4
"Let's see…" The cute Reese Witherspoon look-alike walked with Cate through the hospital corridor. "Heart, pulse, good… urine test, pristine..."
"Blood test?" Cate asked as Dr. Masterson checked Bridget's report. "I mean… the needle didn't break on her skin or something, did it?" She giggled half in jest.
"What?" Lizzie didn't hear the joke.
"Nothing."
"Uh," The young former intern checked her notes. "Her iron count is excellent, her hearing and acuity is very sharp, she's not pregnant and I would kill for her figure." That did get a bit of a laugh and a chuckle.
"What about her seizure?"
"Maybe it was just a bad dream." Dr. Masterson held her clipboard as a shield against her. "Has anything been bothering her at school?"
"Not that I know of."
"She seems to be a very bright and intelligent young girl, Cate." The lovely female doctor added.
"Okay," Cate stopped and turned back to Dr. Masterson. "Now I know there's something going on with that girl. No one has ever described her as bright or intelligent!!"
"Cate…" Masterson leaned over to calm Cate. "You're after hours now. You can go home now."
"Right." Cate composed herself and had a friendly parting grin with Dr. Masterson before turning to the nurse's station on her floor. Gesturing to one of her friends that she was off her shift, she looked and reached to her purse under the counter and grabbed her jacket from its hook on the wall. Nearly pulling her jacket over her purse strap, she shifted her purse from shoulder to shoulder as she slipped her arms into her sleeves and then took her purse reaching to her cell phone in it and punching out the number to her daughter's cell just as she reached the exit to the parking lot. After a few goodbyes, her heels moved from tapping across hospital linoleum on to the parking lot asphalt. In her ear, she listened to the ringing of her daughter's phone.
"Hello?"
"Bridget, it's mom." Cate reached her car and tossed in her phone while still waving to friends waving back at her. "I just wanted to let you know you got a clean bill of health from Liz."
"What'd you expect?"
"Nothing." Cate lightly chuckled. "Where are you right now? It's so quiet where you are"
"Oh," Bridget seemed to hesitate. "Just hanging out…"
"Want me to pick you up?"
"I got my own ride." Bridget answered. "Love you mom."
"Love you too, Beej." Cate signed off as Bridget shut off her phone and clipped it into a pouch on her yellow belt. She was starting to love this outfit. She had found it at a bargain price in the costume shop and thought it was perfect for the jobs she had to do. It consisted of bright red boots matching her red cheerleader skirt and long red cape. All of them were mere accessories to the main piece, a navy blue leotard with a proud and familiar Kryptonian emblem, a large red letter emblazoned against yellow against her chest. If she was going to act like a certain costumed fictional character, she might as well choose the best one possible instead of trying to be someone else no one would know. A lot of people wanted to be comic book characters, and she had just received the chance to be the best one possible.
Suspended aloft across the stratosphere in synchronous orbit with Detroit below her, Bridget looked across the heavens around her, turning round on her personal axis as a cosmic ballerina with the powers of earth and sky. Endless night was above her and below her was several thousand square miles of layered clouds showing pieces of earth. The lights of Detroit were unmistakable against Lake St. Clair and the rest of the country. It was like seeing particles of sun shining through holes in an endless dark tapestry with endless colors as far as she could see. Every hue of the rainbow was up here in some way and it was endlessly quiet for her to hear from afar the voices of millions of people. Her mind was diffusing through those voices layer at a time… private conversations, angered voices, passionate whispers, annoyed grunts, frustrated screams and then the plaintiff cries for help. Those were the calls for which Bridget now deemed significant. What ever had happened to her had not just made her short of a god, but also passionate to the needs of others. The old self-centered Bridget was no more; the new improved Bridget cared about the world about her, and resolved to help anyone around her who needed it. Upon screams of torment, her eyes focused on the pinprick that voice originated and she dived headfirst back upon the mortal plane. Descending with the velocity of a shooting star, she streaked back to earth through the boundaries of sound barrier with the lights of the city swelling back up to size around her. A light sonic boom echoed behind her as Bridget streaked across the sky.
On earth, Bonnie Marie Misch sat on the cold sidewalk at the corner of Fifth Street and Decatur grieving the loss of her purse. Her weekly paycheck from her job at the diner was in it along with her favorite photos, important numbers and now that young punk was going to waste them on death-inducing drugs or dangerous hallucinogenic plants. Not a single person had tried to stop the young cretin, and now she was pining for help below the dark windows of a closed furniture store with cold strangers passing her by. Tears dropping from her face, she wondered how she was going to tell her son that she could no longer afford to give him a birthday party. Tears dropping from her face, the thirty-eight year old beauty turned to curse at her mugger and saw from down the block the sight of him being jerked off his street and tossed into a dirty alley. The streaking image above the sidewalk was coming closer and closer. It looked like a flying blonde girl with a large red cape who dropped her purse back into her lap before sailing away and vanishing into the night. Realizing once more there was hope in the world, Bonnie stopped crying tears of despair and shed a few tears of joy. She wasn't sure if what she had seen was real or not, but she had her purse and valuables back!!
"Thank you!! Thank you!!"
Near Oakdale Street, Kyle Brady was taking the family trash out to the garbage cans on the curb when he felt a sudden sheer breeze brush over the neighborhood. Leaves swelled up into the air from the massive wind and scrambled across the street and yards. The trees rustled and bent into the direction of the figure sailing by through the area. Knocked to his back by that gust of wind, Kyle landed against the soft grass of his yard and stared to the heavens trying to refresh his mind of the brief image he had seen.
Within the Hennessy house, Kerry had finished her algebra homework and placed it in her pack so that she could have it the next day in school. Now wanting to spend time briefly with her family for as long as she could stand it, she left her bedroom and started for the kitchen, but just before ascending down the back stairs, a vague shape barely cognizant to her eyes rushed up to her and passed her on the top landing. The impact had turned and spun her around twice and she had to grab the wall to keep from falling down the back stairs. Her mind still spinning, she took a deep breath, looked around and continued down the staircase to take a bottle of water from the refrigerator. At the same moment, her mother entered the house through the back door.
"Hi, Care bear…" Cate beamed to her middle child and kissed her head. The sarcastic and introverted girl just mugged a bit and waved the whole thing off. Cate turned her head up and saw her husband and son playing a computer game through the TV. Two boxes of pizza were on the kitchen counter over the stove with one errant plate of uneaten pizza crusts nearby. Miffed at this choice of dinner, Cate took one hearty piece of mushroom, black olive and pepperoni and bit into it as Paul and Rory paused briefly to notice her between killing zombies in their game.
"Nice dinner, Paul." Cate smiled a bit annoyed to her husband. "Is Bridget home?"
"Not yet…" Paul watched as his video character was eliminated by his son's character. "But if she's late again…"
"Hi, mom…" Bridget pranced down the back stairs in her robe and hugged her mother before getting into the pizza.
"Where'd you come from?" Paul jumped to attention.
"The stork brought me?" Bridget responded and reacted confused to the question. She bit into a pizza slice holding her robe shut to her chest with her left hand. "I'm feeling a bit scummy. I'm taking a shower and then straight to bed. Night!" She kissed her mother delicately and shined briefly to her father before hurrying back up the back stairs with another slice of pizza in her hand to sustain her appetite.
"Wait a second…" Rory went from grinning ear to ear after beating his dad in the Zombie Wars computer game to being suspicious. "Bridget's home early and she's going to bed on time? I gotta ask – where's Bridget and who's that stranger in our house?!" His father half seriously poked him in the back.
"Hey! I was just up there." Kerry sipped her water with one hand and pointed upstairs with her left. "She was not up there."
"What's wrong with you two?" Paul was disconnecting the video player to see the evening news. "I saw her come in the front door a few minutes ago…" He paused a bit unsure. "I'm sure I did." He paused thinking it over. "Yeah, I did… The thing is… she's home and on time for a change, and why? Because your mom and I laid down the lawn." He got a grinning nod of confidence from Cate. "I mean… where else would Bridget have been."
"We have just had our twenty-third Supergirl sighting here in the Greater Detroit area." Local news anchor Peter MacNichol announced just as the television was reverted back to regular TV viewing. "As you may know, starting with this morning, witnesses have been reporting an attractive young girl in a Supergirl costume presumably and allegedly flying through the city helping people. At first, rumors were that a movie might have been filming in town, but as late, the local police deny that is happening. As you can see from this amateur footage taped from a young man's handheld camera, it seems that Detroit might just have a true honest-to-goodness superhero!"
Paul, Cate, Kerry and Rory leaned into the television in unison and dropped their jaws simultaneously. The grainy footage taken from a city block away of the subject showed a vague blond teenage girl in costume landing in the middle of a street filled with fire engines and placing an elderly woman in the hands of paramedics. The camera had been taping an apartment house on fire in nearby Sterling Heights, and with it, it had taped the superhuman beauty rescuing the trapped woman from a third floor apartment by carrying her to the ground and then ascending to the ground. Her shape, her size, her build, her demeanor and vague likeness were all like someone they already knew. Someone they heard in the upstairs shower!