Chimney falls as lovers blaze – Thought that I was young
Now I've freezin' hands and bloodless veins, as numb as I've become
Neko Case
Fall 2010
“I hope you’re not doing this for some boy,” Logan said once, and damn him for jumping straight to the lowest common denominator. He knew she was going crazy, but still he made it about them instead of her. Damn him for being right.
It’s always been about some boy.
He was the baseline drumbeat to the cacophony in her mind. “You did this! It’s your fault!” – “It’s not my fault, I just touched him. I-I didn’t mean to.”
David Cody-Robbins. Son of a preacher man, the only boy who could ever reach her – that had been their song, and she was going to tell him so right after they graduated from handholding. Her best friend Natalie used to snark, “For an all-state hitter, he’s sure slow to start rounding your bases.” Last time Marie’d seen her, Natalie was sliding into David’s third base head first. Window facing Marie’s open, because, true, Natalie had called dibs on David to begin with and, probably, ostracism just seemed too subtle a torture.
That night it finally occurred to Marie that normal wasn’t a place she could go back to. She left home and followed the moon as far as her Uncle Nuts’ bar at the edge of Meridian, where Aunt Shirley gave her his old army duffle and told her if she ever needed a place to stay to bring her stuff on over.
Later, when she ran away from home for good because of the clinic, then again and again from the clinic, David was in her head. Telling her there was no help for something as nasty and vampiric as her.
And sitting on that bench with the new boy, the one who made her remember normal, who told her, “It’ll be easier on your own,” David was back, crowing louder than ever. The clinic and the streets should’ve taught her already, but now she had it from the benevolent privileged – she was a freak among freaks. It wasn’t a mutant gene that made her such a disgusting human leech.
He told her so often and so certainly that even after a cure exorcised his throbbing accusations, her soul-sucking powers – when she rakes fingernails across her flat, lifeless skin and says to a mirror, “There’s still something wrong with me,” she hears some boy saying it with her.
“We both know you don’t have to be here.”
Marie, slouched down in the hard leather chair across from Dr. Hines’ desk, glanced up from the thread on her glove she’d been tugging on. The self-satisfaction on her lips was as telling a response as therapy had yet to elicit from her. She’d been a patient at the Southaven Mutant Treatment Clinic off and on going on four months. It was a point of pride that the only words Marie had ever spoken on Dr. Hines’ tape recorder were, “I really have to pee.”
Unfortunately, Dr. Hines enjoyed the sound of her own voice, so this mockery of a treatment had persisted.
“What do you do on your weekly excursions, Anna Marie? Sneak into movies. ‘Dine and dash.’ Steal.”
Dr. Hines indicated the things she’d confiscated when Marie strolled into the cafeteria for breakfast after just missing bed check. A carton of cigarettes, though she didn’t smoke, and a camera just like the present from her uncle that had been the only one she got on her seventeenth birthday from hell. She’d had to forfeit it last month for squatter’s rights.
“Some of our younger patients like to say that Southaven is no better than a juvenile detention center, but you don’t think so. You had three choices after you were arrested in New Orleans.” Dr. Hines ticked them off on her wrinkled, steady fingers: “One, give evidence against the criminal element you fell in with. Two, allow yourself to be incarcerated for breaking and entering and attempted burglary. Three, accept the mercy of Sister Irene, who dropped the charges on behalf of the church when you agreed to return to our clinic. You’ve chosen to be here time and again. Why?”
Marie stared blankly through the good doctor just to piss her off.
Thin lips compressed as tightly as her fists, Dr. Hines leaned forward. “Because you’ve no place else to go. You want to be cured as much as we want to cure you.” She pushed a thick stack of papers toward Marie, who was fighting to keep her face from falling. “Your parents have faxed their consent to an experimental psychosomatic treatment for your illness. During the trial, it is imperative that you remain at the clinic. We’ll begin tomorrow.”
“And what if tomorrow I’m not here?” Marie countered, but breaking her no-talking rule was enough for Dr. Hines to know that she would be.
The treatment was amped-up mescaline, and it flooded Marie’s mind to the saturation point of delirium. Voices whispered in the dark. David accusing, Momma agonizing. Paige Guthrie, blackmailing. Bring me stuff from outside or I’ll tell them what really happened when we fought. I’ll tell them you stole my powers – Oh, no, baby girl, don’t draw attention. Keep your head down ‘til you can come home where you belong – You don’t belong anywhere. You should to be dissected –
Marie, on her back in the psych ward, was loaded up with pills, wracked with silent spasms. Naked hands came down to stop her face. Lora Gibbons, the clinic’s failed poster patient for the almost-cured, bore down on Marie, shrieking, “You’ve got them demons!” as her power drowned them both deeper. Light filled the room, infrared and ultraviolet, swirling and pulsating, tangible even after Lora was sedated. Dr. Rao saw the light, strongest around Marie. Marie saw the scheming critique in Dr. Rao. I’m a sinner, I’m a sinner, I’m a sin…
When her mind was part her own again, it was daytime and days later. Dr. Hines and Dr. Rao conferred in low voices. “You know how I feel about military scientists,” the older said, and the younger suggested, “Worthington Labs is just as eager to give us funding. They see her as the universal test subject.” The doctors turned when a gurney wheeled in. A nurse explained, “Another suicide attempt.”
The slow beep of Jeffery Garrett’s heart monitor rang in Marie’s ears as she feigned unconsciousness. She was desperate for it to get stronger.
As soon as her paralysis subsided, she took from him regardless.
His hand, his mind was weightless in hers. The alarm sounded when Jeffery’s heart rate dipped, calling in nurses who only hesitated a moment before plunging through Marie’s spectral outline to start resuscitation. Her actual body was in the building adjacent, scrambling around for her clothes, her coat, and her duffle. Paige was on one of the beds, smeared eyeliner ringing her red-rimmed eyes. Rigid with horror, Paige didn’t have a chance to say anything before Marie had teleported herself to a bus stop blocks away. But to her fading outline, Paige hissed, “Swear to God, Rogue, if you killed him – ” I didn’t mean to hurt you, Marie pleaded with the boy sighing inside her head, his faint impression too much like a ghost.
The criminal uncertainty of the open road took her away from the clinic’s cure-at-any-cost guarantee. Neither was anything like freedom.
Marie hugs her shivering arms around herself, her teeth chattering between airy giggles. Beside her, Cal is laughing full-bodied at his own misadventures living homeless in the Manhattan underground with a ragtag bunch of mutants called the Morlocks. Marie tips him toward her so she can rearrange the thin blanket he brought out to the fire escape. Underneath it, their arms are intertwined.
They’ve bonded in the past few days over their shared fascination with their own skin. Like little kids on a playground, they pinched and poked. They traded Indian burns and blew raspberries. Some of the others took up a collection so the two of them could get a room at a bed and breakfast by the park, but Cal passed it on to another pair before the words, “It’s not like that,” even left Marie’s mouth.
And it isn’t like that. They aren’t flirting, they’re remembering.
Marie licks her thumb and smoothes down Cal’s newly-grown eyebrows.
“Gross,” he complains, half-heartedly pushing her away.
“’Gross’ is this pedo ‘stache,” she says, tugging the wispy light brown hair on his upper lip.
He strokes it luxuriously. “Been waiting six years for this to come in.”
Cal’s mutation manifested at thirteen, Marie realizes, looking away. Six years to her sixteen months. Warmth leaves her freezing hands and bloodless veins.
Following her gaze, Cal fakes a shudder. “Half-moon creeps me out. Looks too much like my bony butt cheek used to.”
Marie puts her mouth against her knee so she doesn’t wake the hostel with her half-groaned laughter. “Why can’t you just let me be sad?”
“Because you don’t need to be.” Cal fishes her phone out of her jeans and starts scrolling through the texts she’s avoided. “Bobby: ‘Please call me,’ Bobby: ‘I love you,’ times infinity. Logan: ‘I asked when you’re comin’ back.’ Jubilee: ‘Copasetic, chica? Kitty says Bobby thinks you’re here in DC. My dorm’s small but we can cuddle now?’ That’s with three question marks, an exclamation point, and a wink. Kitty: ‘Maybe you don’t want to hear this from me, but the Professor made this our home and we’re still your family.’ Pete: ‘Iceman’s cracking. At least put him out of his misery.’ Logan: ‘Can’t wait no more, kid. Headin’ out.’ That was fifteen minutes ago.”
Holding back her tears burns, but Marie can’t cry in front of Cal. Not without coming off a spoiled, ungrateful bitch. Which she is. But she’s scared, too. Never in her whole life has she been able to move forward by going back.
If Logan leaves, she knows she won’t be brave enough to even try.
Marie accepts her phone from Cal. His lips are soft and light against hers. She thinks it’s his first kiss, and she’s glad to be part of one where nobody got hurt. “It’s been nice getting to know you, Anna,” he says as goodbye.
Getting to know Anna has been nice for her, too. And a lot easier than facing the fact that she was wrong in thinking that killer skin had drawn a clear line between innocent Marie and mercenary Rogue.
She hates the tears in her voice when she makes the call to Logan. She doesn’t deserve them.