5

---

There’s a quaint little gym tucked away in a corner of Center City, in what looks like a touched-up-but-disused old warehouse. This gym is known only to a small, select group of superheroes and their retinue, which I am now apparently a part of. Go figure. It doesn’t even have a name on the outside, only the washed-out rectangular dust-stain of what used to be some sort of sign. On one hand, I understand the need for a degree of cover, given that many superheroes are also celebrities in their own right, but on the other hand, would it kill them to spruce up the front? Maybe some plants? Just some sort of indication that I’m not just walking up to an abandoned building at the edge of town. That’d be nice.

As it were, I’m standing in front of a heavy, metal door, without even a window cut into it. It’s hot and humid so I’ve got on soccer shorts and a t-shirt, and every thirty seconds I’m checking my phone and GPS to make sure that I’ve actually got the right place, waiting for 9:00 AM to tick over, since my mom always taught me to arrive ten minutes early for any important meeting. We’re out of the way enough that nobody passes me by on the street or sidewalk, but, you know… standing on the side of the road in a bad-ish part of town feels weird. Nobody goes inside ahead of me. I can’t hear, see, or otherwise detect any movement inside, except for a faint smudge of coffee grounds through the thick walls that lets me know that Liberty Belle, or someone else with stomach problems, is probably in there.

9:00 hits, and the front door opens. Liberty Belle steps out to greet me, beckoning me into a pleasant looking airlock, which I suppose is a bit oxymoronic on its own. “Good to see you,” she says, her hair loose and free in an afro today. Every time I see her, it’s in less and less of her costume and more and more casual clothes – if I didn’t know it was her by face and voice today, I could’ve assumed I was greeted at the door by any random gymgoer, in a sports bra and leggings.

“Yeah, thanks. Good to see you too. I think I would’ve freaked out if someone I didn’t know was welcoming me at the door,” I reply, trying to make light conversation.

“Thankfully, it’s just the main group today, no support staff or nothing.”

“Support staff?”

“Is there an echo in here or what?” she jokes, thumping me on the back as she shuts the front door, followed by a thick metal door coming down behind it to seal the airlock. “We’ve got a small team of support staff – a nurse, two dispatchers, a computer nerd, some forensic staff and investigators – that we rely on for day-to-day operations. Being smart is not really an essential part of being a superhero so a lot of modern day organizations offload that stuff to civvies.”

“Uh-huh,” I reply, listening to the rushing of air around me as the airlock seals. “So this is home base?”

“Yep! The entire DVD headquarters here, but, y’know, most of the adults like me have homes and shit, so we’re not here a lot of the time, but the Young Defenders like to hang out here when they don’t have other shit going on. We’ll get you a key fob once we’re done dotting all the I’s and crossing the T’s,” she says, pressing her phone up against a small panel on the other side of the airlock. She catches me looking at her funny, and the door hisses open behind her. “Standard issue, in case of a superhuman capable of performing chemical attacks or otherwise fuckin’ with the air. Any place that deals with superhuman stuff and gets government funding probably has an airlock, or at least a panic room that’s air-tight.”

“Oh, I was actually just thinking that we already crossed our I’s and dotted our T’s. Wasn’t that what I was waiting a week for?” I ask while she walks me into a modest locker room. Each locker, of which there are 30, is big – double width compared to the ones I saw in my high school during the tour – and a little over half of them are decorated and labeled. I read them out in my head. Professor Franklin, Liberty Belle, Fury Forge, Multiplex, Bulwark, Mrs. Clara, Mr. Davis, Puppeteer, Blink, Crossroads, Gossamer, Playback, Gale, Rampart, and one with an empty paper tag with no name filled in. I can only assume that it’s for me. “And is ‘Mrs. Clara’ and ‘Mr. Davis’ really their superhero names?”

She wrangles a set of keys off the wall from high up and tosses them to me. I snatch them out of the air. “No, that’s our lawyer and the de jure head of the DVD, respectfully. I mean, respectively.”

“De jure?”

“Aha, I got you with that one. You know what ‘de facto’ means, right, kiddo?” she asks.

“Yeah. Like, the one everyone recognizes. I’m de facto the best soccer player on my team, or something like that,” I answer, popping them into my locker’s keyhole and twisting it open. As expected, there’s nothing in it, so I just sling my gym bag that I brought with me into it and shut the locker.

“Yeah, de jure is like, the opposite of that. The leader on paper. Law says every group of RSEs needs a civilian regulator on oversight. I’m the de facto leader, Mr. Davis is the de jure leader. You feelin’ me, kiddo?”

“Yeah, I get it.”

She shows me around the rest of the space that encircles the main gym. Showers, bathrooms, a lounge, a dispatch center with big, huge monitors, changing rooms. Nothing luxurious or that I wouldn’t expect to see. If anything, it’s more low-key and down-to-earth than I expected out of what’s supposed to be a superhero group’s headquarters. I expected cool technology and shiny equipment, but everything here looks like the government surplus that my dad brings home from the office sometimes. Even the newest, shiniest thing looks 8 years old at the least, 15 years old on average, if I had to guess from the layers of grime and dents. Everything smells like metal and sweat, and the entire time I can’t help but feel Liberty Belle’s blood swimming around in my field of… vision? Field of blood-vision? Whatever. It makes sense in my head.

We don’t spend too long taking the tour around the outer perimeter. It’s not hard to notice my silent glancing at the various doors set into the side of each room, each one a passageway to the actual reason I’m here. I can hear, very faintly, a conversation that’s occurring without me as I’m shepherded around by someone I can’t bring myself to trust completely. “This is the dispatch room,” “This is the ladies’ room,” yadda yadda. Finally, we get around to the point.

“You ready to meet the team?” She asks.

Really, I’m not. I’m a bundle of nerves, but I think that’s just a constant with me. If I say no, though, that I’m not ready, that I’d like maybe a minute or two, that would push us even further overtime – it’s 9:30 AM on a Saturday, and I’m tired of waiting.

I nod, and she opens the door.

---

The centerpiece of the headquarters is a massive, ginormous gymnasium. Or, rather, a normal sized professional gymnasium, I think, but being used to school soccer fields and street basketball cages, it seems pretty damn large in comparison, easily able to fit four or maybe six basketball courts with room to spare. It’s split up by quarters, with padded, blue flooring covering the whole thing: one quarter is occupied by normal gym equipment, weight machines, stuff like that, the entire back half has been swallowed up by some sort of Ninja Warrior obstacle course, and the remaining one quarter is empty space, where seven people wait for me and Liberty Belle in varying states of sitting.

I am immediately intimidated, and do my best to avoid looking anyone in the eye. Liberty Belle gently nudges me into the group, causing me to go stumbling, heels skipping off the ground until I land on a cushion of air, right in front of a very pretty girl wearing a headscarf and a dazzling lip-shut smile. We make the most uncomfortable eye contact I have ever had in my life, and with a gentle pushing motion from her hands, she walks me back along the invisible force-field until I’m in the center of the group. “Ladies and gentlemen of the Young Defenders, I present to you… fresh meat,” Liberty Belle teases, and I turn back to look at her with a little bit of obvious anxiety in my eyes, trying to silently plead for help.

Instead of the immediate hazing I expect to be subject to, despite my parents’ earlier promises, I instead receive a small, disorienting chorus of hellos, in varying dialects and styles. “Some of you are almost adults, so I’m not going to babysit you all. I’ve got patrols, you’ve got a new member, let’s get this jawn handled, okay?” she calls out from behind me, shutting the door as I am plunged into the unfamiliar. I feel like I am in kindergarten once more, subject to the whims and judgments of strangers, all silently assessing me.

“Alright, y’all, you heard Lib. Let’s show the new girl some respect and introduce ourselves. I’ll go first,” someone behind me says, waving her hands out to get everyone else to back up so that I’m no longer stuck in the center of the crowd. She arranges everyone like a conductor handling an orchestra, using small finger gestures to organize everyone in line before putting herself at the head of it. She takes a step forward and bows politely at me. “Puppeteer. I’m the eldest here, so that makes me the babysitter by default.”

“It sounds so undignified when you say it like that,” someone – fifth in line, male – interrupts her.

“Yeah, yeah, well when you magically grow two and a half years in a day then you can be the leader,” she jokes back, flicking her hand backwards. The speaker, a tall black kid, probably a year or two older than me, shoots his hand out to grab his beanie before it flies all the way off his head. “I do strings, by the way, since inevitably we’re gonna get around to the power discussion.”

“‘I do strings’,” number five mocks, imitating her voice in a childlike sing-song as he adjusts his beanie again.

“Are we going out of order?” I ask, followed by another question. “And is it really just based on seniority?”

“No, just merit. Seniority is not a good way to organize a group’s leadership. And I’d like to go in order, if y’all can keep your pants on,” she replies, cracking her knuckles. She’s about as tall as me, maybe half an inch taller, with dark skin and fluffy, curly hair that looks like it might turn into something like Liberty Belle’s if she ever let it coil up into locs, although the sides of her head are shaved down. Her costume is built over top of a black, skin-tight undersuit, again, like Liberty Belle’s, with purple-pink accent cloth over top that I can see sits on top of a layer of padding, or maybe some kind of armor like kevlar or something, and big steel-toed boots.

She takes a step back. The next person, an Asian girl that’s about four inches shorter than me, steps forward. I can tell her eyes are trying to focus on me, but her face says she’s somewhere else completely. She waves. “Blink. I can move things really fast but only along one axis. Hug or handshake?” she offers, but I raise a hand up and take a step backwards.

“No thanks. I’m not really a physical contact type. Your power sounds, uh, cool, though,” I give her a little bit of a layup so she doesn’t feel like I’m rejecting her – a tip for social interaction that my dad taught me.

“Thanks! It’s useful sometimes. Good to have you aboard. I’d call you by your name but I don’t think we’re supposed to know what it is,” she responds. She’s very pretty, with short hair, a white costume with purple accents that looks to be coated in some sort of… matte coating, and a long scarf with several colored marbles dangling off the end of it. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Pleasure is, uh, all mine,” I say, trying not to mumble.

She takes a step back. The next person in line doesn’t even bother stepping forward. He just raises his hand up. “Crossroads. I see the future.”

He’s tall, easily the tallest in the group, and stretched out like an old tree in the wintertime. I’m pretty sure, guessing from appearance, that he’s Hispanic, but he has a sort of ill looking pallor to him that makes him look almost as pale as I am, and these yellow-brown eyes that I think are, in fact, actually staring right through me. Most people say that as a metaphor, but I mean it – it looks like he’s focusing on a spot behind my head, like he can see right through me. I like his hair, though, very dark and very long, longer than most of the girls, and his costume is pretty simple, with a black undersuit and orange-red padding, similar to Puppeteer’s. I guess that’s some sort of standard-issue? I give him a nervous wave and turn towards the next person.

She actually almost leaps out towards me, reaching out to shake my hand expectantly. When she notices me glancing back and forth between her face and her hand, she switches it to a fist, which I reluctantly bump. “Gossamer! I’m super good at tailoring. And weaving, and fabrics, and… you know, like, materials and textiles? I’ll be designing your costume, too!”

“Oh, I get a costume?” I ask, and then immediately feel stupid for asking it. She giggles and titters like she’s had a little too much sugar, her braid swaying with her movement like a cat toy, and she retracts her hands to her sides so she can bow hard towards me twice. Her costume is easily the most fashionable and pretty looking of everyone’s, all bright green and yellow like a citrus candy, with sparkly golden threads throughout. Even still, I can’t help but notice thick layers of padding at the vulnerable locations, except for her shoulders, which are exposed. She’s maybe an inch shorter than me, with wiry black hair and narrow eyes, and a smile like a sunbeam that weirds me out a little bit.

“Duh! Do you think we send you to the nearest Spirit Halloween or something? I made everyone’s costumes. I mean, like, obviously there’s templates, but I did all the hard work! You can tell because it’s all perfectly symmetrical and even. I’m really good at that,” she rambles, sticking a tongue out at me in what I feel like is her attempt to be playful and endearing. “Don’t worry, we can get your measurements later. And I’ll ask you about theming and stuff.”

“Uh-huh,” I try to reply, trying and failing to match her enthusiasm. It just sort of stumbles out of my lips. I hope that they can’t tell how weirded out I am by this, and I also hope that I can figure out what is bothering me. Am I having an anxiety attack? I think that I’m having an anxiety attack. My eyes feel like they’re flickering back and forth in their sockets. I’m trying not to open my mouth super wide, so nobody can catch a hold of my creepy, weird teeth.

Number five finally gets a name to the face. He points finger guns at me and waits for a reaction, while I stare blankly at him. “Playback. I do sound stuff, if the name wasn’t enough of a giveaway.”

“Yeah, I could imagine,” I try to make light. He smiles and winks at me, resulting in a quick, harsh tug to his beanie from Puppeteer – this time, it goes flying off all the way and into her hands, revealing a short, dark buzz-cut. “Hey! Th’ fuck was that for?”

“No flirting. Besides, she’s 14,” She chides him.

“Oh, aight, aight, word.” He responds, his body immediately going a little slack. That, somehow, gets me to laugh, and he winks at me again. I can tell he’s got the same standard padded bodysuit as everyone else on top of what looks like a surprisingly muscular frame, but most of it’s covered up in a blue sweater, which must be absolutely miserable to wear out anywhere that’s not an air conditioned gym like this. “Yeah so, hold on, let me do the math… Yeah, okay, once you’re like… 18 and I’m 21, hit me up. Ow!”

He slaps at his ear while the lobe visibly stretches sideways towards Puppeteer’s hand. There’s a momentary pause, interrupted only by my quiet giggling, and she lets go with whatever invisible wires she’s using, causing him to stumble back. “I’m serious, don’t creep out the new girl.”

“It’s fine, I don’t care that much. He’s not my type, anyway,” I cut in.

“What, you not a fan of– OW! Fuck! Quit it!” he shouts, swatting at the empty air as it tries to pull on his face and ears.

“You are absolutely not allowed to make that joke at a teammate. Have your hat back and put a sock in it,” Puppeteer orders, flinging his beanie back. He grumbles under his breath and shoves it over his head.

“Sorry about my teammates. I know this is probably a pretty overwhelming first meeting,” says number six in line, who looks like a linebacker. He’s got broad shoulders and muscles and is the only one who seems to be wearing any sort of armor armor, with some sort of ceramic or metal over top of his costume in thick, heavy-looking plate layers. “They call me ‘Rampart’. I’m the immovable object.”

“You just pull that one out every time, don’t you?” Playback says, still rubbing his face after the chastising he received from the team leader. I look around and notice that Blink seems to have vanished, before I catch her running on a treadmill. My first instinct is to think that it’s rude, but there’s probably a reason why she’s not being yelled at to get back here, so I don’t mention it.

“What, you’d rather I explain what ‘super-anchoring’ means?” he shoots back.

“Yeah,” Playback replies, folding his arms over his chest.

“Too bad,” Rampart responds, before turning back to me, eying me up and down in a way that makes me feel… bad. “Now, as nice as my comrades have been, I need to let you know that we’re not going to be tolerating mediocrity. As I’ve heard from our illustrious leader, you’re fourteen, and I wager you’re fresh off your activation, but, you know, I have to be the one to say it – if you start weighing things down, we’re going to start having some problems.”

I couldn’t tell you why this made me happy, but it did. It didn’t feel like bullying, or hazing. It was straightforward. It was blunt. Keep up, or get left behind. It was just like in sports, how you got benched if you couldn’t keep pace with the rest of your team. A good attitude can only get you so far. “Duly noted.”

“Good. I like her,” he says to the rest of the group.

“Yeah, what’s not to like?” Gossamer replies, squishing her cheeks together. I turn to face the last one in the lineup, the girl who had welcomed me by stopping me from stumbling into her, uh. From stumbling into her. I could guess pretty easily from process of elimination that she was some kind of telekinetic, but I was curious as to the exact specifics.

She smiles, and something in my stomach overturns with anxiety. I see a twitch of concern on her face and feel like vomiting. I swallow the emotion, clench my fists up by my hips, and stand up straight. I feel wind holding me up around my waist, and notice her fingers in her right hand gently tracing circles in the open air. Her costume is minimal, with the usual bodysuit underneath, and her white hijab sitting comfortably over it, with only a small fan mounted on her belt and a couple of yellow accents. I am trying very hard to keep my gaze on her face. “Gale. I can control wind,” she says, while I take in the specific shade of gold-tan that her face is.

She takes a step back, and I haven’t even realized she took a step forward in the first place. She smiles and waves a little with her left hand, and I notice how her nails are all shiny, black, and lacquered with polish. I look away from them, and towards her face again, before I’m rudely interrupted by a voice to my left.

“Your turn, newbie,” Puppeteer orders.

I take a step forward into the semicircle, doing a quick headcount. Blink had returned at some point when I wasn’t looking, probably when I was staring at Gale. I raise a hand awkwardly. “Uh, hi. I don’t have a name yet. I’ve got shark teeth and I can smell blood,” I explain, doing a quick mental assessment of what my blood sense is telling me. Besides all the people within about a block or two that are bleeding outside of the warehouse, nothing useful, nobody immediately gushing blood, and no Liberty Belle. She wasn’t kidding when she said she was going to vamoose.

“Okay, I’m not going to test that second bit but you better show the chompers, girl,” Playback says, taking two steps forward, to which I take two steps back. “Can you spit ’em or something? Use ’em like knives? Make jewelry?”

“Uh…” I stall, thinking about it. “No, no, maybe. They’re just person teeth sized. I don’t have the big shark teeth because I’m not a big shark, but they do grow back and I do have to keep getting rid of the old ones. I’ve got a baggy at home if anyone, uh… You know, if anyone wants a bunch of person-sized shark teeth. But act fast, cuz they turn into dust in a couple days.”

Gossamer is immediately in my face while I’m pulling my mouth open by the lips to show my teeth off. Her phone flashlight is on and it’s pointed down my throat, while a scatter of voices jumbles out behind her, voices which I haven’t yet learned to associate with a name and face. “Quit it, Goss!” “Hey, don’t scare the newbie!” “Can I have a tooth?”, you know, those sorts of gossipy voices. Her free hand fearlessly is just in my mouth, poking, prodding with her fingertip, and I really have to resist the urge to bite. Not just because it would be monumentally stupid, permanently injure someone who’s supposed to be my teammate, and make me look really bad, but also because… Actually, I’m not sure where I was going with this sentence. I just make a groaning sound as I’m prodded at like I’m at the dentist’s. “Can I have them? I have ideas.”

“Mnyeah, sure,” I reply, wiping spit out of my lips from the back of my mouth. “If you really want a baggy full of baby shark teeth I will definitely not stop you.”

Puppeteer has bent into a squat at the back of the pack while everyone else, now that order has broken, is busy trying to examine my mouth. I keep my mouth open, which makes it hard to talk, but let them fawn as much as they want. After a couple of weeks of friends calling me creepy and weird, even if I know they don’t mean it in a mean way, just having a bunch of people going nuts over how cool my disgusting shark teeth are to them feels like a well-needed breath of fresh air. None of them are touching me, but they are getting very close, gloved hands and bare fingers and flashlights in my face. My breath comes out in halting waves, panting a little bit as I force my mouth to stay open with my fingers.

“Alright, alright, give her some space,” Puppeteer says, gently waving everyone to the side, where they part like the ocean. “Can you bite hard, or are they basically cosmetic?”

“I ‘an ‘ite hard,” I say, keeping my lips spread open with my fingertips at all four corners. Then, realizing I’m probably incomprehensible, I let them flop shut. “I can bite hard enough to bite through silverware. I haven’t tried on anything harder.”

“Okay, okay. And the blood sense, how far does that go?” Puppeteer asks, staying direct and on-topic while everyone else is chattering. I’m trying hard to focus on her and not on the snippets of out-of-context talk about me that my ears are tuning in and out on like a radio.

“What? Repeat, please,” I ask, my brain not having fully processed the message yet. She flicks her hands forward, and I see some sort of disturbance in the air rush past me, anchoring to the ground behind me. She scoots forward on her heels, and I recognize for the first time that her boots also appear to have little tiny wheels on them. My first instinct is to think “oh, that’s cute,” followed shortly after by “oh, that’s practical.”

“The teeth are cool but for practical matters I think the blood sense is the more effective tool in the line of duty.” She says, skidding to a halt in front of me. I like her, too, Puppeteer – she’s got her head on right, and I like her straightforwardness. “Don’t show me the teeth, I’m good on teeth.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She smiles, and I watch the semi-visible strands whip past me as they retract into her fingertips. “Blood sense. Range. What is it?” she asks, not chiding me on calling her ‘ma’am’ like most people have. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I always felt like it was right to be polite with sirs and ma’ams. I’m not calling someone old, it’s just a matter of respect. “Give me the details.”

I bow just a little bit at the knees. I hear someone mentioning “shark-tooth necklaces” and absorb the idea for later. “I’m not good at visualizing distances, but I can smell someone on the sidewalk outside that scraped their knee. When someone’s bleeding from an open wound, I can see their entire vascular system,” I explain, trying to impress her with my knowledge of what a vascular system is, “including heartbeat and anywhere that blood is flowing inside of them such as internal injury. I can also smell blood in the air or on surfaces.”

“Can you distinguish blood from two different people if it’s mixed together?” she asks, glancing backwards at the group behind her that seems to have immediately dissolved into nonprofessional gossiping.

“I haven’t tried, ma’am.”

She nods, rubbing her chin. “We’ll figure it out. Do you actually like sharks? You called ’em shark teeth before. A hundred percent sure it’s a shark power?”

“Oh, yeah, I can also swallow a lot of seawater and it doesn’t make me sick. So I think it’s sharks, or maybe a piranha or something,” I ask, straightening myself up and folding my hands behind my back in an attempt to look as professional as possible. “And, really, I’m uh, ambivalent about sharks. Ma’am. Don’t really think about them much one way or another. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” she replies, causing my heart to skip a beat with fear. “Here’s your schedule; we’re going to start by getting your baselines while Goss works on a costume. Then, we’ll run through the obstacle course, break for lunch, and you can either stay here or join me on patrol. Got it?”

“Yes’m.”

She spins around on her heel and claps loud enough to draw everyone’s attention, immediately silencing the air. “Alright, y’all. Morning chat circle is over, let’s get this shit started.”

---

Puppeteer’s thumb clicks on a stopwatch while I shoot by, sneakers slamming on the mat-coated floor to push me forward. “Good. Nine point eight six seconds,” she says, as I lean over into my knees, sucking in air through my teeth. I can feel the blood rushing in my ears, my stomach aching, my arms hurting. Not from running, one of my favorite activities, but from all the stuff preceding it.

Curl-ups, pull-ups, push-ups, vertical jump, everything you can do without picking up a weight, the same stuff you do in PE class when you’re getting assessed. Someone shows me how to do it and I feel a rush of inadequacy flow through me like water in an open bathtub, draining out in my knees. There’s nothing interesting or new under the sun here, just a 14 year old girl in a room full of older teenagers getting smoked in nearly every respect. Gossamer is the only one that I’m competitive with, and she wasn’t already an athlete before getting her superpowers, I’d bet. My hands hold my kneecaps hard and I gasp for air, before standing back and holding my hands up over my head. My hair is all over the place. I feel ugly.

All I can do is kick a soccer ball real good and run real fast. These aren’t skills translatable to superheroing.

I walk in a loose circle, hands behind my head now, while Rampart and Puppeteer talk quietly, whispering below what I can hear. I turn around at the feeling of a tap on my shoulder, only to spin face-to-face with Gale, and the blood rushing through me pumps a little bit faster. “Would you like a breeze, newbie?” she asks, twisting her fingers around rhythmically.

“Uh, ah, I, um, I mean, uh… I, uh… If you’re… If you’re offering?” I stammer, looking like the least cool person in existence. She smiles and brings her hand up like she’s pulling something up from the floor, and the wind around me picks up, flowing into the spaces between my shirt the rest of me, up around my neck. It wipes sweat from my brow and sends my hair everywhere. It is the best breeze ever. “Can you, um, fly with that?”

“Yes. Wanna see?” she replies, glancing behind me. Her little USB fan spins and spins on her belt, making the mildest of breezes that I assume she accelerates into this wondrous air conditioning cooling me back down to a functioning core temperature. She glances behind me. “Maybe later, actually.”

I turn around at the sound of footsteps and the breeze stops, my shirt’s billowing edge flopping back down against my stomach, hiding my scars. In the distance I spot the others working out, Crossroads and Gossamer lifting weights, Playback running on a treadmill, Blink… doing handstands. Hand-walks, actually, which is a lot more impressive. Puppeteer and Rampart approach me as a unit, and I hear the last edges of the whispering as they stop talking to each other and start getting ready to talk to me instead. “…sure about her?” from Rampart, and my heart sinks.

I guess it must be apparent on my face, because Puppeteer puts up her hands preemptively, a posture of compromise. “Hey, hey, no worries. You look scared. We’re not kicking you out or anything.”

“I’m expecting a ‘but’, ma’am. What’s the ‘but’?” I reply, trying to keep myself stiff and professional and not shoving my hands in my pockets or looking down at my feet. I make eye contact. I can feel Gale behind me, hear her taking a couple of steps back.

“No ‘but’! You’re just fourteen. I’m not expecting to be blown out of the water – you’re probably a lot more athletic than most of us were at your age. Rampart was just expressing his concerns.”

I feel betrayed, even though none of these people are my friends to begin with. My face twitches without my permission. “Concerns?”

“With candor, newbie,” he starts, and I realize that none of these people know my name. Or maybe they do, but aren’t saying it for whatever reason, but I certainly don’t know theirs, so I assume the lack of info goes both ways. “at your age and body weight, a 35 kilo deadlift is impressive, and beyond the norm. Nine point eight six shuttle, well above average. You know your mile?”

“Almost six minutes flat. Sir.”

“Right, good, impressive. You’re definitely a good athlete – for your age. I have no doubt you’re the best of the best at whatever track and field team you’re on, or whatever sports you play. Bluntly, though, good, even great, isn’t good enough,” He folds his arms over his chest, and I mirror him. “You need to be exceptional. Cream of the crop in your afterschool team isn’t enough. You have to be willing to buckle down. You might get stabbed, or shot, or otherwise attacked. If you’re not there, we can take you there, but it’s gonna be tough. Do you think you have the fortitude?”

I can see his eyes, hazel with what looks like a ring of blue, assessing me. I have muscle, but I’m not beefy. I have a runner’s build. I keep in shape, but not by going to the gym, and I feel like he must have some sort of telepathy he’s not telling me about because as far as I can tell he can just tell this, he can smell the inexperience on me. I can see his eyes seeing through me. He can smell my weakness. There’s a moment of uncomfortable silence, and a little twitch of anger works its way up my spinal column like a centipede.

“You’re just saying that because I’m a girl,” is what comes out, backed up venom from an hour and a half of tension, testing, and exhaustion. Rampart looks completely taken aback, like he’s been physically pushed in the stomach, his face twisting up in confusion. Part of me, the mean part that lives in the center of my brain, the part that my mom says is from the lizards we evolved from and tells me to eat bugs, is satisfied by this. He tries to open his mouth in protest. “You afraid that a girl’s gonna beat you out some day?”

Puppeteer covers her face with one hand, the other on her elbow, trying to hide laughter. Rampart stumbles, trying to save face. “You’re good for a guy, too! I mean, for a boy your age, you’re still above the fiftieth percentile, that means you’re better than average.”

“Oh my god, she was joking, dawg,” Puppeteer says, prodding Rampart in the face with one of her strings. She looks about as embarassed as someone can look, mixed with what I can only described as a sort of horrified amusement. “Get the stick out your ass.”

“Yes’m.”

“Alright, you spoke your candor, newbie, you’ve heard his concerns. We’re cool now,” she says, turning towards him and whacking him on the head a couple of times with vertical chopping motions, carrying her strings with her. “And you, nitwit, know that she’s ready to go the distance, or she’d just leave. Right, newbie?”

I stand up tall and adjust my hair. “Yes, Puppeteer, ma’am.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Rampart mumbles under his breath, looking thoroughly cowed. The lizard part of my brain is pleased. His entire body is deflated like a balloon.

“I’m serious, newbie. There’s no shame in quitting. If this isn’t for you, you’ll know it, and you can leave, and we’ll all say we never met you if asked,” She says, turning back to me, squatting on her heels, elbows on her knees. “We get like three, four people a year. Most of them quit even if they can hack it, because the life isn’t for them. The rest just can’t hack it. There are physical demands. There are mental and emotional demands. Nobody will judge you. You in?”

“What, are you trying to convince me to quit or something?” I reply. “Respectfully, ma’am.”

Puppeteer’s smile is infectious, and dangerous. “Right answer. Related question – how do you feel about obstacle courses?”

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