Max.

In a haze, I clamber out of the house. The world is spinning and words drift out of me as if they're recordings playing off a voice box. Nothing I say feels like me, or mine. My skin feels plastic, my hands, my quivering mouth, my spinning head, they all feel like circuits and silicone. 

I collect phone numbers, talk to my guests in a slurring, slumped state. The police arrive, yelling through megaphones, and kids, scared kids, angry kids, fresh adults, fake punks, true rebels, all small cogs in a big machine, stumble out of the house. Shouting, tossing things. Shards of crumbling drywall. The soft, wet vinyl crust that makes up the floor. Glass. I glide easily into the mass of mad kids, my head ducked and my hands laced behind my back. And just as easily, I escape.

I creep past the jumble of cars; sleek skeletons and shiny beetles. The moon is high in the sky now, a big white gibbous thing. 

There's an old adage about how the moon always watches, that it's the same everywhere. It's sitting over Monet and Percy, Chip and Finn. My dad. Gideon, poor Gideon. I think about them looking up at that same moon, and my chest hurts. I look up, waiting for a cloud to pass over its pale face, so I can stop remembering all the eyes of all those people I've betrayed, stop seeing them blinking down at me in the cool, watery light.

As I trail through the tall, dead grass, and I try not to think, the moon gets bigger and bigger in the sky overhead. The world is still swimming, stars still turning and turning all around me, like I'm standing under Van Gogh's painting, watching the world curl up and the lights spin. I think I'm still bleeding. I think I'm hurting, but all I feel is warm. 

I stumble, cracked inside, kicking up mud and clumps of weed. I walk through the darkness, walk into the closest copse of trees, walk without looking up, looking around, looking back. I walk and I walk, hit with the smell of pine trees, the bristle of bark on the ancient trees that cut my arms and bite my back. I close my eyes, press my fingertips into my temples. Draw in a deep breath and let it whisp back out in a small puff. Then I open my eyes with a sigh.

Mist rises around me, and I splash warm muddy water with another step, and the farther I go, the little pine grove fills with little muddy puddles. Steam weaves up in the air like white ropes, so thin and translucent there's something almost angelic about them. I take a deep breath and sit down on a thick brown log. Water laps my boots and soaks my pants, and the warmth of the water, the warmth of the blood, the warmth of the alcohol all heats me at my center. I close my eyes and let my head fall backward. 

All I want is for the world to stop spinning. All I want is to stop thinking.

Footsteps. I hear them, but instead of running, I freeze. I keep my eyes squeezed shut, my stomach rolling like a marble going thunk thunk thunk down a flight of stairs.  Maybe I'm imagining them, maybe if I don't think about them they'll go away. 

They get louder, the soft squashing of mud on their shoes, and then they go silent. I hold that long breath deep in my core. And then I stand up and whip around, ready to answer more questions from more dumb kids, adrenaline already pumping through my fried veins. 

Chip's glaring back at me. 

A sound tears out of my mouth and I stumble backwards, all reflex. My foot catches on the bumpy wet log and I hit the bottom of the puddle. Dirty water rolls around me and I grip the mud in my shaking fists. "What are you doing here?" Maybe he isn't real. Maybe this is a vision. Between the heavenly mist and the big moon, he might be a ghost from my past. And I start to laugh. "You can't know that I'm in Starlight. You couldn't have tracked me to this stupid party. This isn't real."

Chip steps up on to the log. He looks thinner than before, his hair longer now, limp and greasy. He's wearing a blue hoodie, a tie-dye shirt, and torn-up jeans. But he's not something I've carved out of my memory, the soft, cowering boy, dressed all in black. His body is tensed, and the colors look foreign on him. 

And then he throws himself into the water. He's light, but his weight on top of me sends me to the bottom, over my head in filth water. There's a sharp, sudden pain in my thigh. I'm being torn open. I can feel the cold thing in my muscle, slicing against my screaming nerve-endings. I shove him off me, sit up, see a black handle outlined in the chalky moonlight sticking out of my leg. I start gasping, stop looking at it, the thought of touching it making my stomach whirl and whirl. I squirm up to the bank. Something long, ropey, and red hisses in Chip's hands. 

I try to stand up. The pain tears through me. And I'm all reflex again. I grab the handle, pull the blade out, upchuck my stomach out of alcohol, pain, and shock. Chip. Chip's here. He won't talk to me. He stabbed me.  I try to stand up and I topple face-first into the water. Pain and red slide out of me and onto the water around us. It hurts, hurts, hurts. I try to scream and it comes out of my throat a strangled mewl. 

Voices mesh over my head. "Are you okay?"  "You got him!"  I breathe in mud and it sits in my throat and my lungs, heavy. I bring myself up and over the puddle, wet and shaking. I put my hand on the bubbling wound. Fingers dig into my arms from behind me, bend them together. Everything is spinning, spinning. Chip unwinds the rope and steps closer to me. His tie-dye shirt is splattered with my blood. There's two pairs of hands on my wrists. My breath spills out of me in gasps. 

"Chip?" I squeeze my eyes shut for a second, trying to remember his soft face when I'd had him pressed against cool glass, his neck under my hands. I remember how he didn't struggle, how he looked at me with those big, trusting eyes. How I punished him for that trust. "You don't have to do this to me. Trust me."

I see his fist a second before it lands. Right in the mouth. It's a weak hit but I'm already sore from Galaxy and I howl because it moves every already sore muscle. Loosens a couple of teeth. The fingers around my hands tighten and I feel the rope against my throat. It's warm.

"Chip, Chip, guys!" I talk despite how much it hurts. I look back at the two boys I had already expected, and still my heart falls into my stomach. They won't forget how many times I tried to kill them. "You don't want to do this to me." I wriggle against their hands, but that simple knot around my throat's already sapping my powers. "What's the point in doing this? I was just trying to start a new life."

"New life? Monet doesn't get a chance at a new life." Finn's voice is so cold, but his grip tightens. And my stomach keeps dropping and dropping as the pain in my leg gets worse. I know my healing factor is waning, I know it and the weight of that scary fact adds to that blistering, bubbling pain. I want Gideon. I search Chip's face for an emotion that isn't anger, for the softness. But the delicate features and tear-drop shape are all hard angles and shadows now. I drop to my knees, trying not to scream. Talk fast, talk fast. What do they want? But it's hard to think of anything between the pain and the alcohol and the unreality of it all. 

"Wait!" I slump against Kai and Finn. "I can heal Monet."

Chip gnashes his teeth together. I can see the white flash in the moonlight. "He's lying, do you have any duct-tape?"

There's two main things that help me get what I want, my superpowers and the silver tongue I've made for myself. And Chip knows that, knows me. 

Kai squeaks. "But what if he's right?"

"When has Max told the truth?"

I slump over, suddenly feeling a lot less super and a lot more like a normal guy who's been stabbed. I choke back the scream that really wants to come out, beg my brain to stop spinning, and stare up at that face that's suddenly so hard. I know what will budge him. 

"There's a boy," I say. "I locked him up in his apartment."

 Chip stiffens. I see his fists shaking at his sides, his grip on the rope so tight his knuckles are going white around it. 

"He's lying?" Kai hesitates.

Finn digs his heels into the ground. "Of course." I hear the venom in his voice,  and with it, I swear I hear the gears in his head clicking against eachother, connecting me, a supervillain, and what I've done, supervillian activity. "Of fucking course, Max!"

Finn drops me and I hit the mud one more time. Kai's fingers brush my shoulders, cold and shaking, but he leaves me there. "Why? Why do you keep doing this? What's wrong with you!" Gasping, shouting. But Chip just looks down at me calmly. He knows why,  he knows what's wrong with me. He knows that shouting at me will do nothing. He rubs his face, his hands trembling.

"We rescue the guy, and then you go to prison."

"If I don't bleed to death first. Poor kid, no family left to care for him. No one will check on him if I die before I tell you where he is."

Chip takes a deep breath. He can't escape me, he can't win. I'll always have him checkmated. Because he's trusting, and I'm calculating. He can never hurt me the way I hurt him. No, not even with a kitchen knife. Though that actually really hurts. I try to stand and my leg gives out underneath me. The whimper wrenched out of me makes Chip wince, and I see it, the softness in his gaping mouth. It never left. "Please, it hurts. It hurts! I'm sorry!" It's acting, all acting. Tears slide down my face. 

"I'm...sorry..." He scoops me up over his shoulder. I'm heavy and he staggers, my bleeding leg pressed up against his stomach. I see Kai and Finn's faces,  Kai's eyes, big as saucers, Finn's, squinted pins in a tear-stained face. I grin at them, grin at the moon, grin at all the eyes swimming in and out of my head.

They only know the picture of me. They only know from a distance that I'm always playing 4-D chess. I'm always so many steps ahead of them, placing them on a checkerboard with their motivatons, ideas, and weaknesses. What do they want? What's wrong with them? What makes them tick. How can I use them? 

There's a smirk on my stupid face as I pass out on Chip's shoulder.