8
In Pasadena, the local police were calling the fire station so often to pull down street gang members and drug users off radio and power lines that they were debating getting one of their own trucks. The common street criminals were at a certain caste; they were strung up by their underwear and hung around the city like turkeys at Thanksgiving. The career criminals in town from other parts of the country had their underwear pulled up over their heads and were held up by their belts or tempered steel bent around them that they had to be freed with power cutters. More serious offenders… the child molesters, the would-be terrorists, the nihilists who indiscriminately killed innocents, they were found with broken bones, severe injuries, concussions and then strung up by their underwear. If this flying personage phenomenon was a hoax, there had to be a cult out there pulling off these incredible frauds and illusions. After almost ten years, no one really believed the hundreds of sightings were promotion stunts for an up-coming movie. Hundreds of people believed she was real, thousands did not, and yet, those numbers were constantly changing. When actor Dean Cain and actress Helen Slater went on TV to host the Supergirl: Fact or Fiction documentary, the on-line poll showed that 48.9 of Americans believed she existed, while 47.6 percent believed she did not. The rest were undecided. Of those who believed was a struggling musician named Nick Tayback, a native from Twin Peaks, Oregon who had been eliminated from the first round of American Idol for the 2009 to 2010 season. Nowadays, he just spent his evenings on the corner of Barrymore and Second near his aunt's sandwich shop and played his guitar to people in the street.
"Supergirl, Supergirl…" He strummed and played his variation of a television ditty to pedestrians and tourists. "Does everything like Superman…"
"Bends steel any size…
"Catches thieves just like flies.
"Look out, here comes Supergirl…
"Is she strong? Listen, bud, she's got Kryptonian blood." He sung and strummed his guitar as some people dropped change and a few dollars.
"Can she fly through the air?
"Take a look over there…
"Hey there, there goes Supergirl…." He grinned and played while singing as a few people stopped to here this version of the TV theme.
"In the chill of night at the scene of a crime
"Like a streak of light, she appears just in time." Tayback flirted with some girls who had stopped to giggle near him. "Supergirl, Supergirl… Friendly neighborhood Supergirl,
"Wealth and fame, she's ignored…
"Action is her reward to her.
"Life is a great big bang up
"Wherever there's a hang-up
"Here comes Supergirl…." He stopped and grinned. A few more people gave him money in his guitar case, but several of the dispersed without leaving anything. Among them, two brothers named Sam and Dean Winchester had stopped, listened and looked at each other briefly before wandering the cold night street down toward their motel off the main street.
"Great. Now I'm never going to get that tune out of my head." Dean looked to his brother. "Did you learn anything at the Warner Brothers lot?"
"She's definitely not a publicity stunt." Sam answered as they neared the lights of a McDonalds. "I talked to a special effects guy in contact with most of the FX companies, none of them are working on anything close."
"Yeah…" Dean looked into the McDonalds and had a craving for a hamburger. "I'm starting to wonder if she really is the daughter of Thor and Aphrodite." He recalled the disputed interview with a New York City police detective several years prior. "But I did peruse a few of the websites out there, and they mostly agree that her sightings here in the Hollywood area have shot up…."
"Have we completely ruled out that she's not Laura Vandervoort?" Sam wondered about the former "Smallville" actress.
"She threatened to have us arrested if we showed up on the set of "V" again." Dean stopped and loitered outside the McDonalds. "She's definitely not an actress." He continued on his way down the street past tourists, locals and glowing streetlights as cars drove by them. "Actor lives are ruled by schedules… readings, rehearsals, photo shoots, they're tracked by the studios. An actress would never be able to juggle a secret identity, and if one tried, the paparazzi would definitely expose it."
"So that lets off Reese Witherspoon, Britney Spears, Emily Osment…."
"…Ashley Tisdale, Christina Applegate, Emile De Ravin, Taylor Swift and every other blonde celebrity that the tabloids have allegedly exposed…" He made quotations marks with his fingers on the word "exposed." "We need to track her down. Why? Because out of all the websites, the Incredible Supergirl Sightings Database alone pinpoints her somewhere in Pasadena, and that's where we are going to center our investigation."
"And how are we going to meet her?" The brothers had walked farther and now stopped in front of a local H.G. Hills grocery store.
"Easy," Dean spoke. "You are going to stand on the top floor… no, the roof of the highest building we can get into and pretend to commit suicide." That was his plan.
"No…" Sam resisted. "No, I'm not doing that."
"She'll save you before you hit the ground!"
"Sam, I'm not doing that!"
"You have to!" Dean stood his ground. "We're not going to run into her in the street!" The door to the Hill's Store slid open wide as Bridget headed out carrying a bag of groceries. She had cans of soup and vegetables, a few TV dinners and some snacks, some fruits and vegetables along with the bread and ingredients for sandwiches. In her free hand, she carried her milk in a plastic bag and stopped before the brothers blocking the entryway.
"Excuse me?"
"Oh, sorry…" Sam stepped back and Bridget continued on to her fourth floor apartment down the street. She passed between the two brothers and headed on her way, her long blonde hair bouncing off her shoulders and cascading down her back. Her tight red shirt shaped her figure nicely, and her jeans danced a bit with every step. After a few feet, she stopped and looked back at the Winchesters mentally undressing her then continued on her way.
"Damn, she's hot." Sam turned and lowered his voice as his voice turned to steam in the night air.
"No argument there." Dean was smiling too. Bridget meanwhile walked down the head of the block and turned left at the crossing to cross Second Street and head onward to the apartment house. Passing a cell phone place, insurance company and an ATM, she checked the traffic and skipped off the curb and over to her building. A moment to check her mail, she walked past the busted elevator to ascend the staircase. She didn't tire from the walk up, but the elevator might have been convenient.
"Hello, Penny…" Howard waited for her at the stairs to the fifth floor outside her apartment.
"Hello, Howard…" Bridget rolled her eyes suspiciously, set aside her milk and reached for her keys in her purse hanging from her shoulder.
"Fancy meeting you here…"
"I live here." She had the door open. She took her milk and strided through the open door.
"I was just wondering where you said you came from." He sounded as if he was fishing for information. He stood and followed her into her space. "Omaha… That's in Nebraska. A farm state, isn't it? Sort of like Kansas." He paused theatrically. "Isn't that like where Smallville is?"
"I'm not sure…" Bridget placed her milk in the refrigerator and pretended to be obtuse as she fished for his intentions. "I've never been to Kansas. How big a town is it?"
"Smallville?" Howard was not rehearsed for this. "It's a fictional town… That's where Superman came from…"
Bridget knew where he was trying to lead to but decided to play him right back.
"Oh!" She acted surprised. "That's one of your comic book characters!"
"They're graphic novels!" Howard became frustrated. "Penny, what I'm trying to ask is… well, if I tried shooting you with a gun, where would the bullet go?"
"Out!" She pointed the way.
"What are you doing over here?" Leonard Hofstadter stood in the door.
"She's about ready to crack." Howard insisted. Leonard just groaned embarrassingly.
"I'm sorry, Penny…" He groaned from having to play peacemaker. "He's seems to have got in his head that you're…"
"You've got to be kidding me!" Bridget tossed her celery in the bottom of the crisper of her icebox and left the bag open with a few cans on the counter. "Okay, I want to see this supposed picture of me in India." She marched through her apartment pushing Howard before her. "If she doesn't look like me, I'm sticking my size seven pumps up some one's ass!" She entered the guy's apartment looking disgusted. Sheldon was at his spot on the sofa finishing off the last of the night's Chinese food. He wasn't exactly happy that Penny had gone to a separate Chinese place than Wong Foo's, but the food surprised him. It was practically authentic despite being take-out.
"Raj…" Leonard entered. "Show Penny the picture."
"Oh, sure…" Raj quickly drew quiet as he saw Penny. He smelled her shampoo, the scent of her perfume, and his hormones spiked and made it hard for him to talk. It barely allowed him to type and pull up the photo on his computer. Over his shoulder, Bridget as Penny looked over his shoulder as his laptop pulled up the file and the picture started loading. Waiting for the image to come up, she looked over to Howard as the picture quickly popped up; it was barely up a second as Bridget secretly twitched her nose, and it suddenly vanished.
"What did you do?" Howard came around and moved Raj's laptop to his lap. Raj could barely speak around Bridget. He could only gasp the same syllable in her presence.
"So, where is this picture?" Bridget asked.
"I'm getting it." Howard ran a quick diagnostic through the computer. Everything looked fine. He tried to download the picture, but he failed to locate the attachment. It was missing.
"The rest of the pictures are here…" He found the folder it was once in. "But it's not…"
"Give it here." Sheldon took his chance to prove his intelligence. "Howard, let someone who knows what he's doing pull it back up." He started typing pulling up files and programs and delving into the computer memory. "Okay, and here's…." He had it back then changed his mind. "….the problem. The laptop rejected it." He pushed Raj's laptop back to him.
"How's that possible?" Leonard reached down and tried solving the problem. "Images just don't vanish!"
The guys all turned and looked to the girl who claimed to be Penny Parker from Omaha, Nebraska.
"Uh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no…" Bridget reacted to defend herself. "I never even touched the thing, and besides, I wanted to see it. All I got was a second's flash of… something."
"It was here!" Howard didn't understand what was happening. "It was here!" He gave up trying to find it again. "Raj, have your parents send another copy of the image." He passed the laptop back to Raj who looked up defeatedly confused.
"Penny," Leonard spoke up. "In Howard's defense, it looked a heck of a lot like you."
"Leonard, look…" Bridget shifted her weight to one leg and postured a bit. "A lot of the people who come into the Cheesecake Factory are always saying I look like daughters or nieces or grand-daughters… we are always going to look like someone else." She paused. "Just the other day some lady with red hair from Detroit named Cate Hennessey said I looked like her daughter Bridget." She used her real identity to force the point.
"Penny, I for one believe you." Sheldon spoke up.
"Oh no…" She feared where this would go.
"There is no possible way you could be Supergirl because you're just not smart enough." Sheldon continued. Penny started looking worried.
"Someone who has only been as far as community college would not be able to fool someone with a brain like mine." Sheldon continued talking as he forced a pompous grin. "I'm sorry, Penny, but you're as dumb as brick."
"You're right…" Bridget humored him to continue the facade. "I am…" She leaned back and started picturing his underwear pulled up over his head.
"However," Sheldon dared to go on. "If I may ask, could you have possibly encountered a quantum reality doppelganger counterpart of yourself visiting here from the Anti-Matter Universe?" His left eyebrow arched.
"I've got to remember to stop coming over here." Penny sighed and headed for the door.
While it was barely past seven in Pasadena, California, it was after nine in Detroit, Michigan. Instead of actually meeting someone named Penny Parker in a Pasadena restaurant, Cate Hennessey wrapped the end of her day with housework she had been putting off. Paul was in Chicago covering a football game for the newspaper, Kerry was out somewhere on the way home and her father was watching the local news. One of the news features was about the Air Force maneuvers interrupted by the flying blonde. Without even knowing her identity, the local Fox affiliate covered most of their favorite native daughter's superhero exploits from around the world. They showed the footage of her from the Nashville flood, the tsunami in Haiti, the earthquake in Mexico, the search for a British serial killer and a terrorist cell in South Africa. As far as the sighting in Hawaii, the Air Force was disavowing the sighting of the flying blonde girl over the Pacific as hallucinations by their pilots. The account had a different affect on Cate. Her daughter was traversing everywhere in the world, but she wasn't coming home and telling her about it. Trying to hold back her hostility, Cate finished putting clean sheets in the master bedroom and went on to Kerry's room, formerly Kerry and Bridget's room. Cate wondered if her daughter was ever coming home. As she thought about it, she got even more frustrated, and that made her upset enough to talk out loud to herself.
"Paul, can we go to Hawaii?" Cate griped to herself and covered both sides of an old marital argument. "No, Cate, we can't afford it. Paul, can we go to Hawaii? No, it's not the right time. Paul, can we go to Hawaii to look for your flying daughter in the red cape? Yeah, I'd like to see him get out of THAT one?"
"Catey, honey…" Her father had left the TV downstairs and appeared at the bedroom door. "Can we talk?"
"Sure, dad…"
"Honey, I'd like to talk about the secret with Bridget." He entered the room.
"Dad…." Cate mussed with the sheets on Bridget's bed. "There is no secret. That's just something CJ got into his head. The only secret about her is I don't know where she is."
"Yeah, well…" Jim pulled out Kerry's desk chair to sit down. "Sweetheart, I'm talking about the one where she flies around in that costume helping people."
Cate dropped the comforter and spun around in shock, her hands shaking embarrassingly over her chest.
"Yeah… I know all about it." Jim Eagan confessed and removed his hearing aide. "You see, when you got me this new hearing aide, I noticed if I turned the volume up that I could hear you and Paul whispering to each other when you thought I wasn't listening." He spoke with his head turned up then replaced the hearing aide to his ear and grinned at his little joke.
"Dad…" Cate was discomfited. "Dad, I'm sorry. It's just that…"
"You weren't sure if I could handle it?" Jim asked her. "I know you didn't keep it secret from me because you didn't trust me…"
"No, dad…" Cate knelt to sit on the edge of the unmade bed. "You see… well… Maybe I did…"
"I just kept wondering when you was going to tell me the truth that my granddaughter was that famous girl from all the newspapers…" Jim looked fatherly to his daughter. "And with CJ the other day getting wise and all that… well, I just figured it was time to let you know I could keep a secret too. Did a good job, didn't I…." He tilted his head up grinning. "Now, Catey, I know there's no mutants on our side of the family…" He sat down with Cate on the bed. "But I'm not sure about Paul's side of the family…."
"Dad…"
"Did you by any chance find Bridget in a rocket deserted by the side of the road?"
"No!" Cate smiled and chuckled a bit to herself. "Dad, it's just so frustrating. I mean…" She paused looking for the right words. "You know, when she was still at home, she just disavowed everything. She had this knack… No, this ability to prove she wasn't that girl. She was so adamant and so logical, but now… I've still got mixed feelings about it. I still don't if she was or if she isn't." She sighed. "I just want to know the truth."
"And Kerry…"
"Is convinced the girl is Bridget." She looked to her father. "And dad, God help me, I'm skating on thinking she's right." She paused thinking through five years of memories. "If that girl isn't Bridget, why won't she come home?'
"Princess…" Jim placed his arm around his daughter the same way he did when she was younger. "May it is like the Army. Maybe she was able to live at home when she was starting out, and now… she has to fly it alone." Jim sighed a little bit. "In the meantime, honey, you just have to be proud of her. She's able to do things that no one else can, and she's making the world a better place for it."
"But why do I have to share her with the world?" Cate broke down crying, releasing five years of grief for a daughter she wanted to hold one more time. She had two children, but it was her first born for whom she was grieving. Kerry was going to be a lawyer, and Rory was going to be something else if he ever decided what he wanted to be. Paul would have been happy to see the boy a sports star, but Rory was looking more to his next year of college. He was in his third year at Michigan State University, attending classes during the day and at night, he was hanging out with his frat brothers drinking beer, parting with girls without underwear amidst an unchaperoned frat house. The closest thing they had to a chaperone was Peter Bennett, a graduate from 2005, and he mostly lived his past through the frat brothers, drinking and partying nearly every night. The leaders of the Omega Delta Pi frat house were Eugene Dagastino and John Blutarsky Jr. the son of a former Illinois senator. Called "Dags" by his frat brothers, Dagastino was pre-med with aspirations of becoming a plastic surgeon. Blutarsky was nicknamed "Bluto" like his father in the Sixties. It was his job to help Rory pass his tests to stay on the basketball team, even if it meant getting copies of the tests ahead of time or sneaking answers into places where professors didn't check. Tonight, the frat was partying their basketball defeat over a rival college. Enjoying the freedoms of college, Rory was able to regale the girls hanging on his word with his personal exploits on the court. A beer in one hand, the frat house was reverberating with the music of Lady Gaga. The floor was shaking with dancing. Toilet paper was streamed over the stairs and furnishings. Amidst the partiers, Sondra Bathory from Alpha Beta Pi reached into her cleavage as she kissed Rory and pulled out a roll of paper barely two inches long. He looked at it suspiciously.
"I don't know, Sonny…" The baby-faced unshaven young man reacted surprised. "I promised my parents I'd stay away from that stuff."
"They'll never know…." Sonny loved his big brown eyes and Justin Bieber-like hair. She grinned coquettishly, but Rory looked to Peter for guidance. In the Roman Circus surroundings, their so-called chaperone was hitting on Lisa Welch, five years his junior. She was a pre-med student with Dags and looking forward to playing doctor with the tall good-looking older guy, but Peter nuzzled her neck, kissed her under the ear and looked up to the entry way. There was a security light outside the frat house, and in its glow was a figure who didn't belong. A tall blonde figure with his hair covered by a baseball hat. Blonde tufts of hair poked out from under that cap pulled down over his eyes. He wore a zipped up black leather jacket and blue jeans with dirty sneakers. He wandered in slowly perusing the frat house surroundings, ignoring the two would-be adults in the middle of a display of affection and avoided the two guys chasing the pledge out the entryway of the former mansion. Who ever this person was, they didn't belong, and Peter knew it. He excused himself from his shapely female conquest and strided defiantly up to their visitor.
"Excuse me…" He stood toe to toe with this thin gangly intruder. "Can I help you?"
"Where's Rory Hennessey?" The person asked.
"Rory is indisposed." Peter grinned. "I'm afraid you can't come in here."
The unwanted guest grabbed Peter by his front belt and lifted him off the floor, bouncing his head off the ceiling and dropping him where he once stood. A hundred students heard the loud crash and thump and looked over to the scene. Dags and Bluto stopped drinking long enough to turn their heads to the strange guy who had dropped their favored leader. Watched by almost a hundred partiers, they broke from their poker game and rushed to take this intruder down themselves, but despite his slight frame, their unwanted guest kicked Bluto's feet out from under him, lifted Dags up and tossed him the twelve feet into their bar, shattering a shelf and collapsing over twenty books. By time Rory looked up, Bluto was flying through the big window and landing in the garden. He froze in place as the unknown stranger came marching up to him. The other young adults scattered from the tall powerhouse's presence. He grabbed Rory by the jacket in one hand and clenched his right hand with the burning joint in the other.
"Are you stupid or something?" The intruder yelled at him. "Do you realize what mom and dad would do to you if they knew you were smoking this crap in college? The college would toss you out, and you'd lose your precious basketball scholarship? This is the stupidest most idiotic thing you could do! Do you want to end up one of those creeps always stealing from others just for your next stinking fix?"
"You can't order me around like that!" Rory scowled pinned to the sofa as Sonny froze in fear a foot away on the arm of the sofa. "There's no way I'm…" Rory's eyes bobbed down into his attackers jacket. There wwas a sign of a large red "S" on yellow against a blue shirt around a female bosom. His attacker was a girl. His eyes panned up under that Los Angeles Lakers cap, and recognized eyes he had not seen in over five years.
"Bridget?" He choked.
There was a huge explosion in the room and Rory with his accuser vanished from the scene. The huge torrent of wind blew everything in the room around with the force of a hurricane. One minute Rory and their unwanted guest were at the sofa, the next they were gone. Faces looked around in confusion. Bluto looked up through the window, and Bennett tried standing as he tried forming a thought. In the flash of images and speeding shapes, Rory felt dizzy and then found himself fighting for air. He was in water and fighting for air. Struggling to get his bearings, he finally broke surface and caught his breath. Hidden in those clothes, Bridget had dropped him into the reflective pond on the quad. It was only thirty feet wide and five feet deep at its deepest point. Around him on the campus, three students and a teacher watched him treading water then sloshing out of the water for land. Coughing, freezing and his breath steaming in front of him, Rory sloshed outward for shore. He got the message. Bridget wanted him to get a reality check. Still coughing up the brackish water, he collapsed to his knees.
"I'll never do it again!" He screamed to the starry night.