Rivals 1

When Lucy came over the next day after school, Brent was getting Grandma's dinner ready: minestrone soup and chicken salad just the way she liked it, with plenty of mayonnaise. Normally he didn't like cooking but he was bubbling with excitement and when Lucy came into the kitchen he grabbed her up in his arms and swung her around the room, her leg braces clanging off the legs of the table and the chairs.

"You're in a good mood," Lucy said, laughing along with him. "Which is very good, I wanted to give this to you when you were feeling good about things, because you might take it the wrong way if you were feeling down, and - "

"What are you talking about?" Brent asked. Then he noticed that she had brought a cardboard box with her. It was tied up with green ribbon. "A present? For me?"

She nodded bashfully but couldn't keep from laughing again.

"Hold on, let me just turn this down. It needs to simmer a while anyway." He left the soup bubbling gently on the stove and headed up to his room, pulling her along by the hand.

"What's got you so happy?" she asked, as he pulled the door almost closed behind him. He was careful to leave it open a full foot, as per Grandma's rules. "The last time I saw you, you looked like you were going to start an emo band."

"Huh?"

"You looked like you felt pretty sorry for yourself," she explained.

He picked up the box and shook it. It made a soft rustling noise. He had no idea what was inside. He wanted very much to open it but first he had to tell Lucy what had happened. "I think I have a girlfriend," he told her. "I wasn't really sure, at first, but when I kissed her, it all kind of came together and - "

"You kissed Dana?" Lucy asked. Her face was expressionless, as if she was unsure exactly what he'd meant and was waiting for confirmation before she started to react.

He bit his lip. Maybe this was something he should keep to himself - you weren't supposed to kiss and tell, after all - but he really wanted to talk about it and Lucy was his confidante. "Yes," he said. "I kissed Dana."

"Oh. That's - "

A laugh bubbled out of him. He paced around the room, not in agitation but just because he had so much energy. "Several times."

"Okay, well, the details probably aren't - "

"With tongues." He went to the window and glanced outside, looking for newsvans or reporters, then pulled down the shade. "And then she let me touch her... well... her..." He turned around. He couldn't see Lucy anywhere.

He looked at the door but it was still open the mandatory one foot. She hadn't gone out that way. He opened up his closet but it was so full of stuff even Lucy couldn't have squeezed inside. Finally he looked in the space between his bed and the wall. She was there, curled up with her knees tight against her chest. She wasn't looking at him. He squatted down in front of her and smiled at her but she just looked away.

"Too much information," she told him. "Okay? I don't want to hear the grotesque details."

"I thought you'd be happy for me," he told her.

"You thought that, huh?"

Brent stood up and went over to his desk where he'd set down the box. He couldn't understand what the problem was. They had talked about sex often enough before - both of them had been surprised to realize the other one thought about it so much, they'd wondered together what it was like, and they'd even confessed all to each other, pooling what little experience they had on the subject. She'd even told him once about the boy she'd fooled around with at camp the summer before he met her, and the details then had been more graphic than anything he could have said about Dana.

"Okay, change of subject," he said, figuring if she was suddenly going to get squeamish he could at least be sensitive about it. "Let's see what this is, shall we? It's not even my birthday!"

"Maybe now's not the time," she said, but without much force behind the words.

"Nonsense! There's never been a better time." He pulled open the box and pushed back a piece of tissue paper that hid its contents. Underneath was a carefully folded suit of clothing. It was sage green. He pulled it out, thinking it was a shirt, but more and more of it kept unfolding and he realized it was a kind of jumpsuit. It zipped down the back and had a high, stiff collar of a much darker green cut in a pattern of flames that ran down the shoulders and part of the way down the chest. Underneath the jumpsuit, inside the box, was a pair of gloves of the same darker green color, ending in more of the spiky flames, and a pair of soft boots to match.

"Holy cow," he said, holding the jumpsuit up against his body. The fabric was soft but felt very strong. This was why she'd been taking his measurements, he realized.

She'd made him a costume.

"You can't be a, a," she said, waving her hands in the air, "superhero, right, without dressing the part. Can you?"

He picked up one of the gloves and pulled it on over his left hand. It fit perfectly. He made a fist and it just looked right, like a superhero's fist.

"Oh my God," he said. "This is amazing. It's - it's green flames. Green flame, like the flame that gave me my power."

Lucy glanced up at his eyes, then looked away again. "I thought you could call yourself the Green Flame. Except there's two problems. One is, you might not want to constantly be reminded that the green flame also killed your dad, and the other, is that it would be kind of easy for mean kids to call you the Green Flamer, so maybe we need to work on the name. But I really liked the way it came out."

"You made this?"

"My mom helped some. Well, a lot. But I designed it. It's not a big deal."

"Not a - Luce! This is unbelievable! This is way, way beyond the call of duty. I have got the single best friend anybody ever wanted," he said, truly blown away.

"Well," she said, and she started to smile, even though she still wasn't looking at him. "I figured, every time you save somebody you end up ripping your shirt or getting blood all over yourself or whatever, so maybe this would be - "

"Dana is going to flip when she sees me in this," he said.

He might as well have dropped a live grenade on the floor.

Suddenly a hundred pounds of Lucy Benez was leaping through the air at him, leg braces and all. Her small fists bounced again and again off his chest and her face was contorted in rage. She was hitting him, he realized, punching him like crazy. He tried to grab her arms but she just yanked them away from him and fell over onto the bed.

"You stupid, you dumbass, you jerk!" she shrieked. "You freaking assface! You piece of - "

"Lucy! What are you doing?" he asked, trying to grab her again. She writhed like a snake on the bed.

"I worked for weeks on this! I had to save up every cent of my allowance to buy the fabric! I drew maybe a hundred sketches for what it should look like, I bought special color pens so I could show the ladies at the fabric store so it would be the perfect colors, I must have jabbed myself with needles and pins a million times because it had to be perfect, and yes, I did it myself because, whether you believe it, or not, I have, talent, I have so much, talent!" She was sobbing and gasping for breath at the same time. "I have some, some brains, in my head, unlike your, poor little, rich girl, brain-dead, girlfriend, who thinks she, can just, buy everybody, thinks, she can buy you, but she will never, love you, a millionth as much, as I've loved you every day, since I met you!"

She rolled off the bed and hit the floor hard, her leg braces clanking against each other. He reached for her again but she waved a hand like a claw at his face and then she pulled herself up to her feet and hobbled out of his room, hobbled down the stairs, out the front door.

He started to chase her - he could catch her easily - but Grandma was already there at the door with her plaster-wrapped arm held up to stop him.

"Did you hear what she said?" he asked.

"Half the neighborhood did, for my money," Grandma told him.

"I have to go after her!"

"If you do," she said, "it will be the biggest mistake of your life."

"But - but - "

"More importantly, I believe that my soup is burning. Go turn it down, dear. That's a good boy."