Content Warning: Depictions of antisemitism ahead.
The rest of the weekend felt almost surreal. Like I hadn't spent Friday night in costume beating up Nazis with Glory Girl. Charlotte had been shaken up by her near-miss but remained unbowed and unbroken. The cans of spray paint in her bag and the messages of "Never Again" and "Żegota Lives" painted over some Empire 88 graffiti went unmentioned.
Despite running into little else with Glory Girl that night. I had opted to end my patrol at 3 AM and head back inside, Glory Girl—or as she insisted I call her, Vicki—had given me her cell number for when I went on patrol again, so she could show me the ropes as a hero. I had resolved to go out and buy a burner phone for cape work going forward. Having to rely on increasingly scarce payphones wasn't going to work, I realized.
I spent Saturday ordering my black widows to make some patches of cloth, my costume might have been knife-proof but that didn't mean it wouldn't eventually get cut. So I wanted some patches of cloth that I could have on hand to repair my costume. It also made me wonder about adding spider silk linings to my regular clothes, to make them more durable in case I ever got caught up in something in my civvies.
Looking through the boxes of old and ruined clothes in the basement, I found an old jean jacket of mine. Emma had bought it for me for my birthday before I went to Nature Camp, before she turned her back on me; it had been stained in a couple of places but I could work with that.
Trying on the jacket, I discovered that all my work towards getting into shape for my superhero career had an unintended consequence, the new muscles in my arms made getting through the sleeves fraught with difficulty.
I guess this would just have to be a denim vest then.
Taking a stitch remover from my eclectic collection of sewing supplies, I turned the jean jacket inside out and started unstitching the sleeves from it.
Having removed the sleeves, I turned the newly made denim vest inside out again to put it back to normal. Unfortunately the old juice and soda stains from the trio, and the bleach stains from my early attempts at washing out said juice and soda stains were very visible.
The bleach stains I couldn't do anything about, but they gave it character. The juice and soda stains not so much, so I grabbed some leftover fabric swatches of spider silk from when I was testing different fabric dyes for my costume and sewed them over the stains on the vest, with the biggest patch going over a large stain on the back where some juice had gotten between my backpack and the jacket, spreading out.
The end result had a patchwork look that had an almost punk rock aesthetic to it. I could either try to hide that from the finished product, or I could own it and make it seem intentional.
I went with the latter.
Pulling out the fabric paint that I had leftover from my costume making, I painted the symbol for the historical Antifaschistische Aktion on the back, along with the three arrows and the anarchist circled A on the front.
Monday morning finally rolled around and I felt like a slug. After everything I did over the weekend, finally becoming a superhero, to have to go back to being ordinary Taylor Hebert felt almost wrong.
It was fortunate then that my first class of the day was computer class.
Mrs. Knott typically divided the class between the beginners and the advanced students, as Winslow didn't have the budget to offer multiple classes. The beginners were learning how to use Word and Excel, while the more advanced students like myself had to write a program in Python that would be given a text file of random numbers and would output the same list in numerical order using a binary search tree. We had already done most of the fundamentals in the advanced group so it was just a matter of putting that theory into practice with this assignment. I managed to hammer it out in fifteen minutes, tested it and uploaded it to Mrs Knott's dropbox folder.
With that out of the way, opened up a browser window and started browsing PHO.
To my surprise, searching for "Weaver" on the PHO wiki turned up a page.
Weaver is an independent Hero operating in Brockton Bay as of 2011. Her power is the ability to manifest and control swarms of insects, which she uses to block her opponents vision and distract them by having her bugs crawl over them.
As I continued to read the wiki entry about me, I was put off by how subtly off everything on it was. None of the information that was on there was wrong about me, but it felt incomplete. My initial instinct was to go in there and edit it to be more accurate about my powers, but I stopped myself. Villains probably read PHO too, I wouldn't want to give away everything I could do with my bugs just to correct some wiki.
Scrolling to the bottom, I saw that the page about me had only been created yesterday, and that somebody named "Point_Me_At_The_Sky" had been the one to create it.
"She saved me, you know." Came a voice from behind me. I looked over and it was Charlotte sitting at the computer next to me.
"Weaver?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
"Yeah." Charlotte replied. "Rune's cell torched our Synagogue last week and I wanted to fight back, so I grabbed some spray paint to say that we wouldn't be forced out of the bay. I got cornered by some E88 groupies afterwards and then Weaver and Glory Girl saved me."
"Well uh…" I said, awkwardly, "I'm glad you're okay."
"Thanks." said Charlotte. "When I saw that cloud of bugs, I thought it was Grue for a second."
"You wouldn't be the first one." I muttered.
"Huh?" She asked.
"Nothing." I said. The awkward silence dragged on until the end of the period, with the silence ended by a lilting ding dong from the PA speakers.
I was halfway through the door when I heard Mrs. Knott speak up. "Miss Hebert, can I speak with you for a moment?"
[hr][/hr]
I didn't have any other classes with Taylor today other than that first period computer class. I didn't know her that well but I didn't take her for a cape geek so I was curious how she already knew about Weaver, a cape who—as far as I could tell—only made her debut this weekend.
Lunch was… fine. I sat with my usual group of friends in the cafeteria while we ate reheated chicken sandwiches and the cardboard-tasting pizza the cafeteria offered.
"So then Hebert starts talking about some tinker in Des Moines, and Knott totally backed down on the dress code thing." Said Allison Nguyen.
"Des Moines?" Jenna asked. "Are there even any capes there?"
I shrugged my shoulders, and took another bite of my chicken sandwich. It wasn't the most appetizing thing, but it was the best of what Winslow's cafeteria had to offer.
As I looked around at the cafeteria's lunch tables, the junior members of the Empire were being a lot more aggressive today, probably lashing out because people around here weren't putting up with their shit anymore.
"Looks like we've got the affirmative action table over here." came a very familiar and very annoying voice from behind me.
"Fuck off Ferguson." I growled.
"Oh don't be like that Raimi." Ferguson said. "What happened to free speech? The first amendment and all that?"
"You spammed my phone with text messages that said 'six million was not enough.'" I said, incredulous.
"I was talking about the powerball lottery." He said, blatantly lying. "The grand prize was only 6 million dollars. I thought that was way too small of a prize."
It was the usual routine for the Empire kids. Say something bigoted but couch it in paper-thin deniability that those of us on the receiving end could see right through, we speak up, they deny it, and the teachers take their obvious bullshit excuse at face value. This time, Peter was wearing a t-shirt that advertised the fictitious "Pinochet's Helicopter Tours," which featured a drawing of a helicopter with somebody falling out of it.
I didn't want to deal with this shit so soon after what happened on Friday, so I bussed my tray to the trash and then left the cafeteria.
My next class was over on the third floor so I figured that I might as well head over there a bit early and kill some time over there, away from the Nazis. Plus, almost nobody uses the girls bathroom on that floor and I didn't really want to deal with any people right now, so I could hide out there for a bit.
I froze as I walked into the bathroom.
A chitinous mass of insects covered every surface of the bathroom. A veritable carpet of bugs made the worst, most unmaintained rest stop bathroom on I-95 look positively hygienic. It was only my rescue at the hands of Weaver on Friday that kept me from screaming at the sight in front of me. I watched in mute horror as bugs poured through a broken ceiling tile as an almost undulating mass.
Then, just as quickly as they seemed to appear, the bugs dispersed through cracks in the walls, broken ceiling tiles, and old drill holes where a paper towel dispenser used to be mounted.
There in the center of the bathroom by the sinks was Taylor, covered in juice and soda.
"Weaver?" I asked.