Rivals 1

"Come on in," the stoner said, holding the door open. He kept scratching at the sparse goatee on his chin. "We were just watching a movie on cable," he told her.

Maggie stepped inside an apartment that stank of old stale pot smoke. It was one of the cheap student apartments down by the local community college, a place where you were always likely to find somebody sitting outside on the lawn playing an acoustic guitar, but unlikely to find anybody playing one well. There were guys in the park playing hackey-sack and girls two years older than Maggie wearing no make-up and ponchos. Every time she'd been to this part of town, Maggie had wondered what they knew that she didn't. What secrets she was going to learn, when she got to college.

It looked like she would never find out.

Whatever, she told herself. Buy the car. Get moving. Get out of town.

"So how old are you?" the stoner asked. "You look kind of young."

"I'm eighteen," she lied. She'd gotten his name out of the local free paper, out of the want ads. He was selling a car for twelve hundred dollars and the ad suggested he needed to sell it as soon as possible. It seemed like her best chance. Maggie had wasted a lot of time going to used car lots. Places like that wanted to see some ID up front, and they had not been impressed when she started laying out twenties to smooth things along. One place had even called the cops on her, while the salesman tried to convince her that whatever her parents had done, it couldn't be so bad that she needed to run away. Rather than telling him the truth she'd just run.

"Listen, can I see the car? I'm kind of in a hurry."

The stoner was watching the TV on the other side of the room. Three other guys, all of whom had beards and the dull, glazed eyes of stoners, were sitting around the TV in various states of consciousness. "Yeah, hold on a sec." The advertisement on the TV ended and a newscast came on. "You know about the super kids? The brother and sister who keep fighting, right, but they've got super powers and - "

"I've heard about them," Maggie said.

"Well check this out. The brother snapped and totally attacked a reporter last night."

"What?" Maggie stepped over toward the couch, intent on seeing the television. "Turn it up for a second," she said.

The guy with the remote had laid his head back on the top of the couch and was looking up at her with a huge smile. He wasn't blinking. She grabbed the remote out of his hand and turned it up herself.

" - unprovoked outburst, leaving one vehicle badly damaged and this reporter scared for her life. We met up with Brent Gill at around seven last night as he was coming out of his suburban home. He looked agitated, but when we asked him what was making him upset his reaction was like nothing we'd seen before."

The reporter's face cut to a video shot of Brent walking straight toward the camera. His eyes were wild. Maggie had never seem him so angry. The reporter asked him a couple of questions Maggie couldn't really hear - something about his girlfriend, which surprised her (what else had he been up to that she didn't know about?) and he said, "No comment. No comment, okay? I don't want to talk to you right now!" The reporter said something else that Maggie couldn't make out at all. Then Brent came right up to the camera until his face filled the entire screen. "Leave me alone. All of you. Just leave me alone. Leave me alone, and leave Dana alone." (Dana Kravitz! Maggie thought - so Jill Hennessey is behind all this!) His nostrils flared. Then he said, "I'm not asking anymore."

The camera pulled back as if the cameraman was running backwards to get away from Brent. The scene widened out and Maggie saw Brent standing in a circle of reporters, some of them backing up themselves, some pressing in closer with microphones or tape recorders or just notebooks and pencils. There was a news van very close to Brent, its headlights painting broad yellow stripes across his shirt and pants.

He punched it.

Just swung around and hit it with his fist. It jumped up off the ground and then fell back on its tires, bouncing a little. One of the headlights shattered and steam shot out of the broken grille on its nose. Its passenger-side door popped open and a cameraman fell out, then quickly got up and ran off. Brent punched the van again, darkening its other headlight. And again. And again.

The camera cut back to the studio where the same reporter as before said, "Channel Seven news is still debating whether or not to press charges against the boy who, until very recently, we were calling a hero. More on this story as - "

There were other stories on the news but she didn't listen to them. It's finally happened, she thought. The world in all its suckiness has finally caught up with the golden boy. She wasn't sure how that made her feel, actually. Maggie switched off the TV. Suddenly four stoners were looking at her. None of them recognized her, though. Her disguise worked, as usual. "Now I'd like to see that car," she said.

"Um, sure. It's just downstairs."