mine's there egging me on when I get pissed off. He is so lucky."
Wally West didn't feel lucky that weekend. As was the recent pattern whenever he was visited by Aunt Iris, his mother took her resentment out on him. All weekend long she yelled at him and hectored him for any available fault, real, imagined or completely contrived as his sister was a cheshire cat spectating on his difficulties. And all of a sudden, his mother had a mania for cleanliness and order that he simply had to immediately satisfy.
Dishes, Wally!
Trash, Wally!
Wash the windows, Wally!
Rake the yard, Wally!
Mow the lawn, Wally!
Water the grass, Wally!
Clean your room, Wally!
Do the laundry, Wally!
Vacuum the rugs, Wally!
Wash the car, Wally!
Clean the bathroom, Wally!
Anything she could think of, she ordered Wally to do. And she was buzzing around the whole weekend; he couldn't do any of it at super speed. He barely had time to mow a couple neighbors' lawns to get some money for Monday. Complain, complain, complain. That's all she did the whole weekend. Look at this! Clean this Wally! Look at that! Take care of that, Wally! Why do you eat so much! You can't possibly need to eat so much when you're that thin! And twice he saw her looking around in his room, going through the drawers of his battered dresser and looking under the bed, somehow suspicious that he must have been given something more than socks and underpants. Not a kind word, no thank you or word of any consideration for his efforts was uttered to spoil the resentment offensive.
Wally kept his head down and did what he had to do. It helped that, in the back of his mind, was the possibility that, fairly soon, he might become a Teen Titan. But more than that prospect, Monday's date with Jinx made temporary annoyances seem small. When kids in school came up to him that morning with paper copies of the juniors' pictures of him in the pig pen, a sow behind him and fencing in front of him, they expected a furious reaction or perhaps an emotional meltdown. Wally just shrugged.
"Yeah, they got me" he said with a slight smile, just happy that the mud made it hard to see his muscle tone and that his penis didn't show behind his left thigh. Kids made squeals and snorts and yelled pig calls but they may as well have been making fun of him in Farsi. It just didn't matter to him.
What mattered was what happened at 7 pm. He was there at the Cineplex at ten minutes of courtesy of super speed and a quick change of clothes in an alley back to his civilian uniform. With a mischievous smile he decided to see how long it would take her to pick him out of the crowd.
He saw her walking up to the entrance, one glistening drop of girl in the flood of people entering the doors of the 16 screen complex. She was dressed exactly the same as the last he'd seen her but with a bright scarf over her head so that her hair was disguised. He avoided looking directly at her from the bench off to the side of the doors where he sat. He saw her looking around intently, and could almost see her sifting through the possibilities. No . . . no . . . nope . . . nuh uh . . . no . . . Hmmm, slender and athletic . . nope, blond . . . no . . . nope . . . no . . . no. A head of reddish hair in the distance! . . no. Not him either.
A couple times he was sure she was about to look at him, so he looked away. He waited a few moments and saw her scanning the crowd again. Finally, after several minutes of increasingly frantic searching she approached him on the bench. He looked down at his feet.
"Excuse me. Have you seen a boy with bright red, actually orange hair around here? I'm supposed to meet him but-"
He looked her in the eye. Her expression changed and she slapped his shoulder. "You bastard!" she laughed. "Why didn't you come over? I saw you sitting here ten minutes ago."
"I was just curious how quickly you'd notice me dressed like this" he said standing up.
She chuckled. "You're so camouflaged dressed like that. Where'd you get those clothes?"
"This is what I always wear"
"Really?" She pictured him in his tight red and yellow suit and then looked at him in his body concealing oversized clothes and hat. What a shame.
"You said the magic word. Camouflage. I don't need kids seeing me and thinking Kid Flash"
"It's like the exact opposite of-" she looked around to make sure no one would hear, "-your Kid Flash uniform. That shows your body but hides your face. This shows your face but hides your body"
He nodded agreement and they went inside.
"You really went all out to hide, too" he smirked and she slapped his shoulder.
"What do you want to see?" he asked.
"Well, let's pick something we both like"
They looked at the board listing 16 different movies. There must be one we both like, they both thought. He began, willing to see a movie about which he was indifferent if she really wanted to see it.
"Um, Munich?" "Nah"
Her turn. "Glory Road?" she suggested. "Nah, a review said they cheated on all the facts. No thanks. How 'bout . . Rumor Has It?" he suggested trying to guess what might appeal more to a girl. "Ugh. Jennifer Aniston. And double ugh, Kevin Costner. How 'bout . . Syriana?" she said making the same guess of what might appeal to this sort of boy. "No way. I know a kid of arab background and I heard him saying that that movie says the CIA runs the whole middle east and that it's insulting to arabs. George Clooney? Intellectual of the new millenium?" He made a funny face.
She laughed. "Really. How 'bout . . The Producers?" "Jeez. I saw the old movie of it a week ago. How 'bout . . Family Stone?" "Will they play Everyday People or will Sly Stone have a cameo? I'm Sarah Jessica Parkered out anyway" She replied with an expression of mild distaste.
They quickly burned through the other choices in likeminded disinterest leaving only two options that both had left for last. "Um, . . . Fun with Dick and Jane?" he offered unenthusiastically. "I hate Jim Carrey with the fire of a thousand suns" she answered. "Trying harder doesn't make things funny".
"Pffew! I can't stand him either. I'd have sat through it if you really really wanted. And that leaves . . only . . . " he didn't even want to say it.
"Brokeback Mountain. Ugh. You don't really want to see two other guys do it, do you?". He shook his head slightly but emphatically. "Not that there's anything wrong with that".
They both looked around. What now?
"How about we go to the Borders in the mall around the corner?" he suggested and offered his hand. She nodded assent and they walked along the outside of the fortress-like Cineplex holding hands. It occurred to each, separately, that holding hands as they walked was a sign of being each other's official boyfriend and girlfriend. And each, separately, accepted that notion.
"So, what do people think of a boy dressed like that" she asked as they neared the book store entrance.
"I think they suspect that I'm some kind of criminal or lowlife or something. I don't think they're sure exactly what except that I'm something they don't like. You should've seen the teachers at school when I started dressing like this."
"What kind of kid are you at school? Are you a jock?"
He laughed. "I had to quit the sports I used to play but I wasn't really a jock then either"
"Nerd?"
"Um, I think that's part of the perception of me because I get really good grades and I like reading"
"But what nerd dresses like that?"
He kept the term 'Gangsta Geek' to himself and just shrugged.
They made their way inside the store and, with no particular plan, went to the literature section at the end of the alphabet to the far right from the entrance. They started walking slowly along those walls of the store, from the end of the alphabet back toward the A's. And here and there they stopped and talked about an author, each wondering, anxiously, what the other thought of this or that favorite of theirs.
"I remember how much you liked those books in that mansion the other night" she remarked. "That was a nice surprise."
"I remember you being pretty fond of them, too. What do you usually read?"
"Fiction, but not any one kind. Something'll catch my eye and I'll try that. I read a lot and I, uh, I can read whatever I want. I haven't gone to school in probably more than 2 years. How about you?"
"Mostly non-fiction. I read . . I read a lot of odd things to try and fill in the gaps in my knowledge that might help me patrolling"
"So, a lot of science stuff?"
He nodded and she smirked at him having to quickly pull up his pants as they were dropping past his rear. He'd done it a few times on the walk over from the Cineplex.
"Doesn't that drive you nuts?"
"Nah. I'm used to it. I barely even think of it now"
She pointed to the shelf as they were slowly walking past. "Tolstoy?"
He shook his head slightly embarrassed. "I haven't read any of him"
"Anna Karenina is great. War and Peace. Ugh. War and Peace is really hard to follow at the start. I gave up. All these characters! It was like he was trying to throw the readers off".
He sighed slightly at the beguiling twinkle in her eyes when she mentioned Anna Karenina. Book lovers take a small joy in the pleasure that other readers get from their favorites. Being so close to her when she recalled any joy pleased him. And to a reader, someone else being a book lover was like an affirmation of that person. She's okay. She's definitely okay. With effort he got himself back on track.
"Twain?" he asked pointing to a collection of his short stories. She shook her head. "There's a story called Letter to the Earth. It's close to the title of this other collection, Letters from the Earth but this is to, to the earth and it's just one story. But it's the most incredible, clever vicious satirical thing. More than a hundred years ago and it's as strong as anything today. It's great"
Now, she, in turn,lost her bearings. That boy, that face, so close and absolutely enthralled by a more than hundred year old book. She let out a small sigh to the side away from him and gave a tug to his oversize shirt. Walk. Walk. Don't just stand there gawking. Walk.
A little further, she pointed to Catcher in the Rye. "Salinger?"
"Nope. I refused to read it. That was me at my most obstinate in school. It-it just set me off the way they were talking about it that everyone just had to read it. I wouldn't."
She laughed. "So, you were a rebel about not reading the supposed young rebel book?"
"Yeah. The teachers don't like me very much. But it was a young rebel book being pushed by people against whom I feel compelled to rebel. Too much irony."
She decided to let that go for the moment as they walked on. "Ayn Rand?" she asked pointing to a copy of The Fountainhead. "You and Howard Roark have the same hair"
His expression brightened. "I read that one"
"And?" she asked with raised eyebrows. She loved it. Their first test of common literary ground.
"It's terrific."
"Hmmm. How do you reconcile liking Ayn Rand with being a guy who goes around saving other peoples' lives?"
"Well, I-I do get a lot of pleasure out of using my super speed and helping people. It's not just for them. And I've read some stuff on political philosophy. Not that much, but I have and I-I think I'd have to say that I'm a libertarian, which is what people who like her are, right?"
She nodded and smiled at him. This definitely piqued her interest. He likes Ayn Rand. Hmmm. They had a few more misses. He hadn't read Lolita by Nabokov. She hadn't read Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville.
"Huxley?" she asked pointing to a row of paperback of Brave New World.
"Oh god. I loved Brave New World. Great writing. So powerful and tremendously sad. My eyes were tearing up at the end"
"Really?" she smiled. "I love that book! John, the savage, is such a wonderful character, all honor and Shakespeare"
Without even thinking, he took her hand in his. He almost started reciting the 29th sonnet. He was thatclose. But he held off and they walked further along.
"George Eliot?" she offered pointing to two shelves of different books by that author. He nodded. "Very much. I read Silas Marner and Felix Holt and liked both."
She laughed to herself. He's not a bimbo. He's a book nut. "Do you know what a freak you are for being, how old are you?"
"Fifteen" he said, giving himself credit for the couple weeks he was short of that mark.
"Fifteen and having read stuff like that?"
He shrugged. "I don't think people should constantly check and measure themselves against normal and average. I wish I had thought of that phrasing first but I got it from someone else. Anyway, it's true. So what if someone's different in some way? Different doesn't mean sh-"
He stopped himself before finishing the word as an old woman was making her way past them in the aisle. They shared a mischievous glance.
"Back to George Eliot" she said. "Whom do you like better, George Eliot or Jane Austen?"
"Oooo. Whom. Proper english"
"Yes" she smiled. "I command the language. Now answer the question"
"George Eliot" he answered immediately.
She chuckled. "Guys always like George Eliot better than Jane Austen. Always. But some girls do, too, like me. Jane Austen's too girly girl."
"Really?"
"You do know that George Eliot was-"
"a woman" he nodded. "Mary Ann Evans, I think, right?" She nodded. They walked through the rest of the stacks without finding another common favorite. He recommended The Black Monk, A Boring Story and some other Chekhov stories to her. She told him that if he really liked Brave New World he'd feel the same for Don Quixote by Cervantes.
They stared at each other at the end of their walk, each re-calibrating their estimation of the other to a slightly different affection. After several moments, they walked on through the store, each making an occasional joke about a ridiculously unlikely to be sold book or CD at the front of a shelf. But mostly they just held hands and walked slowly on, each separately contemplating how unlikely but fortunate it was that the initial fire of interest for the other had so much more potential fuel. They were still mostly lost in this contemplation, strolling past trade and engineering books when something caught his eye and he stopped short.
"Oh my god! Cheng and Vandermeer's Contemporary Communications Circuitry!"
She laughed, "What?"and saw him staring wide eyed at the 12 inch high and extra wide black and yellow book then dropping to one knee in front of the shelf. There were books about plumbing and boilers and air conditioning and the section gradually segued into college engineering texts. The one that he was excited about was on the border between the two.
"Oh my god. I-I've been looking for that book"
"That excites you?"
He nodded feverishly but she saw his expression go to crestfallen when he saw the price.
"Fifty seven dollars? Fifty seven dollars! God damn!"
"How much have you got?"
"Twenty three"
"Put it on your card"
"I don't have any card. I have the money I make and that's it"
He sighed and looked around. She wondered. Is he going to steal that book? Good, boy goes bad for a book full of circuit diagrams and pictures of electronics. Set your price higher than that, for god's sake! But he didn't try to hide the book under his clothes. He lay it down on the carpet taking another look to either side of them and leaned forward, kneeling on one knee. The posture separated the back of his pants from him. She cast a glance there and saw the perfect skin of the small of his back and the top of his white boxers. But her scrutiny of him was quickly diverted by what he did next.
It seemed to her that he somehow managed to have all the pages of the book stand out in a semicircle above the covers and binding for two seconds and that he then closed it. But then he did it again and she thought she could sort of see him running his right index finger along the pages, all of the pages, every one of what must have been 700 of them. In two seconds. He slammed the book closed and put it on the shelf turning to her with a sly look and an exhale from significant effort.
"That-that wasn't reading, was it?"
"Yeah"
"No way"
"Mmm hmmm"
She yanked the book from the shelf. "Prove it" she said flipping it to the middle. "What's the picture on the bottom of page 341?"
He looked up to one side, deep in concentration. "Okay, give me a sec. That's chapter . . seven. It's . . it's two uh, two . . chips, one for TDMA and the other for GSM cell phone systems".
She slammed the book shut and gave him look of shock. " . .How did you do that?"
"It's um, it's a lot of memory association tricks and stuff. But it's really really hard and if I don't use what I read, it'll all just slip out"
"That's impressive"
"Thanks. It-it takes a lot out of me. It's almost like running at super speed for a while"
"Why that book? I mean . . " she took the book in her hand and read the title.
"Well, about a year ago, there was a case. I-I got to this crime scene, there was a poor dead guy and I walked through this industrial site with these two detectives and they were talking about all these things, wiring and alarms and metals and-and just everything they said was over my head. I was tagging along behind them like a puppy. I-I felt so pathetically ignorant. I-I was just a body, just a fast body that didn't know anything. They had to explain to me what they'd figured out about the case like I was a . . retarded kid or something. And they weren't being jerks. I deserved it. It was how they had to talk to me. I-I was just this fast body in my red and yellow. I think I'd been occasionally embarrassed before but that one case, especially, made me realize how ignorant I was."
So willing to beat up on himself, she thought. Not exactly a braggart after all. "But I thought you said you were near the top of your class"
"I am. I was then, too. But that's crappy junior high, the worst stand in there could be for the real world. Those detectives knew tons and tons of things about which I was ignorant. I-I decided that that would have to change. I started reading more and more books to try and get necessary background knowledge for working on cases"
They walked on chuckling at this or that unlikely specialized section of books and passed a section of shelves of books labeled "Gay and Lesbian". She looked from them to him with a smirk as if asking about his interest. He rolled his eyes.
"You're not a basher or anything?" she asked, just playing.
"No. Really, I'm not. In fact, I, well, with all the patrolling I've done I've become very familiar with where the police patrol and-"
"Where do they patrol?"
"Well, I can tell you that they overpatrol in the rich neighborhoods on the north side of the city and that they underpatrol in the worst part of the city and that they underpatrol the-the gay district, the gay area near the theater district. I figured out all their patterns over time. So I patrol extra in those places. They deserve to be safe just as much as the people in the rich neighborhoods"
"You do!" she rested her head on his near shoulder and huggedhis othershoulder. His heart raced for a moment at the contact with her but she pulled back after a moment as she chuckled. "I can only imagine you in your skin tight uniform waiting in that neighborhood for the cops to arrive and a crowd gathering around you."
"Yeah, that's, um, that's happened a few times. Everybody asks how old I am and takes pictures of me with their phone and tries to figure out if I'm on their-their team. It's times like that that I wish I had a cape with my uniform. But, hey, that's part of the deal."
She sat down on a bench several steps away and he sat next to her.
"I'm so glad we didn't just go to a movie and sit there without talking. I think I had the wrong idea about you in a lot of ways"
"Same here. When I first saw you HIVE FIVE types setting up to rob that museum. I was going to just run in and punch out all of you. You're villains, right? Case closed. But I snuck in close to you as you were explaining something about the museum to the little mechanical wizard guy, um . ."
"Gizmo"
"Yeah, that's right, Gizmo. And the way you explained it betrayed how smart you are and how much you . . how much you loved learning things. You explained it to him in this wonderful way, trying to make him see how terrific it would be to learn all these things and to want to learn them. And I was shocked. Not, that you were so smart but because I realized I couldn't have you land in jail. I couldn't do it. It was the first time it ever happened to me that I felt that way. It wasn't till you guys were halfway done the robbery that I figured out that I should just put the things back and set off the alarm so that you went away and didn't get arrested."
"That's why you did that! You weren't just showing off"
He laughed. "No. I guess my rep for that precedes me but I was keeping you out of jail"
"Thank you"
"You're welcome. You don't belong there" he said turning to straddle the bench and face her. "You're very special" he added moving closer.
They were just a few inches apart now. The kiss that they shared was inevitable. It was also electric. They stared into each other's eyes, both smiling. He moved closer still and took her upper lip between his before turning his head for a french kiss. As their tongues mingled, he wrapped his arms around her feeling, in his embrace the gorgeous slender hourglass shape of her figure and then, with one hand, the dewy soft skin of her neck.
She was facing 90 degrees away from him and could only wrap one arm around him but acted with no reserve in its use, feeling the width of his shoulders down to the narrowness of his waist and then the muscularity of his hip before settling on pressing her hand to his warm chest just below the pectoral muscle. She could feel his heart beating fast. What pleasant continuity. And she felt one of his hands in the analogous position though deriving quite different sensation.
They kissed deeper and deeper and when they were gasping for breath, he drew his breath on the way to kissing the nape of her neck. She sighed heavily and reached under his hat to pull at his hair.
"Hey! Hey!" said a voice from outside and it took both of them a couple seconds to reorient themselves to their surroundings. A balding middle aged employee with glasses was looking at them angrily. "If you're gonna get hardcore, take it outside, kids"
Both grinned but neither said anything. Then Jinx swung one leg over the bench to sit facing him and they leaned in close and just gently rubbed the ends of their noses, both grinning at the pleasant sensation. The employee stammered. "That's uh . . better" he declared uncertainly and thought of an excuse to go somewhere else.
Jinx and Kid Flash rubbed noses some more and then he took her hand between both of his and brought it to his lips, kissing the back of it while still staring at her over it. Eventually she withdrew it and then brought it to his face to just touch one nail to his lips. She smirked. "You have such wonderful lips for a pale skinned boy" And then she thought of the irony and laughed. "Listen to me calling anyone else pale" said the light grey skinned girl. But he immediately came to her defense.
"You're beautiful" he said taking her hand again and kissing it as before. "Beautiful. And I am pale skinned. It goes with the orange hair. The most color I have is on my face" he chuckled "and that's not much either. I . . "
She looked at him anxiously. His face abruptly went from affection to worry in an instant. His ring had vibrated twice. There it was again, two more vibrations. And now a third time. Damn! God damn! Police call.
"What is it? What's wrong?"
He could barely keep from using an expletive as a prefix. "Police call . . . my ring. I-I'll either be back in ten seconds or this is goodnight" he said and quickly pressed his lips to hers. A second later he stepped around the corner of a high bookshelf and then he was gone. She vaguely remembered wanting to talk with him about powers and influences and timing of them but couldn't focus on those things. She thought of his face as she kissed him.
She sighed. He has to but did they have to call him now, now of all times? Aaarrrggghhh!
In ten seconds, he was back, in his civilian clothes. Only he didn't look relieved. He looked even more worked up. "Come with me right now" he said and walked her quickly to a spot next to the side wall of the building. They were out of view of anyone for the moment.
"What is it?"
"You remember at the ball, how I vibrated us both through a wall, I'm going to do that again, now. So-"
"Wait a minute! What is this?"
"There's no time, Jinx. Here goes" he said and, looking closely, she saw him seem to have the slightest blurriness to his features then step toward her and press the palm of his hand to her navel. A split second later they were outside, in the landscaping next to the building hidden by a high arbor vitae.
As she was preparing to demand to know what was going on, civilian Kid Flash was replaced, like an editing trick, by red and yellow uniformed Kid Flash and he took hold of her. Before she knew it, like another editing trick, half the city had passed before her eyes in less than a second, the half of the city from the Borders book store to the same intersection where he'd left her last time, only now they stood in an alleyway a half block from it as she tried to calm her wind whipped hair.
"Are you done with the Flash tricks? Tell me what the hell is going on, now!"
"The police call was for a sighting of you. I'm not sure what your legal status is but someone guessed that that was you at the book store and they called the frigging cops who buzzed me because you're not a typical guy with a warrant out on him. Just, um, please, go home. I'll try and figure out where things stand. Call me tomorrow at 555-4608 that's my home phone. My real name is Wally. Just ask for Wally if I don't answer."
"You did wrong for me . . Wally"
"I-I did what I had to do" he said then stepped forward and kissed her like a continuation of their kiss in the Borders store. When he finally stepped back from her he pulled a rose from his glove.
"Here. I was saving this for you all night under my shirt".
She took it in one hand and he took her other hand between his two, kissing it and staring at her over her hand. Then he was gone.