Rivals 1

"Lucy! Please. Just stop a second. Stop and talk to me," Brent said. He'd been looking for her all morning. He wanted to discuss what she'd said the night before, but every time he saw her in the hall she had hobbled away from him. He was starting to get really frustrated. "What you said - "

"There are some places even superheroes aren't allowed to go," she told him.

"What?"

She glanced to her left. She was standing next to the door for the girls' bathroom. "Give it a rest, Brent," she told him, with a sigh. "I acted pretty stupid last night. I said some things I didn't... mean." She looked down at the braces on her legs. "Anyway. I know I can't compete with Dana. Just - give me some time, okay? To get over what was really just a childish infatuation anyway."

"I need to tell you how good it made me feel when you said... that," he told her. "How special it - "

"Oh just shut up!" Lucy clenched her eyes shut as if to hold back tears. "Shut your stupid face and leave me - "

"Brent!" someone called from down the hallway. "Brent! Thank God I found you!"

It was Dana.

"Hey," Brent said, his stomach churning. "This isn't a great time."

Dana shook her head and ran over to grab his arm. "It's your sister. She's here. Over by the Home Ec rooms."

"No way." He felt his hands make fists by pure reflex. "No, she wouldn't..." He shook his head. "But I guess she did. Lucy, please, just - " he began, but when he looked at his best friend he only saw the girls' room door swinging shut behind her. "Damn it! Okay, okay. We need to be careful here." He turned back to Dana. "Go get a teacher, any teacher, and tell them what's going on. They need to start evacuating the school. Maybe she'll just leave quietly, but we can't take that chance."

Dana nodded. She was still holding his arm.

"You should do that right now," he told her, gently.

She nodded again. Then she ran toward the nearest classroom.

Brent went the opposite direction - toward the Home Ec rooms. The hallway turned a corner up ahead. He was running by the time he got there and he couldn't slow himself down in time, so he didn't even try. His momentum carried him into the far wall, hard enough to crack some of the bricks there. He bounced off and kept running. By the time he got to the Home Ec rooms he was running so fast that the classroom doors on either side flickered as they whooshed past him.

"Mags!" he shouted, when he saw her. "Stop right where you are."

She was holding a locker door like a club. She had it lifted over her head, and somebody was down on the floor in front of her. It looked like she was going to play golf with their head. Jesus, Brent thought. That's Jill.

"Not right now, baby bro," Maggie said. She was breathing hard and her eyes were bright. The prospect of hitting Jill Hennessey was clearly exciting her.

How do you talk somebody out of killing the most popular girl in school? Half the kids in Brent's class would probably cheer.

"Brent," Jill said, sounding far calmer than the situation indicated, "will you be an absolute doll and kick Maggot's ass for me? I'll make Dana let you have your way with her. Whatever you want."

"You never did know when to shut up, Pill." Maggie looked up at Brent. "I don't suppose you'd be willing to turn around for a second and not look?"

"Put that thing down," Brent told her.

"Do you remember the last time I let you tell me what to do?" Maggie asked. "No? Me neither. Because that never, ever happened, and it's not going to start now. Hit me if you're going to hit me - or stand back and watch."

So he hit her.

Digging his heels in hard enough to leave small craters in the linoleum floor tile, Brent launched herself at Maggie with everything he had. He shot toward her with his arms wide, planning to grab her around the waist and knock her down with his momentum.

The problem was - as always - that she knew exactly what he was going to do. He might be faster than she was, but she already had the locker door up high, held like a baseball bat. She swung around as he came toward her and hit him right in the chest with the door's jagged edge. Brent went spinning away from her, totally out of control, and as he struggled to get his feet underneath him she grabbed him by his belt and his collar and body slammed him against a row of lockers, face first. The lockers caved in, their doors popping open one after the other. A shin-high avalanche of gym shorts and three ring binders slithered to the floor.

"Start fighting back now," Jill commanded.

"Get out of here," Brent shouted. He would have said more but Maggie chose that moment to grab his hair and haul him backward, out of the ruined lockers, and throw him against the far wall.

He felt the bones in his shoulder separate with a drawn-out cracking noise that made him feel instantly nauseous. He dropped to the floor and thought about how nice it would be to never get up again.

He could just turn his head. He could feel his broken bones knitting themselves back together, felt the muscles in his neck and arm sliding across each other. It hurt like hell to look down the hall and see Maggie walking away from him.

Without turning around, she gave him the finger.

That's it, he thought, anger filling him up, drowning out the pain. He pushed against the wall behind him with his good arm. Shoved himself upward until he was standing. There were no moral quandaries in his head just then. No worries that he was doing the wrong thing.

He jumped through the air and came down with both feet on Maggie's back, right where her spine met her pelvis. She cried out and bent away from him, dropping to her knees. He grabbed her under the armpits and hauled her back up to her feet, intending on spinning her around and knocking her out with one powerful right hook.

Instead she brought her head back way too fast. The back of her skull connected with his nose, smashing it flat. Then she kicked out with her feet and launched both of them backwards with incredible force, straight toward the wall of the AV Department.

Maybe she'd planned on crushing him against the wall. Instead, the two of them went right through it in a shower of bricks and pulverized mortar.