Cute Mutants Deluxe, page 6
It leaves me at the mercy of them, which I’m used to. I stare at the dirty floor of the bus and let it all wash over me. If you ignore people long enough, they usually get bored. Underneath the banter, I can hear the bus burbling to itself. It sounds all deep and thoughtful but whatever it’s saying is to the tune of the kids’ song about the wheels on the bus. Objects are weird af. Was the bus always awake or did I wake it up? Are there other people like me, waking up objects all around? More practically, I wonder if I could ask it to open its doors and hurl a couple of the most obnoxious douchebags out onto the road. It’s very tempting, but probably too far along the supervillain axis. I bet Magneto would do it. When we reach our stop, the kids all press themselves against the window as the bus pulls away. I give them the finger with both hands.
Emma’s house is big and fancy, with a peaked gable that has a massive round window. There are no cars parked outside. It’s pretty quiet. The whole street is quiet.
“Fuck it,” I say, because I am class personified. I walk up and press the doorbell. We can hear it bonging around inside the house. There’s no answer. We stand there and wait, like we’re selling something. I press it again, and then try the door, but it’s locked.
“I guess she’s not here?” I frown.
“Dani said she was.”
I make this tiny scornful sound. “Dani doesn’t know everything.”
“We just leave then, I guess,” Alyse says.
We both stare at the door, as if willing it to open. I poke the doorbell again.
“She’s inside,” the door tells me, as if it’s embarrassed. “But she can’t hear you because of the things on her ears.”
“Emma?”
“I think so? Not the youngest one, but the other small one.”
“Well, I’m Dylan. We’re good friends of Emma’s. We’ve been here before. Don’t you want to let us in?” I run my fingers over the lock. “Please.” My voice is husky. I’m grossing myself out, to be honest. “I just want to be inside.” Ew, Dylan.
The lock makes a clunk sound and the door swings open with a really faint creak.
“Dylan, did you just flirt your way through a door?” Alyse sounds shocked.
I can’t hold back a grin. I don’t know if this counts as breaking and entering, but we’re standing inside her house. I don’t recognise it at all. Last time I was here, it was full of people. There’s a big entranceway with a door to a massive kitchen. To the left, a wide wooden staircase goes up. An enormous painting—a landscape rendered in scraps of red and black—is on the wall. It looks like real fancy art, not just the reproduction shit you buy at the mall. On the right, there’s a room with an enormous TV. On the couch in front of it, sitting cross-legged with a keyboard balanced in her lap, is Emma. She’s wearing a puffy jacket and leggings. Her face is intent. There’s all this weird writing on the screen. Some coding stuff, I assume.
“Hello?” I take another step inside and wave.
She must see us out of her peripheral vision, because she gives this massive twitch, and spins around to face us. She pulls her bulky over-ear headphones down and they tangle in her long black hair. Her look of surprise is almost as extreme as Alyse’s wide-eyed gape. One hand goes to her chest, as if she’s trying to feel her heart rate.
“Dylan? Alyse?” Emma’s voice is croaky. “What are you—? Wasn’t the door locked?”
“Um, no?” I lie, on reflex. “We heard you were sick and came to check up on you.”
“I’m not sick,” she says. “There’s a coding competition on and I can’t do it when my parents are home because they think I waste too much time on screens and—” She breaks off. “Thanks for coming to check on me though?” There’s a little frown on her face.
“Except we didn’t,” Alyse says firmly. “It’s not true. We’re here about superpowers.”
If either of us expected Emma to break down and confess everything, it doesn’t happen.
“I don’t get it.” Her forehead wrinkles. “Is this a joke?”
I have no idea what to say, so I gesture helplessly in response, as if words might come to me if I wave my arms. The awkwardness of the whole situation is gathering steam in my head, like we literally just broke into her house and are standing here like two fu—
Alyse solves the problem by transforming. Obviously she’s feeling awkward too, because she shifts into a creepy broken-down thing. Cracks run along the surface of her skin, and one of her arms hangs by a thread. It looks like she’s been disassembled and put back together wrong, rickety parts that don’t quite connect.
Emma screams and shifts halfway up the back of the couch. The keyboard falls on the floor. Her fingers are splayed on the leather, her body tense and coiled.
“Now you show her,” Alyse tells me intently. Great, that’s fucking awesome. What are my options here?
“Door?” I ask. “Can you please open and shut a few times?”
It’s still overexcited and half infatuated with me, and it eagerly bangs back and forward in a violent way that shakes half the house until I beg it to stop.
Alyse spreads her arms wide. “Superpowers,” she says.
“But this—this doesn’t make any sense.” Emma looks at us beseechingly. “Superpowers aren’t real.”
“Yeah, except there’s us to prove you wrong,” Alyse says. “The only thing we can figure out is that it happened after we kissed you at the party.”
A faint blush colours one tan cheek and Emma drops her head forward, so her hair swings down and obscures her from view.
“Okay, so I kissed both of you,” she says. “But that doesn’t—”
“Yeah, and the next day we got superpowers,” I tell her. “Like we don’t know if that’s the thing, but maybe if you kissed anyone else, we can check?”
“Well I kissed Dani, my best friend,” Emma says. “Which we both knew was a bad idea, but she was half drunk and mad about Lina.”
Alyse nods sympathetically, but I don’t even know who the fuck Lina is.
“Anyway, she doesn’t have any powers,” Emma insists. “She would have told me. I kissed Bianca Powell too. And there was Lou as well,” she ends in a rush.
Something twists inside me. It’s not that Lou kissed Emma, because I did too. It’s that he said nothing, even when I came stammering to him to confess everything.
“You mean Lou Patterson?”
“Yes,” she says, as if she fears my wrath. “Your Lou.”
Alyse’s eyes are so enormous in her head it is freaking me the fuck out, because how can her body physically function that way? It at least distracts me from the ‘Lou lied to you’ parade that my anxiety brain is performing. I force the non-anxious part of my brain back to the problem at hand. How the hell did perfect Emma Hall create superheroes with kisses? What made her like this? And how big is our sample pool?
“Where did this app even come from?” I ask.
Emma flushes slightly. “I’ve never even liked anyone, let alone been with anyone. When people talk about so-and-so being hot I can’t see why. My Mum had been going on and on about this boy she knew and did I want to go have coffee with him, and I had zero interest.”
Alyse flashes me a look. We still can’t see Emma’s face through her hair. I have no idea where this conversation is going, but I don’t want to be rude and rush her.
“I was turning seventeen, and I thought what if I go my whole life never liking anyone? So I decided to try and kiss some people I’d heard were hot, so I coded it up and pretended it was a random thing.”
“You made the app?” I ask, incredulous. It looked fancy like a real app, and it popped up my name when Emma swiped it. I’d kissed her, because it was her party and she was cute and the app said so. It was only a kiss. Spin the bottle kisses are like being singled out by fate, and when in my life was someone like Emma Hall going to pay me any kind of attention? And wait, does that mean she heard I was hot?
“It was such a bad idea,” she says. “Like you can’t just randomly kiss people and hope it’s going to somehow be this romantic moment that will fix your brain that’s, I don’t know? Can’t detect hotness or—”
“You’re probably ace,” I say, ignoring the melancholy old-movie heroine version of Alyse I’m looking at, who seems to be highly offended that her kiss didn’t rock Emma’s world. I guess if I’d expected anything, it was for Emma to have been drowning in regret, so bland seems a) predictable and b) kind of a step up for me.
Emma hooks her hair behind her ear, and stares at me like I’m speaking gibberish.
“You know, asexual,” I prompt. “Like you’re just not interested in sexual relationships with other people. One of my parents is like that.”
“Asexual,” she says, like I made the word up myself. Honestly, they need to teach this shit in school.
“Google it.” Now Emma’s attention is on me again. I feel awkward, but I forge ahead anyway even though I’m babbling. “There’s like a bunch of different varieties. You might be biromantic like my parent or you might be aromantic which means no romantic feels or—”
She blushes and lets her hair fall back in front of her face.
“I’ll Google it,” she says.
“So we have a list,” I tell Alyse. “We can check out these other people.” Including Lou, my apparent best friend and boyfriend, like what the fuck is going on. Beyond that, I think about what happens if we all have superpowers. A whole group of us, like really truly X-Men, or more accurately the New Mutants and—
“Dylan,” Alyse says meaningfully, and I guess I’m staring off into space. She’s been talking with Emma, doing social skills stuff, and I’m rendered into an awkward sketch of a girl. No transformation required for that.
I make stumbling goodbyes and we leave Emma’s. Outside, Alyse looks at me with these cartoon eyes with a little tear trembling at the corner of each one.
“I thought the kiss was good,” she says.
I have this idea she wants sympathy but my brain is screaming LOU at me like an enormous bass drop. It swallows my mind whole, except a tiny part reminds me that apparently someone thinks I’m hot. Surely that part was a prank.
Alyse and I catch separate buses from Emma’s. There aren’t as many kids on this bus, mostly just sad commuters who ignore me and stare into their phones. I’m transfixed by my own, staring at a blank message window thinking about how to phrase a hundred variations on ‘what the fuck?’
In the end I do the passive-aggressive move of
Dylan: missing u boyfriend
Dylan: wanna come over?
He responds in the enthusiastic affirmative. The poor boy has no fucking idea.
I get home and say practically nothing to Pear, who side-eyes me and then goes back to work on their laptop. I consider getting changed into something hot, but it’s not really worth it given that I’m not sexy at the best of times. Not that Lou seems to mind. I’m no pretty-pretty girl like Emma fucking Hall, that’s for sure.
Ugh, I’m not remotely mad at Emma. She kissed a bunch of people on her birthday trying to figure out asexuality. Okay, maybe I personally shouldn’t have kissed her, but I told Lou straight away and it didn’t mean anything. What I can’t figure out is—
“Lucifer,” I say, as he leans over me with a smile. I didn’t even hear him come in. He strokes my hair and kisses my cheek. In any other scenario, I’d be purring like a happy little kitten. Instead, I sit very still and smile mysteriously.
“Dilly,” he says, comfortable as can be, scooting onto the bed beside me. He is not picking up signals.
“So handsome,” Pillow sighs. I reach behind and shove her back against the wall.
“Missed you,” I whisper to Lou, and I lean in and kiss him. He moves back a little, but I open my mouth slightly and let my tongue flick over his lips. There is a plan here, which is to give him one hell of a kiss, then when he breaks it off I’ll say ‘so, how does that compare to Emma?’
Except I start to get lost in the kiss, especially when he starts kissing me back. His lips feel hot, like he’s running a fever. When I place my palm on his cheek, I almost gasp because it’s like touching the front of a car that’s been running.
My eyes snap open to see why his skin is burning up, and that’s when I see him glowing.
“Shit,” I squawk. My arms pinwheel and I fall off the bed.
Then Pillow pipes up with “Holy fucking shit, Dylan, your boyfriend’s on fire.”
I may be a bad influence on her language.
Lou stares at me, horrified. He isn’t glowing any more. It turned off when I broke the kiss, like flicking a switch, but there’s a scorch mark on my super-fucking-cool duvet with the kittens on it.
“You fucking kissed Emma Hall,” I snap. “And now you’ve got a superpower.”
“I’m sorry about the kiss.” He slides off the bed and crouches beside me. He takes my hand. It’s soft and smooth and regular warm.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“When you told me you kissed her, I didn’t deal well,” he says. “Remember I went offline for the next couple of days?”
I do, but at the same time this is when I was figuring out I could talk to objects. I spent most of that weekend terrified and exhilarated, veering between thinking I was losing the plot and feeling like all my dreams of superheroics had come true.
“Sure.” I’m still giving him the cold vibes. “I thought you were sick.”
“I was upset. You kissed Emma. She’s so pretty and I was really mad about it. But it was like I couldn’t be mad because I kissed her too. Except I was mad, so it seemed easier not to say anything.”
I put my face in my hands. Save me from people who think too much.
“You should’ve told me, Lou.” Meaning his goddamn superpower as well, but we’ve both been keeping that secret.
“I know,” he whispers. “I’m terrible. I’m the worst boyfriend.” He pulls this shit sometimes and it’s quite honestly a dick move that I fall for way too often. Except today, beyond all of this ‘who kissed Emma’ bullshit, there’s a way more major issue.
“No.” I don’t kiss him, I don’t touch him. “You just did a thing you probably shouldn’t have. Both of us fuck up. Like I should’ve said no to Emma when she asked to kiss me. So I’m sorry for that too, because I should’ve known it would make you squirrelly.”
He takes this big shuddery breath like he’s on the verge of tears.
“So let’s talk about your superpower instead,” I say. “What the fuck is up with that?”
“It’s not a superpower,” he says. “It can’t be. Superpowers aren’t real. None of this can be real.”
“Okay sure.” I manage to only half-roll my eyes. “Then can we talk about this totally-not-a-superpower where you glow? Because it’s obviously real, whether you like it or not.”
He coughs and blushes and stammers for a moment. “It started the day after the party. I was in the shower and I was thinking about you and Emma and all this stuff and I started to get—”
“Oh shit, you glow and heat up when you’re turned on.” I’m gasping for breath like I find this hilarious. God knows what the poor boy thinks, but it’s too disastrous for words. I fight my gurgles to a standstill. “That’s why you’ve been avoiding—”
“If I kissed you properly, I knew it would happen,” he says miserably. “But today you were being extra sexy and I thought maybe I could keep it locked down.”
It’s a tiny bit flattering and still hilarious, but I focus my efforts into what I call scientific experimentation. I straddle Lou, and I kiss him all slow and delicate.
“Dylan Jean Taylor,” Pillow says in horrified schoolmarmish tones. “What do you think you’re doing with that boy? You are not that sort of girl!” Um, pretty obviously wrong, Pillow.
His eyes tremble closed, but I keep mine open. I watch in awe as his face suffuses with orange, like one of those old heaters warming up. I put my hands on his cheeks and kiss him harder. Within seconds I have to pull my hands away. I topple backwards off his lap, with zero grace.
“Let’s call it a superpower because we don’t have a better word.” I’m dizzy with it all. “You’re a hot glowing boy. And I have something to tell you as well.”
I feel all the objects in my room reaching out to me. They want to show off what we can do together. I don’t have any rage in me, but right now I don’t need it. They’re all slowly levitating off the bed and desk and floor, rotating around me like I’m the centre of their universe. Pillow floats down gently and lands in my lap.
Lou gapes at me, completely lost for words.
“The whiteboard marker,” he says.
“Yeah,” I admit. “It looks like the people who kissed Emma got—let’s call them abilities. Alyse can change her appearance with her mood.”
“Alyse?” He gets that little frowny forehead thing going, because he knows exactly who Alyse is, and his brain is putting together the fact that I must have been talking to her to know this and—
“Lou. This is a big fucking deal. I’m talking about us all having mutant abilities, not unnecessary jealous bullshit. Can we please for five seconds talk about the fact that we are superheroes?”
“It’s not a superhero thing,” he says angrily. “It’s a sickness thing. I don’t want to turn into a torch whenever I get horny. Does Ness know?”
“No,” I stare at him in shock. “And you are not telling them. They’ll—look, I know they’re obsessed with the X-Men even more than I am, but—Lou, just don’t.”
“It’s a nightmare,” he says. “It really is.”
This is not how I wanted this conversation to go. I want to make him understand how potentially cool this is, so we can be excited together. I do get it’s a lot to take in, especially when Lou has other dramas.
I grab my phone and text Alyse, who says she’s fine to come over. Maybe she can convince Lou. He sits on the floor, looking at his knees and picking at the carpet. We sit there for ages, because I’ve learned there are times to wait together rather than letting all my restless little thoughts off the leash. I can see his nails are bitten all the way down. I want to kiss them, because it’s all I can think of to make this better. He’s like Wolfsbane in New Mutants, who thinks her power comes from the devil. Except I’m bad with people and I can’t convince him of anything.
