Song Selection: Viva La Vida—Cover by Future Idiots

Audio recording dated October 8th 22:38:14

https://youtu.be/QWIuZN4Hs_Q

I don't want to talk about what happened. All I want is to ask you this: Do you believe in good guys? Do you believe some people are destined for great things, for friends and fortune?

Do you believe you're one of those people?

I did.

I mean, I'm not going to tell you to stop believing in fate or superheroes. Why listen to me? I'm a supervillain. A kidnapper and a would-be killer and a sixteen-year-old to boot. There's nothing I can say that would make you like me or even believe me, and I don't want to talk about what happened because you're all right. I was evil. I was cruel.

But if you believe in good guys, do you believe in bad guys?

I mean, if destiny chooses some people to be heroes, then fate's gotta pick some people to be villains, right?

What if you're not part of the group destined for great things? What if you're destined for a pitiful life of regret after your own horrible mistakes?

What if you're destined to become me?

***

My father chose my middle name after the Confederate general, but it was my mother who named me Max. It was a sweet name, she said, silly and docile. Brought to mind Maxwell House, the coffee, and Maxwell Smart, the spy. Silly and docile, like the son I think she wanted, all throaty laughs and dimply smiles and 'Yes, ma'ams.'

Maxwell Lee Preston. The stupid spy and the Confederate General and my father's blood, all married in five syllables. Five syllables that have clung to me like chains all my little life, achy to wear and impossible to escape.

As I stare down at the quilt of shanty homes from the roof of my father's mansion, this is all I can think about. I repeat my name,  savoring the sting of each raindrop on my tongue. They taste like acid. Wires, glinting with rain, run out by the broken trees in the distance.  Hail whips against my skin and I clench pieces of ice in my fists, watching them melt on my cracked fingerpads. 

The police will arrive in minutes. As soon as he gets the call, my father will bust open a window with the barrel of his shotgun, have it pointed at the base of my spine with his expert aim. I can imagine his disappointment. His practiced smile replaced with bared teeth and a ground jaw, his nose wiggling with that rabbit-twitch he gets when he's gunning down deer or reporters.

Maxwell Lee Preston. The name doesn't make you think of a 5'4 teenager with his left arm pulverized to fine white powder, does it? The bones all up my left hand are obliterated after punching through layers of concrete at speeds of over two hundred miles an hour. My genius prison escape plan, everyone. My phone lies on my lap. A blue suede bag of clothes, bandages, and an aluminum candy can full of cash leans against my ribs. I'd packed it for a quick getaway, kept it under my bed. My phone finally rings. I pick up, my heart in my throat. "Chip!"

The end crackles with static. I've been desperate to hear that voice, so soft and low. When I was little, Chip told me he lived with his aunt because his parents "were in heaven," and I thought he meant that they were angels, and that he was an angel, too. Why else was his voice so pretty? Like he was a little jazz singer, I thought. 

"I'm not coming," he says.

Sweat drips from my matted hair. I can tell it isn't rain because its hot against my burning skin.

"I-I just want to explain." The first siren has cut from across the city, less a wail and more a scream. I shift, bouncing my thighs on the sandstone shingles. "And apologize, I mean, for the way I treated you." I made you my punching bag. You trusted me, and I hurt you. A soft, tittering sound leaves my throat. And it hurts. Like I'm choking up a piece of bone.

"No, Max." Chip has a way of phrasing things shortly. Clip-clip. I used to be his voice, the steel to his soft. It makes my fist quiver, my fingertips numb from crushing ice. "You don't get to pretend you're a good person. Monet will be there in a minute and you're going back to prison."

My fingers freeze in midair. He tipped her off. Chip, the shy one, who cowered with his fists over his head when I told him about every kidnapping, every plan. Who kept silent all his short life, afraid to speak more than a couple sentences at a time. Who would tremble in the corner of my room while Percy was sweating at cheer practice, those big cornflower blue eyes peering up at me so trustingly. That's the boy who tipped her off. My good fist slams into the shingles, once, twice, three times and then a staccato flurry, crushing them to sand. I don't know why my first instinct is violence, I just know I can hear Chip gulp, and that it sounds like a whimper.

 "You've made a mistake." I stand up, stretching my back and bloodied fist. The voice I use is calm. My father's, when he tells me I'll become a disgrace to his name. I don't know why my second instinct is manipulation,  but it is, and so I  do. "Without me, you're—"

"Nothing? Yeah, I know. Goodbye, Max. I hope you get better."

He hangs up, leaving me with nothing but the thwack of hail on the roof and the beep-beep of dial-tone. I hurl rubble from the rooftop and watch the sheetrock explode off the bark of trees, how it snaps into powder. My phone clatters from between my shoulder and ear, slides down the roof and lands with a plop! in the gutter. I scramble after it, gripping the edge of the roof. There it goes, at the bottom of black water. Couldn't use it after tonight anyway.

"Hey, Max," Monet says. Her masked face reflects up at me in the brackish puddle, her eyes glinting green. I whip around. Her curtain-cape snaps out behind her, her mask slicked to her face with rain and mud. Her arm is bound to her in a sling of white bandage. An advantage, you'd think, until you'd remember my arm is splintered into a thousand shards under a sleeve of skin. Damn.

My eyes trail to my coil of red rope on her hip.

"How long have you been here?"

"Hmm." She pulls her lip over her teeth and keeps her voice soft. "I dunno? Twenty minutes? I wanted to give you and Chip time to talk."

We're so close our knees are almost touching, she's crouched down, fingers twisted in her rope. Me, bent over her, my legs wobbling in my too-tight jeans. The sirens have become a chorus of screams, all around us. Below, the driveway is full of cop cars. With my bloodied hand braced to the shingles, I can feel the thump-thump-thump of footsteps resounding deep beneath me, like an extra pulse in my fingertips. Daddy with his shotgun.

I let a small smile spread up across my jaw. This is my masquerade. Not the mask or the hood, but the sweet expression that makes me the boy next door. The boy you want to date, with his kind white smile and his big brown eyes. I'd spent hours perfecting this look in the mirror, the way my hair's kept (clean and combed, but with the back in shaggy feathers. It makes me look scruffily approachable, I figure) my smile (all white and winsome, so wide it hurts), I even penned in the edges of my eyes so they look big and innocent. "I see.  So sentimental. What a mistake, miss Jackson." 

This is what we are now. Supervillain and superhero. Not president and vice president, boyfriend and girlfriend, just two enemies throwing quips. She wheels to her feet,  feet swinging upward and planting hard on the roof. She throws a jab to the side of my face. I dodge, stumbling backward. One foot lands in the gutter, my ankle twisting up and to the side. I'm sent flailing into the air before I right myself on the aluminum edge. Send my heel into her stomach. She blinks, but not quickly enough to hide her wince. Then her fist clenches and she lunges for me.

It still surprises me, how quickly the girl I threw into the chemical waste can move. I don't know why I expect her to still be so frail, to be so desperate and helpless like she was that night. Why I still expect her to look down at me with her eyes widened in terror. Her punches land. One to the shoulder, the next to the neck. I hit the roof skidding, shingles tearing open the back of my silk shirt and leaving a chain of slashes down my spine. I'm exhausted from my flight, my eyes already rolled up behind my eyelids.

 She pounces, and I roll to the side on my bleeding back. If she catches me, maybe they won't even take me to prison. Maybe they'll just leave me tied in the rope made from Red Comet's powers and throw me from a building. Would be a lot easier than developing a whole 'nother wing of science just so I can rot the rest of my immortal life in a special cell. My fingertips scrabble at the gutter's edge, and then I'm hanging, too scared to let go even though I can fly.

Against the night, the glow-in-the-dark stars pasted on my window glint up at me. My bag is slung over my back. I shoot up into the hail when the first bullet clips my bicep. It stings like a knife slash, and I swallow down a scream, shivering. From below, police officers kneel in the grass like quarterbacks, weapons steadied over their shoulders. Heavy guns with banana clips and muzzles that glow cast-iron black in the moonlight's reflection on the rain. I've tuned out their shouts, the: "Freeze or we'll shot!" All I know is that Monet, flattened to her stomach, reaches for my hand.

"I won't let them hurt you. They'll reform you."

Two bullets whiz in the air. The movies are wrong, about how some people can sleep through gunshots. When a gun goes off,  it sounds like the world is shattering into equal pieces all around you. My father taught me how to shoot and how to hunt, but I can feel my eyes stinging with tears. Between Monet's hand and the gunshots, I choose to kick open my window and hideaway in my room.

But I can't, I tell myself as soon as I land on the carpet pads. My father's sitting on my bed. One leg crossed over the other at the knee, his tie left loose around his neck. Scarlet. Pinstripe shirt rolled up at the elbows, silver cuff-links. His head is lowered, his fingers running a wet wipe over the brass barrel my grandfather's shotgun, the one that hung up over the back of my dad's office chair.

"So, you're Masquerade." My father uses a soft voice when he talks to me, kind of like Monet. He squints, his eyes a washed out blue, watery and faded. My heart balloons up into my throat.

"Yes, Dad."

"A mutated creature."

"Yes, Dad." No other words will leave my mouth. I'm a kid again. Not a supervillain, just an old-fashioned disappointment.

He raises the gun and cocks it. It fits his hands like it was his, the muzzle steadied at my head. I stare into the barrel, like I'm looking into another eye.

My father's eyes are red-rimmed, swimming with dull bue flickers. "I raised a monster."

I'm trembling in my own sweat. "D-Dad—"

Weight and shadow catapult into my hip, hurling me tumbling across the carpet. The gunshot rings out, an explosion of sound that makes a high-pitched squeal explode in my eardrums. I wince, but I never feel the bullet burying down into my skull. I just hear Monet's scream. When I glance down, her body is sprawled out across my Berber carpet, red spreading from her like shadows.

It takes me a whole second to understand what happened. Why she's twitching on the floor like that, making little sounds of pain at my feet. It must be instinct for a superhero, to throw herself into the line of fire. Maybe I was wrong to tell her she wasn't Superman.

While my dad lowers the barrel so it points at her back, I use the distraction she's made for me. I jet past him. I'll never see my bedroom again. Never see the collection of vinyl supervillain action figures I keep above my computer desk, fuzzed over now with dust. The movie posters smoothed over cracks in my walls I left testing my powers. The pristine trophy case, filled with medals and ribbons that were never enough. Where I first held down Chip and threatened to murder him.

Behind me, my father empties the gun. POP! POP! POP! You're not supposed to look back, but I do. I see the way Monet jerks and shakes. Hear her gurgle and yelp with pain.

As if she's to blame. As if my father already pieced together her identity, which I'm more than sure he did. Onyx, the avenging ghost of the meddling reporter I dropped into those chemicals. She knows too much. And my father has his chance to rid himself of her.

I don't get to wonder if she'll survive. I just get to run. Down the stairs, right as the police fill up the foyer. They look like black beetles from above, small and hunched.

I kick open the kitchen window, bursting into the outside as the guns fire all around me. The sound makes me think of the first time I killed an animal. A fawn with its leg busted at the flank. I was twelve and I killed it with a hunting rifle. Sobbed right there in the woods. It would be the only time my father ever hit me, but I still have the nick his wedding band left by my eye. That threat of violence which hung over our every interaction.

The night is all blackness, the moon hidden in sheets of cloud. Hail lashes at my open cuts, filling up my eyes with tears. I shoot higher and higher, until my lungs wheeze and wobble for air. The rain is so thick I only see black.

I'm free, but everything still hurts.

I'm free, but my journey hasn't begun. I broke Chip. The only girls I ever liked hate me. My father wants me dead.

And I don't want revenge, I tell myself, I want to make things right. I'm free, right? I don't have to be a villain, or a prisoner, or an anything anymore. Another mask and the chains of my name will be clipped. But I don't think I want to be so free so soon. 

For now, I think I want to burn everything to the ground.