When Detroit police officers reached the old Steiner Lift Factory, their flashlights at first beheld empty space and deserted equipment in the empty textile plant. The empty and deserted factory on the riverfront had closed down just under fourteen years ago, left to rot and decay under the weather and fall apart around vandals and the homeless. Not even a ghost appeared when police investigated the tip that a meth lab was being operated in the basement, but soon they found recent repairs and long electrical cables running down the staircase into a room lit up ablaze with lights, a littered room of glasses, powders, chemicals and heat sources. It was enough to have blown up entire city block and poison over five hundred people. Its seven creators had been thrown through the place and in need of hospital care. Broken bones, concussions, internal injuries and crushed hands were the mildest of their injuries. One drugged out meth maker was hanging by the elastic in his underwear twelve feet off the floor. Another was using his own foul poison to kill the pain of his shattered legs and two others were hanging upside down from metal gnarled and crushed into shackles around their feet. Another one was pinned under debris inside the old elevator cursing at a "blonde bimbo in a red cape." When police turned to trace their anonymous tip to the illegal lab, they traced it to a pay phone and several witnesses who had seen a blonde girl in a Supergirl costume using it.
Several blocks away, almost thirty people with camera phones taped a blonde angel in blue and red ascending up over a church steeple and rocketing into the night sky. A six year-old girl saw her and bolted away from her mother trying to get her attention. Before a multitude of witnesses, the small and slight brunette pixie raced down the sidewalk screaming at the flying shadow quickly disappearing into the clouds and ran into the street trying to get the blonde presence to see her. Mother just stopped in shock at the sight of the bus screeching to a halt to the sudden child in its path and numerous people cringed realizing they were about to see the death of innocence. The bus driver stomped his brakes desperate to stop his twenty-ton behemoth from erasing the child before him from existence. There were only five people on board and they jerked forward over seats and each other. The big blue eyes of the child turned up to the headlights barreling upon her. A woman screamed, witnesses hollered warnings at the errant child and tires screeched against the cold asphalt road as the massive steel transit vehicle screeched from forty-five miles an hour to a deep stop, roaring over the child vanishing under its grill and into the center of the intersection. A white hatchback swerved and drove over the curb. A white SUV stopped short and a rush of persons stormed the street looking for a tiny body under the bus.
"My baby!!! My baby!!!" Tricia Haltom hysterically pushed through the crowd of on-lookers and discharging transit passengers looking for her child. One gentleman had dropped to reach under the hot front end of the stopped bus, but all he reached into was darkness. Distraught and grief-stricken, Tricia was comforted by a middle-aged mother holding her back. Another pedestrian scouted the stopped and traffic-strewn street for a thrown body then arched his head upward.
"Again! Again!" A young girl's voice cheered.
"Only if you promise to stay out of the street." Bridget Hennessy descended down to earth right before the flustered mother. Her eyes filled with tears, Tricia hesitated in stunned shock and quickly grabbed up her daughter from this person in the costume. A hundred camera phones were clicking on the maiden of might as a police car ascended on the blocked intersection.
"You're real?" Tricia's distraught tears turned to tears of joy before her daughter's savior.
"Apparently." Bridget gasped a response and lifted her head up as she began levitating back up to the air. There were a hundred voices calling to her and over a dozen hands reaching to try and pull her back to keep her on earth for questions. Her costume slipped through their fingers and her legs and feet were beyond grasp as a lone traffic officer refused to admit what he was seeing.
"Hey, did anyone get her picture?" Someone yelled.
"By camera phone went dead!"
"My battery just died!"
"All I got was a vague blob!"
It was now obvious that no one had got a picture this time. Rising back into the sky, Bridget leveled out at two hundred feet and stared out over the geometric layout of lights, roads and dark buildings around her. Her long blonde locks were waving around her as she flew up just beyond the radar range of the local airport then swerved toward home. Her eyes carefully panned the city around her; the breeze trying to dry out her eyes with no result. She didn't try to analyze her powers or just how they worked; she just knew unconsciously how they worked and if she did not want her picture taken again, it happened. Whether her power was magic or science in nature, she didn't care. She had finally found her calling and liked what she had become. Her bearing was royal, her grace almost godly and her aerobic aerial maneuvers fit for angelic beings. She swooped down through an alley with a mental agenda and shot up the back wall of the local Brendan Morris Memorial Library. It was a three story tall Victorian building of red stone and brick with its top floor reserved for the local historic society. The second floor had a community meeting room and the non-fiction shelves. Passing her hand over a roof level skylight, Bridget conjured open a secret entrance from the roof down into the closed and darkened building and lowered down to the main floor level as if she were invading a underworld sanctum. The only lights were from lights streaming from windows and the red exit signs illuminating the darkness. Her heels scraping across the carpeted floors, Bridget retraced her steps back to the shelves in the back of the library where the research books were along with her street clothes behind a top shelf.
Pulling her sweater over her head and costume, she sat down on a nearby chair to pull her socks and shoes on up over her fax boots, even taking the time to tuck the red tips of her boots into her socks to keep them from being seen. Standing in her shoes, she looked up to the skylight ready to depart, then hesitated, pulled a lock of her blonde hair from her face and had an epiphany. As soon as she got home, someone was going to start making connections and accusations and she did not want that. She had a wonderful little secret here, and she wanted it to stay that way, but if she was going to dissuade those ideas, she had to create a little doubt. She had to confuse them, muddle the waters under their train of thought. Pretending to be the old Bridget was the best venture in this. Barely hovering an inch off the floor to once again ascend through the roof, she dropped to the floor and instead strided with purpose through the darkened library for the checkout area. Her eyes scanned the cleared library counter and she reached to the phone and turned it toward her.
Back on Oakdale Avenue, Paul and Cate Hennessy paced back and forth before the fireplace contemplating what was happening. Kerry was curled up reading a book on the sofa in trying to ignore the world around her and Rory was watching Court TV on the television. Bridget was late again, but whether or not she was flying the skies or hanging out with people they didn't know was the big debate. What should they think? Was it Bridget in the news, or was it just someone who looked like her? Could it be Bridget? She had changed remarkably in the last few weeks, but how far had she changed? What was going on around here?
"Mom," Rory looked up during a commercial break to raid the kitchen for food. "Want me to call the Air Force and see if they can get Bridget on Radar?"
"Enough with you!" Paul snapped at his attitude, and Cate stared at him upset with his sarcasm. "Go up to bed!!"
"Don't know why you're worried." Kerry didn't look up from her novel. "From what I understand, Bridget's bulletproof now…."
"You too!" Cate pulled her middle child by the arm for the stairs. At that moment, the phone by the sofa rang and Paul jumped on it with the desperate fear of a worried father.
"Hello? Hello?!" He put the receiver to his ear.
"Daddy…" Bridget made her best little girl voice.
"Bridget…" Paul looked at Cate. "The Old Bridget's back." He hoped and reported as Kerry sat once more on the sofa rolling her eyes. "Where are you? You better not be at the police station."
"I'm locked in the library and can't get out." She pouted while adjusting her skirt and zipping it up. "It's creepy in here. Can you come get me?" Her voice was childlike and innocent.
"You're locked in the library?" Paul screamed out of surprise.
"She's what?!" Cate reacted as well.
"You mean she actually knows where it is?" Rory answered in a faux perplexed and sarcastic state. After another harsh stare to his son, Paul asked the obvious question.
"How in the world do you get locked in the library?!" He reverted to being the angry father.
"I fell asleep in the restroom." Bridget claimed trying to be the perfect dupe. In her mind, pretending to be stupid was now turning out to be her best defense against her dual identity.
"How in the world did she get locked in the library?!" Cate asked only hearing one side of the phone call.
"She fell asleep in the restroom." Paul relayed the message, but Cate grew upset at only being half-involved and took the phone from him.
"Bridget…" Cate paced still clad in her hospital scrubs. "Why didn't you just call 911?"
"I couldn't recall the number…" Bridget rolled her eyes realizing how easy this was becoming. "Besides, I didn't want to get in trouble."
"How could someone who wrote a winning short story do something this stupid?" Kerry stood up at the sofa and asked herself, and then it dawned on her. Maybe, this was just part of an act. Bridget knew she had been confronted, and this was a nice stunt to try and cover her identity. In minutes, her father would meet with the police and one of the librarians outside the library to unlock the building and let the supposedly over-looked blonde high school student out again. While it was confessed that the librarians don't check the bathrooms thoroughly, it was Bridget's excuse that she had been so upset with what Kerry accused her of that she had gone to the library to hide and cry her eyes out, but she had fallen asleep from her tiring emotion-wrought ordeal.
It would be a silent aftermath. By time, her father returned with her wayward and supposedly absent-minded sister, Kerry had been laying in bed pretending to be asleep as Bridget returned home and readied for bed. She heard Bridget puttering through the bathroom and bedroom behind her and waited defiantly for the blonde one to go asleep and then waited a bit longer. It was almost two o'clock when Kerry rolled over in bed after waiting awake for two three hours for her sister to go to sleep. Gazing over at the lump in the other bed in her room, she gripped tightly the scissors in her hand and carefully and lightly treaded across the room to test the comic book adage of the hair that could not be cut. Along the way, someone else had the same idea and Kerry encountered her brother Rory sneaking into her bedroom as well in his white undershirt and pajama pants also equipped with scissors.
"What are you doing here?!" She voiced so inaudibly that she was almost voicing her own words.
"Same as you!" He whispered back upon seeing her with scissors. "Testing to see if our sister is a mutant!" They looked in unison upon Bridget to see if she was asleep. She hadn't stirred.
"Let me do it." Kerry voiced under her breath. "You'd just wake her up and then she'd know that we know."
"But we do know."
"Step back…" Kerry swapped her sewing scissors for the better pair that Rory had brought. Carefully treading the room in her bare feet, she first tried to reach over the bed and then decided or hovering over the other end of the bed for the long tufts of blonde hair sticking above the covers. Bridget was buried in the bed hugging her pillow and her long blonde locks were bunched behind her head from the blankets pulled up tight. Reaching for a good place to cut, Kerry made one last look to Rory scared for a second of what they were about to discover then lifted a long strand of errant hair ready to cut it from her sister's head.
"Cut it from underneath…." Bridget's voice emanated from her lips. "It's less noticeable."
Kerry and Rory froze extending looks of surprise that their sister had been awake the whole time. An arm reached from under the blankets and flipped on the light on her nightstand, and Bridget turned her body up and sat up in bed. She lightly exhaled, slowly blinked tiredly and looked to her sister then her brother.
"It was her idea!" Rory spoke out loud at normal voice level. Kerry shot him a look of disgust with her mouth hanging open and refrained from swatting him.
"You're awake??!" She turned to Bridget.
"You hurt me a lot tonight, Kerry." Bridget gasped tiredly with her hand to her heart. "Why are you doing this to me?" Shaking her head defeatedly, she noticed the scissors in her sister's hand and took them noticeably upset and reached blindly under her hair for the back of her neck where she could hide a chunk of missing hair. There was a snip of the scissors and she pulled out a small snip of blonde hair only about three inches long. She dropped the scissors by her nightstand and divided her lock of severed hair between her brother and sister.
"Here," She produced her locks to Rory. "You can sell that to your little friends."
"Thanks, Bridget!" Rory's face lit up and departed for his room. Tired and still spiritually shattered, Bridget turned her head to Kerry and reacted spiritually defeated. Kerry looked down to the hair in her hand in empty victory then looked up to her sister's crushed and spiritless blue eyes. The older sister was expecting an apology.
"Bridget, please…" Kerry implored her again. "You can tell me anything. Why won't you let me in?"
Bridget just sighed disgustedly, switched her light back off and sunk into bed. Unsure what to think, Kerry sighed a bit herself and turned to her bed in the dark. Her mattress chinked a bit with her body settling on to it and she poked her legs back under her covers wondering what to try next. A clump of snipped hair was not much proof, but as she reached out to drop the blonde strands to the floor, she realized something else. There were still follicles attached to these strands. They'd been pulled out, not cut!