Read The Borer: A Captain Major Tale Page 1



  The Borer: A Captain Major Tale

  By Jim D. Scott

  Copyright 2015 Jim D. Scott

  The Borer: A Captain Major Tale

  By Jim D Scott

  March 20, 2016

  Table of Contents

  Chapter Preface

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Preface

  In Confederated Justice, the first book in the Captain Major saga...

  Captain Major, moderately powerful super hero fighting for justice under the Confederated Justice corporate umbrella, faced her ultimate challenge when Metroville’s first and most powerful hero, Amazing Man, totally lost his shit and threatened to destroy the city in fits of unbridled rage. Captain Major, with the help of the future-sensing Immortal, defeated Amazing Man at a great personal cost.

  Spent and dissatisfied with heroing for Confederated Justice, Captain Major retired to allow her alter ego, Dee Major, to spend more time with less of her family. Her husband, Randy, having degenerated into an utterly useless lump of selfishness, Dee decided to kick him to the curb. With two teenagers in the house, Lou and Leigh, Dee continued her day job with Venn Diaphragms, Inc., to pay the bills.

  Jim Scott’s personal blog:

  https://www.jimdscott.com/ungrump/

  For more information on Confederated Justice, the first Captain Major adventure, visit:

  https://www.jimdscott.com/ungrump/cfj

  CHAPTER ONE

 

  Monday, August 29, 2011

  Metroville was fading beautifully from summer to fall as the city woke up to the last Monday of August and the first day of school.

  Randy Major was very busy missing it all.

  Sheldon Davies held Randy’s manicured hand as they walked past the store fronts on Pioneer Avenue. Sheldon was half a head taller than Randy, with graying temples that framed a beaming smile. Sheldon felt fully the warmth of the rising sun on his face in contrast to the chill in the morning air. He turned his face up to the sun to feel it all the more. He walked, chin up, eyes closed, across the sidewalk with Randy tugging him around obstacles and jerking him along whenever his progress was slowed too much by delighting in the day.

  It was minutes before seven when they reached their destination. Randy was a bit out of breath from the four-block walk from their building. They made the walk every day now, but Randy’s body was still adjusting to the microburst of activity. A body at rest tends to stay at rest. A body in decline accelerates until it crashes into rock bottom. Randy's body, at this point, was largely debris. Physics.

  Randy had been single and living alone for eight months. It’s fair to say that he was still bitter from the divorce. He was asked to leave his previous employment due to his co-workers finding him impossible to work with due to his increasingly frequent outbursts. He made ends meet now with odd jobs — sweeping out Gail’s Nails Tuesdays and Fridays and taking Sheldon for a walk five mornings a week. The second floor of Randy’s building included assisted living for adults. Sheldon lived there. Sheldon liked most everything about his life. His friends who worked in his building, his friends who lived in his building and his friends who rode the elevator one floor up or one floor down with him.

  Sheldon did not like Randy who was always pulling him one direction or pushing him in the other. But Sheldon adored puppies and Randy earned 80 bucks a week by walking with Sheldon to Pioneer Pets so that he could marvel as the puppies woke up to blink at the coming of the light and piddle in the shredded newspapers.

  Sheldon loved all the puppies great and small, but he loved the black and white border collie best. Sheldon and the border collie pressed their noses against the glass and stared into the other’s eyes. The puppy licked at the glass. Sheldon wanted to lick back but knew better than to invite Randy’s wrath.

  Not that Randy was paying much attention. He was standing back, leaning against a large planter bristling with German flag mums planted by the Metroville Horticultural Society and waiting for the Blog Master 3000 (Professional) app to finish launching on his phone.

  The Captain’s Chronicles was flat on traffic despite the search engine optimization schemes he subscribed to and all the places where he’d posted nearly genuine comments on other blogs to spread his signature and link back to Captain’s Chronicles.

  The thing is, there wasn’t a great appetite for a harshly critical review of Captain Major these days. In December, the heroine had teamed up with The Immortal, until that point a super villain, to defeat Amazing Man, who had been, up to that point, the city’s first and greatest hero. Amazing Man’s personal decline into madness and violence nearly destroyed the city and threatened greatly Captain Major’s life. Randy was fuzzy on the details, having not paid too close of attention to the events at the time despite being married to Dee Major, Captain Major’s secret identity. In Randy’s defense, he had been very close to finishing the main quest in Skyrim without reaching level 14 and was filling his down time trying so very hard to like L.A. Noire.

  The Majors separated before Christmas and were divorced over the summer. She got the kids and he got the shaft, or so Randy told most of the fellows at the bar whenever he could buy them a round and rent their attention for the duration of a beer.

  The blog was his outlet, his howling in the wilderness, his way to strike back at the twin falchions of darkness — hey! He had a new comment. Randy was surprised to see both that the comment appeared to be from a human being and from someone he didn’t know in real life. Maybe a doctor, too: his screen name was simply “M.D.” That, of course, was inconclusive. Randy’s screen name was “HitHerBack”, though he hadn’t thrown a punch since grade school.

  The comment itself was simple. It expressed general agreement with Randy’s theses, a trick many bots used to try to manipulate vanity to escape the spam button. The second sentence consisted of six words describing Captain Major. The last two were curse words. One of which Randy used profusely in all situations. The ultimate word was also the last. An epithet Randy had, so far in his life, refused to speak aloud. Not as a joke, not in a drunken boast to prove he had the stones to say it. On his worst day, from the depths of a bottle of Irish-sounding whiskey he had thought it: thought it very, very hard about Captain Major and Dee Major, too. Now he read the word again and again in tiny letters on his phone. He let his mind work through the sounds as he repeated the word in his head. He let his lips linger silently around the word, enjoying the sensation of how it would feel to say it, to mean it, while screwing up the conviction to utter it.

  And, oh but it was with pleasure that he approved the comment and let it publish through to his readers, and he smiled a vicious smile as he grabbed Sheldon by the arm and pulled him away from the puppies. Sheldon whimpered and stumbled backwards, slow to turn away from the little collie starting to bark at the rubber chew he shared his cage with. And there the word was, primed for Randy’s use. And it fit well and felt right and slid over his tongue and clicked against his teeth in the aptness of the epithet.

  “Come on,” Randy hissed as he dragged Sheldon faster, stumbling him with the hurrying. And, as Sheldon continued to tarry, Randy’s frustration found voice. He stopped short and turned, purple-faced and spitting with rage: “Move faster, you stupid cunt.”

  Shannonanigan’s Pub was abrasively green throughout, but Dee Major made special note of the avocado-colored bathroom stalls between her second and third Irish Curses. Shannonanigan’s started with the popular Jameson’s and ginger ale, served it in an unfortunately short glass and then garnished it with fresh ginger, a pair of filberts and a slice of lime skewered on a plastic shillelagh.
They successfully charged an extra four bucks for twelve cents in garnish derived from tongue-in-cheek ethnic stereotyping. Dee Major, of course, loved drinks with umbrellas, swords or shillelaghs but hated filberts. Not enough to make a fuss, though, so she fished them out with her fork and dropped them in the bowl of edamame husks from the second round of appetizers.

  Dee scrupulously washed her hands as she took a hard look at herself in the mirror. She promised herself she would have just one more drink. The look itself was metaphorical rather than literal. She didn’t notice her bright, black eyes or the pools of golden light that chased like snakes around her pupils. Nor did she notice her skin, which was as pale as a fish belly in the moonlight. A perfect fit for the environs. And she didn’t have to adjust her dark violet hair, which was held in place by the invisible Band of Adornment. The Band was standard issue for all female Confederated Justice super supers. After the property and casualty coverage, it was the most valuable benefit CFJ provided. The insurance automatically canceled when Captain Major left, but the personal items were manually collected. It was terribly easy for an invisible hair band to go missing. Even the visible ones are always hiding under beds and behind sofas. Why, the risk of accidentally misplacing it was so damn high, Dee felt a moral obligation to wear it constantly in real life.

  Rather than noticing anything about herself, Dee reflected on about how she had spent her 42 years — especially the last 42 weeks. Her life had been a steady escalation of duties concomitant with a steady diminishment of support. Without meaning to, she began to count the weeks until she would have another full day of vacation: no kids at home and no work at the office. Her resolve toward tenuous sobriety wavered. By the time she reached the last two women from Life After Five who still remembered her, her resolve to behave responsibly had collapsed like an out of fashion Vegas hotel.

  Val was teasing the poor man-child who had been waiting on them since 11:01 a.m. Val’s style of drinking included beating the lunch rush. The server’s classic faux-upscale serving attire — white Oxford shirt, shitty black pants and deeply unstylish black shoes — was literally capped with a bright green beret. The beret, in turn, was capped by an orange puffball which served as an unfortunate reminder of the large pimples still dotting the server’s forehead and face. The girls at his community college didn’t seem to mind, but he also lived in his own place which made him seem so very different from the other boys in Composition 18.

  Dee delighted in Val, who was always a little too drunk, a little too gross and a little too forward. Dee called her first the night before to see if she had kept the tradition Dee had abandoned: celebrating the first day of school with day drinking followed by a movie to sober up and then a take-out pizza to savor in front of their kids.

  Val had been in as many dicey situations as Captain Major and had escaped with slightly fewer, and vastly less powerful, dick punches. In most of her encounters, Val dealt more damage than she took. The exception was her divorce, which had come as a complete surprise to her and left many a mark. She recovered from the surprise in time to fully engage in the acrimony that marked every day of the eighteen months of litigation it took to reconcile the divorce to an exhausted, bitter detente.

  Amy was a soccer mom with a secret: she hated soccer as much as she hated sweater sets. She hated the games, hated the unevenly enforced throw-in rules, hated the flopping and hated the goddam spots on the goddam balls. She had driven over ten thousand miles to watch games in wind and rain and sweater sets without a word of complaint, because she loved being a mom. Not much of a secret, but Dee had never considered Amy to be much of a secret keeper. Dee was wrong.

  Dee and Val arrived first. Val used the opportunity to explain that Amy had been sober for nearly four years. Dee shook her head to jar loose all the details from her fond memories of their fun nights out. The whole Life After Five group would eat or dance or sing karaoke. The leakers would sneak home to their husbands and kids while Val and Amy kept the party going. The night often ended with Dee insisting on driving Val and Amy home. They lived but a block apart at the time and not more than two miles from Dee, so it was only an inconvenience the nights when Val threw up in the back seat.

  What Dee never knew, and Val only suspected, was that Amy’s night didn’t end when Dee dropped her off. While Val slipped into bed for clumsy and apologetic sex with her husband, Amy stole into the kitchen to drink until she couldn’t feel anything. She kept drinking until she passed out to keep the feelings at bay for as long as she could.

  Amy’s divorce was sad rather than angry. Once the divorce was certain, it took but a few nights alone in a studio apartment for Amy to start to give up drinking. After a few months of stops and starts, sobriety became easier and even a relief. She began to feel better and eventually she returned to how Dee remembered her: smiling broadly and giggling endlessly. She was fueled now by leafy greens, fair trade coffee and energy drinks rather than dark rum and diet cola.

  She had even, accidentally and unexpectedly, picked out Dee’s blouse for her. Dee hadn’t asked for help. She was a grown woman capable of dressing herself. Amy stopped by with a casserole and a kind note in the days after Randy moved out. Dee and Amy were chatting in the living room, with Dee’s hands full of casserole. Dee was horrified, as ever, at the state of the house and glanced nervously at the massive pile of clean laundry teetering dangerously in Randy’s recliner while it waited patiently to be folded. Amy’s kids honked the horn from the driveway like they were auditioning for a boogie woogie neuftet. Amy worked retail all throughout high school and began to reflexively fold clothes and layer them on the coffee table in a mall-worthy display. She made quite a fuss over one of Leigh’s tops, assuming it belonged to Dee. Amy complimented it so much that Dee felt compelled to wear it the next time they met. Dee felt entirely too exposed in the v-neck to the point where her fingers were wearing grooves in her collar bones from her demure fidgeting.

  Sitting across from Amy now, Dee remembered her smile, worthy of a movie poster for any summer blockbuster. Her lips were naturally full and her wide smile beamed with gloriously white, perfectly straight teeth. It was a smile that many missed because they were uncomfortable with her left arm due to the minor ulnar deficiency. Amy was clumsy with her three-fingered left hand, but she suffered from no ill effects other than those caused by ignorance.

  Val ordered another Irish Curse for Dee and sent the server on his way, pantomiming a friendly swat on the backside with the drink menu. Another drink would go a long way toward relieving Dee’s insecurities. A couple more drinks and she might be swatting at the server, too.

  “You guys have to use the bathroom,” Dee remembered excitedly. “The stalls taste like avocado.”

  “Taste?” Amy noticed.

  “I’m glad the nachos come with the guac on the side,” Val added.

  Dee chastised herself for what she slurred. “Jeez, Dee. Hold it together a little bit.”

  “Your problem,” Val interjected, “is that you’re holding it together too tightly. This is your rumspringa. Cut loose. Live a little.”

  Dee shook her head. “I’ve got responsibilities. I’m a goddam role model. I can’t show up at home sloppy drunk on a Monday.”

  “It’s the first day of school, Dee. The kids are out making their own mistakes to learn from today,” Val added.

  “By the time they get home, you can be in bed, pretending to take a nap,” Amy patted Dee’s arm.

  Val continued: “I like the sound of that! Down in one!” Val threw back her head and finished her drink in two loud gulps, then did her best to squelch the ensuing belch.

  Amy blushed. “Dave and I used to use that excuse with the kids. He’d sneak home from work early, before the kids got home from school. He could never remember when school let out, so sometimes we were finishing up when the bus dropped off. It was so hard to focus when the kids are trying to unlock the front door.”

  “I was married to Terry for 10 years and he never
figured out how to unlock the front door,” Val said. She immediately shook her head. “That’s not really true.”

  Dee finished her drink. “I bet you taught your kids how to work the lock, though,” Dee said.

  Amy and Val stared at Dee waiting for an explanation or the opportunity to flee.

  “I mean, take some responsibility, right?” Dee asked. “Randy didn’t teach the kids anything except min-max strategies and inventory management. Not that I’m much better. I don’t know if Lou could make himself a grilled cheese.” Dee paused to note the ongoing stares.

  “For Randy, I mean like, literally, he didn’t teach the kids how to unlock a door. With Terry, the lock is a metaphor. For your clitoris. I’m not suggesting you teach your kids how to work your clitoris. They’re children. And, also, they’re your children. For goodness sake. Someone get me a drink and more nachos so I stop talking.”

  “I think Val might have chased our boy away permanently,” Amy noted.

  “I’m good at that,” Val agreed.

  “Me, too,” Dee moped. “I know we’re celebrating because the kids are back in school, but look at me. I’m a babbling wreck! I can’t talk to people. I mean, I was never great with people, not ever, but two decades of being married to Randy and I got so much worse.”

  “You’re not that bad,” Amy said. “You just seem a little nervous and awkward, and awkward about being nervous. Relax. And stop rubbing your neck. Your skin is beautiful except where you’re giving yourself a friction burn.”

  “I know. I should relax and give it some time,” Dee said.

  At long last another round of drinks arrived. Dee took refuge in aiming for the bottom of her glass. She felt warmer as the drink went down. When she looked up from a long pull on her Irish Curse, she saw that Val was staring intently at her.

  “What?” Dee asked.

  “You don’t need to relax and it’s time to stop giving it time,” Val insisted.

  “You should think about putting yourself out there,” Amy agreed.

  “You should think about putting out,” Val cut to the chase.

  Amy was gentler. “You haven’t been divorced so very long, but how long have you been alone? You were married to a troll. You’re lucky he didn’t steal your kids.”

  “That’s not what trolls do,” Dee said. “They hide under bridges and eat goats and hobbitses and comment on YouTube. I guess if they eat goats, they must also eat kids.” Amy and Val excused Dee’s punning while drunk. Dee, thankful for the indulgence, returned to her drink.

  “What dating sites are you on?” Val asked.

  Dee shrugged and nibbled at her food.

  “Obviously, The Fellowship would be one place to start,” Amy suggested.

  “A lot of short guys on that one,” Val said before remembering that she towered over Dee. “But you could do worse.”

  “And you have to enjoy Middle Earth cosplay,” Amy continued. “But you’ve got the skin to be an elf.”

  “What else you got?” Dee asked.

  “Everything, I suppose. It seems like there’s a new dating site every week, each more specialized than the last.”

  “But they’re all owned by the same company,” Val added.

  “Yeah,” Amy sighed. “And everyone signs up for all of them, so you meet the same guys. But every site has its own theme or gimmick. The ones that are fun last for a little bit. There are still some hard-core Tolkein nerds and barefoot runners using The Fellowship. Plus, there’s no pressure from the new sites claiming they will find you a perfect match. Failure is built in.”

  “What do you use?” Dee asked.

  Having skipped commercials and blocked online ads for years, Dee was wholly unprepared for the answers she was about to receive. Both Amy and Val raced to be the first to open apps on their phones.

  “I like Nintendate,” Amy was the first to offer. “It’s all based on classic Nintendo games.”

  Dee did a quick search and showed her phone to Amy. “Is this it?”

  “No,” Amy pulled a face and laughed. “That’s Nintendate DP. You’re maybe not ready for that.”

  Dee scrolled through a couple screenshots. “Perhaps not,” she agreed.

  “So,” Amy continued, “with Nintendate regular, the first thing you do is pick your avatar family — don’t worry, you can customize later on. Just choose the Nintendo character that best fits your dating style. Some of the avatars are gender-neutral, like the Koopa Troopas, while others are gender-based, like Mario and Luigi. I picked Birdo.”

  “What’s a Birdo?”

  “Birdo is a pink yoshi with a red bow.”

  “What’s a yoshi?”

  “A yoshi is a kind of dinosaur,” Amy explained.

  “With a prehensile tongue,” Val added.

  “Prehensile?” Dee asked.

  “A yoshi can pick up virtually anything with its tongue,” Val went on. “It’s a very popular talent in video games.”

  “As well as in real life,” Dee added.

  Amy shrugged. “I’m not one to hide my gifts.”

  “Oh, I found it now,” Dee said while opening the app on her phone. “Why didn’t you choose Princess Peach? She’s pretty.”

  Amy laughed. “A yoshi can pick up anything with its tongue, but Princess Peach does pick up everything with her tongue.”

  “Don’t slut shame Peach,” Val argued. “She’s got to be pent up, what with being kidnapped and locked away in another castle all the time.”

  “Who would I be?” Dee asked.

  Amy thought about it for a minute. “Samus Aran. She’s super fit and humanoid, which are big pluses, but some assholes are going to maybe judge you as transgender.”

  “Samus Aran is transgendered? Isn’t that sending the wrong message?” Dee wondered.

  “No, she’s not transgendered. It’s just that she was a big, bad bounty hunter in powered armor who kicked Metroid ass and everyone assumed she was a he. Then, at the very end of the game, you see her in a bikini. It’s like the opposite of The Crying Game. Or maybe the same? I never saw that movie. Some guys might think you’re trans in real life. Others will resent you for reminding them of the huge betrayal of finding out that they had been playing a video game as a chick.”

  “You really think any guys would be upset at being reminded that one video game character in the history of video games turned out to be a woman in armor instead of a man? And that choosing that as an avatar would hurt my dating chances somehow?” Dee asked.

  “Yes,” Amy and Val agreed instantly.

  “Duh,” Val added.

  “What else you got?” Dee asked.

  “I’ve been using Safari a lot,” Val said. “Figuratively, you literally get to meet down at the watering hole. And, my avatar is a fennec fox, which is adorable.”

  “If you’ve got an ear fetish,” Amy said.

  “All the ear fetishists are on the The Fellowship or 10 Forward,” Val argued.

  A few drinks later, Dee’s mind was spinning from the alcohol and the online dating options. She went to the avocado bathroom to clear her head. When she stumbled out, her friends had her purse and keys in hand.

  “We’re taking you home,” Amy said.

  “Yep,” Val agreed. She put her arm around Dee. “Wow. Good deltoid. Are you working out?”

  “Not as much as I used to,” Dee mumbled. “Don’t have to any more.”

  “You’re always beautiful,” Val said, “But don’t let yourself go right when you’re getting back out there.”

  “Jesus, Val,” Amy shot back, “if she’s letting herself go, you must think I’m beyond salvation.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I should,” Dee hiccuped. “Get home. But I don’t think Imma oughtta drive.” She tried to pull her phone out of her pocket, but her phone was not in her pocket. She looked up, confused. “I think Imma lost my phone.”

  “I’ve got your phone,” Amy said. “And your purse and your keys. We’re
driving you home.”

  “Let’s just get you to your car, do you remember where you parked?” Val asked.

  “Outside,” Dee said brightly.

  Twenty minutes later, Val was rummaging through Dee’s fridge while Amy noodled through the disaster of a study looking for a blanket to put over Dee, who was snoring on the couch.

  “Too bad we couldn’t get her up the stairs,” Val said.

  “She’s heavier than she looks,” Amy noted.

  “Sure, when I say it, I’m a bitch, but if you say it, it’s cool.” Val handed Amy a glass of water.

  “What’s your plan?” Amy asked.

  “I don’t know,” Val said. “I don’t think we should be here when her kids get home, but I’m a little scared of leaving her alone.”

  “We could get her a cat,” Amy suggested.

  “That is a terrible idea,” Val said as they stood together in the dim study. “But I have a much worse idea.”

  “This feels wrong,” Amy said as they huddled in front of Dee’s aging laptop.

  “Of course it feels wrong. We’re hacking her computer!”

  “I don’t think it’s hacking if you find her passwords in an open notebook on her desk.”

  “Our hearts are pure,” Val asserted. “How about ‘MajorDees’ as a screen name?”

  Amy rolled her eyes and pushed Val away from the keyboard. “If we’re doing this, I’m going to drive.”

  In fifteen minutes, the dynamic duo had created a Choose Your Own Companion profile and stocked it with the poorly cropped photos they found while scouting through the directories on the laptop. As a courtesy, Amy scanned through Randy’s hidden porn files until she was sufficiently disgusted, then she deleted the lot. After freeing up nearly a third of the laptop’s hard drive, she kicked off a disk defrag before they sneaked out to Amy’s car and drove back to the mall for Val’s car.

  Dee Major woke feeling all out of sorts to a dim, quiet house. After years of coming downstairs to find Randy passed out on the couch in a pile of energy drink empties with a sticky controller lolling tenuously from his hand, she felt a strange mixture of shame and pride at being the one waking up on the couch with a dry mouth and a bad headache.

  The lack of kids at — she blinked at the clock on the wall until she could focus on its arms — 7:30 on a Monday evening felt strange, even though both teenagers had long since taken to spending hours and hours alone in their rooms. They usually managed to make their presence known by music, stomping, yelling or a combination of the three that reminded Dee of her favorite Pogues song. Dee brewed a pot of coffee and toasted bread while sipping ice water. She wondered if the kids had eaten supper.

  Dee began loading the dishwasher as she nibbled her toast. She was starting to feel a bit closer to normal, though certainly not fine, and decided to pass on the coffee. She dumped the freshly brewed brown down the sink and added the carafe to the top rack. She was still a few dishes short of a full load, so she began to hunt through the house for wherever the kids may have left their bowls and glasses.

  She found a pair of glasses in the study that were still damp around the rim. Next to the glasses, she found a short note in Amy’s friendly script resting upon her password book. Dee whispered a sarcastic thanks in reply to the written welcome to the wonderful world of online dating. She had no idea what to expect when she logged on to her profile.

  She did not like what she saw. Not one bit.

  First, she removed the pictures Randy must have taken on vacation when she wasn’t paying attention. She took a selfie on her phone. It was fine. She took a few more, but each was worse than the last. Her smile kept turning weirder and her eyes were going all crazy. She watched a short video on how to take a good selfie, then took a few more pictures before finally giving up. She uploaded the first picture with a defeated click of the mouse.

  In the picture her hair was a mess and her light make up was uneven at best. At least her smile looked nearly natural. Whatever the flaws it was good enough for now and better than the cobra pose pics her friends had selected for her.

  Dee knew, without wanting to, that she was beautiful. Along with giving her the power to control plasma fields, her superpowers kept her perfectly fit without effort. Even though she had abandoned nearly all her training since her divorces from Randy and Confederated Justice, she hadn’t gained an ounce. The hours she logged in the CFJ danger room helped her control her powers and prepare her for different styles of attack, but weren't fat burning, body sculpting, or ab blasting. These days she spent a lot more time eating popcorn and chocolate while watching television with Lou and Leigh rather than patrolling the city. She was happier, almost content. She was sleeping through the night for the first time in years, to the point where she was almost well-rested.

  Dee’s desire to meet someone new surprised her because she knew the risks. Her sense of peace was still so new that she wasn’t yet taking it for granted. She had much more to protect than that, of course. She was responsible not just for herself, but for Lou, Leigh and Captain Major. She no longer had the extra resources of Confederated Justice at her disposal to protect her identity. She felt sure of herself, believing that the years of practice had prepared her to the point where she could date without putting herself or her children at any appreciable risk and the kids had always understood — better than Randy, at times — the importance of the protocols in place to protect the family.

  As Dee poked around the Choose Your Own Companion site, she quickly realized that if she wanted to actually meet someone she was going to have to address the site’s central conceit and undertake an adventure. Dee was a practical woman driven to extremes by the responsibilities she carried. None of the fanciful stories called her to participate. One story looked to be a space adventure. The inky black nothingness of space held no interest to her. Hard pass. The next story was one of those hack and slash dungeon crawlers. She preferred that to the superhero story that was also on offer. A little too on the nose.

  There were two distinctly feminine options available. One looked like a farming adventure. The other was about rescuing kittens. Both seemed juvenile with appropriately insulting artwork. By process of elimination, she had no choice but to explore some Aztec ruins.

  On the day after your 21st birthday, an unforgivably early knock awakens you from a gruesome slumber. You stagger to the front door, regretting your previous night’s debauchery with each step. You swing the front door open a few inches, leaning against the door to disguise the fact that the chain is long broken and your landlord has yet to see to fixing it.

  A smiling delivery man with unkempt golden hair spilling out from under his corporate brown cap smiles like you’re his last visit before spending the rest of the day hanging 10 and whatnot off the beach at Malibu. He slips you his package through the small crack you’ve exposed, then passes his clipboard through for you to sign. He hands you the special pen to digitally add your signature and lets his well-worn, yet impeccably clean fingers linger and tease the tiny hairs on the back of your hand. He cocks his head and winks so subtly you’re not sure whether he’s flirting or you are wishing it were so.

  You sign your name and return the signature pad to him. You spot the name tag near his right shoulder. “Thanks, Chad,” you smile, suddenly feeling much better than you did just a few minutes before.

  You start to close the door with a reluctant smile, but Chad stops you with a whisper. You lean your head close to the door, keeping it open just an inch and waiting for him to repeat himself.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” he asks.

  To go out for a drink with Chad, turn to page 14.

  To invite Chad in for a drink, turn to page 199.

  To say goodbye to Chad, turn to page 88.

  “Say goodbye!”

  Dee Major jumped out of her chair with the explosiveness of the superhero that she was, nearly toppling the desk in her leap.

  “Leigh!” Dee gasped. “You startled me.”
<
br />   “Uh-huh,” Leigh replied. “Whatcha doing, mom?”

  “It’s nothing,” Dee said. “Old people stuff.”

  “Lou!” Leigh yelled. “What’s ChooseYourOwnCompanion.com?”

  “It’s a dating site,” Lou yelled from the kitchen over the clattering of plates as he made himself a sandwich. Leigh smirked and Dee returned her expression. “For old people,” Lou finished.

  Leigh laughed and rushed to the computer. She had just turned 14 and washed the black dye out of her hair. She was an inch taller than her mother, for now. Dee was as certain she could be that Leigh had more growing to do. Leigh’s powers, which so far mirrored Captain Major’s, had developed the previous year. The confidence she was gaining in her powers was infecting her personality in almost entirely positive ways. Dee saw a beautiful girl with beautiful brown hair, a beautiful smile and a new, infectiously eager personality. She was not much wrong.

  “Chad does sound hot, mom. But he’s probably too hot for you.”

  “As if,” Dee tried to make a joke of it, but the awkwardness in her voice turned her feigned bravado into a meek cry for help that Leigh, in a remarkable moment of teenage empathy, actually heard.

  “Fine, mom,” Leigh answered the unasked question. “You’re pretty and I will help you.”

  Leigh hurried for a chair and nearly bumped into Lou while he ambled over to see what was going on. Dee tried to return to the screen with perfect nonchalance, but grew increasingly tense as she listened to Lou chew while he read over her shoulder. Lou was two years older, but no taller than his sister. He seemed to be eating constantly in a desperate attempt to force at least one more growth spurt. He wasn’t getting any taller, but he was noticeably leaner now that the cross country season had started. He was starting to look like a man. Unfortunately for Lou, that man was his father.

  At long last, the crunch of ice berg lettuce and stale bread stopped so Lou could ask a question. “Jesus, mom. What’s wrong with you?”

  Leigh and Lou passed abruptly again, Lou exiting for his bedroom and Leigh entering with a folding chair under her arm. She perched at her mother’s elbow, reaching for the mouse to move the story along.

  “That site is full of creeps,” Lou shouted as he stomped up the stairs. A moment later, his door slammed closed.

  “Don’t slam doors!” Dee called up, trying not to reveal her frustration in her voice.

  “He told you,” Leigh said. “Now click. Click click click. What happens next?”

  You smile at Chad with a shake of your head. It’s far too early for a hair of the dog, and you’ve had trouble with his type before. Maybe, you think, it’s time to find a guy with a sense of responsibility. Someone who doesn’t forget to borrow a tie when he gets invited to a wedding.

  You’re about to head back to bed when you look at the package Chad delivered. There’s no return address. You tear off the plain brown wrapper and find a sturdy cardboard box taped tightly shut. You need a scissors to open the box. Inside, you find three items: a leather-bound pocket journal, a plane ticket to Lima, Peru and a carved wooden figurine.

  You notice that the journal appears to have several hundred hand-written pages in an unfamiliar typography. You notice the wooden figurine has a hole drilled in it. It appears to be a fertility symbol. You notice that the ticket to Lima is for a flight that leaves in 90 minutes.

  To race to the airport, turn to page 101.

  To study the figurine, turn to page 7.

  To start reading the journal, turn to page 17.

  “You’ve got to go to the airport, mom!”

  “But, wait. We don’t even know how far I am from the airport. Or how I would get there. It’s not fair that the writer leaves so many key details unexplained. Can I get an Uber? Is that safe? Do I have a car? Do I even have a passport? I think we should read the journal.”

  “Oh, god, mom!” Leigh shouted exasperatedly. “Do you really think men want to date a woman whose first instinct is to read?”

  “I should hope so,” Dee replied. “I happen to like reading.”

  “Yeah, right. You still haven’t finished The Red Pony. What’s that been, eleven years?”

  “Maybe it’s a wishing figurine. If I had wishes I could get a date, time to finish a book and daughter who doesn’t sass,” Dee suggested.

  “‘Sass’? That isn’t even a word anymore! I mean, do you even hear how old you sound right now? Go to the airport before it times out and you get stuck with a bunch of loser boys who want to take you on a date to the library.”

  “George Bailey went on a date to the library.”

  “Who even is George Bailey? Like, your high school boyfriend?”

  Dee started to do the math in her head, then gave up. “He would’ve been old enough to take your great-grandmother on a date, but he was a movie character.”

  “Oh, god, mom. You want to go on a black-and-white date with some movie character from before movies were even good?”

  “That sounds a little racist, dear.”

  Leigh scowled at her mom until Dee stuck her tongue out. Leigh rolled her eyes. Before she could object again, Dee clicked the button to turn to page 17.

  You slowly turn back the dusty front cover to reveal a page, and then page after page, of a writing you have never seen before. The letters are as blocky as cuneiform, yet somehow elegant. Regardless of the beauty of the typography, the plain fact remains: you cannot read a word of the journal.

  Glancing at the time, you call for a Lucky’s Taxi and have but a few minutes to pack before it arrives to take you to the airport.

  To pack make-up and miniskirts, turn to page 147.

  To pack toothpaste and toiletries, turn to page 55.

  To pack your Swiss army knife and multitool, turn to page 38.

  Dee and Leigh shared a groan.

  “Brogrammers,” Leigh complained.

  “What’s that?”

  “You know, boys who don’t grow up and end up as over-paid, hubristic programmers who devote their lives to developing more realistic boob physics rather than creating female characters who are interesting to play.”

  “I’m so glad you’re taking AP English,” Dee said.

  “You’re glad, but Davidson makes us read the shittiest, boringest books ever,” Leigh complained.

  Dee looked disapprovingly.

  “Whatever. Like you never swear.”

  “I swear all the time,” Dee agreed. “Just not in front of you.”

  Dee clicked ahead to page 55. Leigh lightly gasped. “So adventurous, mom!”

  “I’m not going to Peru without a toothbrush,” Dee reasoned.

  “They sell toothbrushes at the airport, don’t they? And probably in hotels?” Leigh asked.

  Dee looked over out of the corner of her eye. “Not in Peru,” she said.

  “For real?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever been?”

  “Yes,” Dee remembered.

  “Really?” Leigh asked.

  “I haven’t,” Dee clarified as the memories started to creep back. “But, Captain Major battled Jenny Girth over the steps of Machu Picchu. Girth was doing one of those body shaming slash addictive diet pill schemes. Kids your age were dropping dead on stair climbers with 14-inch waists and 16-inch calves. I think Captain Major beat her senseless with a rolled up fashion magazine, then rolled her down every step.”

  “So how do you know whether they sell toothbrushes in Peru?”

  “Internet,” Dee replied.

  Lou interrupted by standing in the doorway, arms folded.

  “How much longer are you going to be doing that?” he asked.

  “We’re not even to Peru yet!” Leigh replied.

  “I don’t know, honey,” Dee forced herself to smile. “Do you want to join us?”

  “I want something to eat,” Lou’s voice was a deep, dull monotone, dripping with the urgent need to get angry over something.

  “There are noodles in the fridge,?
?? Dee said.

  “I don’t want noodles,” Lou said.

  “How about breakfast for supper? I’ll make us a scramble in just a little bit,” Dee offered. “Sound good?”

  “Whatever,” Lou turned and stalked away. “I guess it doesn’t matter that I’m hungry now.”

  Dee sighed, harder than she meant, louder than she would have liked. Leigh turned her head appraisingly. “You don’t think that’s worse than swearing a little bit?”

  “We all get frustrated,” Dee said. “Let’s just get to Peru so I can feed your brother.”

  “Okay,” Leigh said as they returned to the story. “But I don’t want eggs. I want French toast.”

  Dee sighed again, as hard as she could this time to disguise how much she really meant it. She was happy to see Leigh smirking beside her.

  “I’m glad you get me,” Dee put her arm around Leigh to give her a half-hug squeeze.

  “Ack!” Leigh yelled as she leaned away and folded her arms over her chest and face like George Foreman before he lost to Ali in the jungle and turned pitchman. “Assault! Bad touch! Do not want!”

  Dee, deflated, continued her adventure.

  You are staring out the window, waiting for the trademark green clover emblem to appear on the roof of your Lucky cab. You’ve got your passport, a small bag of clothes and your toiletries. The cab pulls up in front of your building. You stride toward the door, grabbing for your keys on the way.

  As you lock the front door behind you, you have the strangest feeling that you’ve forgotten something. You ignore the honk from the waiting taxi and rush back inside.

  To grab your copy of Lady Vox’s Fifty Shades of Scarlet Vampires, turn to page 69.

  To grab the incomprehensible journal, turn to page 84.

  To grab your travel pillow, turn to page 73.

  “What’s Lady Vox’s Fifty whatevers?” Leigh asked.

  “It’s about vampires,” Dee replied.

  “Is it that weird one about vampires?” Leigh continued.

  “Yup,” Dee said.

  “Mom porn is weird,” Leigh said.

  “It’s a long flight, maybe I should bring a pillow,” Dee changed the subject.

  “Don’t be dumb. You definitely need that journal for later in the story,” Leigh argued.

  “But I’m also probably really tired. A long flight could be a great chance to take a nap. A glass of wine, a few milligrams of melatonin, another glass of wine, then a long, long nap.”

  “Okay, whatever, grandma. But if you want to survive, you need the journal.”

  “I’m going pillow. When you do this...”

  “In like, forty years.” Leigh interrupted. “I meet boys the normal way. I stalk them on Twitter.”

  “When it’s your turn (and forty years from now would be delightful),” Dee continued, “it’ll be your choice. But this is my choice, and I choose...”

  “Journal!” Leigh grabbed for the mouse as Dee moved to click. They struggled over the pointer until they managed to click on Lady Vox.

  You dash into your bedroom and grab your dog-eared copy of Lady Vox’s Fifty Shades of Scarlet Vampires, excited to have something to read on the long flight. You put it in your purse and jog out to the taxi. Bounce, bounce.

  Ninety minutes later you are winging your way south toward Mexico and beyond. You tire of looking out the window at the great plains passing below. You pull out your copy of Lady Vox and flip toward a passage where a shirtless werewolf secretly listens to the heroine have bondage-themed phone sex with a married vampire. As you find the familiar chapter, a stunningly attractive man appears in the aisle and leans toward you.

  “Is this seat taken?” he asks while tucking his long hair behind his ear. You notice how tall he must be from how deeply he has to bend to fit his head under the overhead compartments.

  To invite him to sit next to you, turn to page 112.

  To ask him his name, turn to page 44.

  To call for a flight attendant, turn to page 25.

  “Look!” Leigh pointed excitedly. “You have matches!”

  Dee looked. She had two matches. Then three. Then six. The counter steadily increased until it started to settle around 85, all within a 30 miles of Metroville. She was uneasy at the turn of events.

  She stood. “Lou, I’m starting the scramble!” she called and walked toward the kitchen.

  “And don’t forget the French toast,” Leigh reminded as she followed Dee toward the kitchen. Leigh peeled off as they reached the door and headed back to the computer to continue the adventure.

  Captain Major was, more or less, officially retired from the ranks of superheroes and had been since Christmas last. Her heroing turned harrowing just as her personal life crumbled around her. She quit Confederated Justice and returned all their gear, except for the things she found useful. She still had her personal kit, including a new costume which The Immortal had given her before he, too, retired upward from villainy and ersatz herodom to further his private fortunes in a slightly more legal way.

  But. There was a freedom to Captain Major that Dee longed for and couldn’t live completely without. There was both the joy of the present — laying down the burdens of memory and giving up the fears for the future — that came with fighting crime, as well as the incomparable rush of using her skills and energy to their maximum.

  Tonight, Captain Major returned to the Metroville skyline. She dashed across her familiar haunts, from the Civic Center in Sector Seven to the coffee shops and tourist spots in District Nine. She was breathing hard when she reached her favorite gargoyle atop the natural history museum overlooking the still damaged Middling Park. This gargoyle was the same as all the others. At least it had been born the same. The rain and snow had worn down its right eye, so that from a certain point of view he always seemed to be winking and therefore slightly more cheerful than all the other gargoyles. At least he wasn’t quite as serious as his fellow stone watchmen.

  Captain Major was 42 years old, but looked 28. She hadn’t appreciably aged since Dee Major gained her powers while saving children from the worst field trip ever, what with the generic soda, raisin cookies, nuclear meltdown and all. She wore a short sleeve, navy tunic with matching harem pants and violet Converse that matched her hair. Underneath it all, a gift from The Immortal kept her warm and waited to store ionic energy for battle. The translucent fabric fit her perfectly from her ankles to her wrists and was decorated with finely stitched, purple Godzillas wearing diamond masks that matched the mask Captain Major wore to protect her identity.

  In the east, a shooting star blinked across the sky, then was gone. Just like shooting stars do. Captain Major drew on the ionic energy around her, gently forming the quanta of plasma into tiny balls. She likened the invisible, internal process to preparing chocolate chip cookies for the baking sheet, with less shortening. Though she could form the energy into any shape, she was best known for the twin falchions she preferred in battle. Tonight she idly shot plasma from her fingers in long, arcing streams of energy. Her sparks chased after the shooting stars in the distance, lasting but little longer as she gazed over her city while her mind and body came to comfortable rest.

  Below her, the Printer Ink Repository slumbered gently between the First Federated National Bank of Metroville and Blingalingaling, Metroville’s premier jewelry and ring tone emporium serving those with more money than sense. Something about the van idling out front struck Captain Major as odd. Reflex urged her to call it in to CFJ HQ, but having parted from CFJ, no such call could take place. She danced across the gargoyles to take a better view.

  The driver was nervously drumming the steering wheel with fingers wrapped in leather driving gloves. He was young, with a shaved head and a toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth. His homages were all balled up — pieces of Statham and Diesel mixed with McQueen. But beneath the overt hardness Captain Major saw the blue t-shirt peaking up between his layers of open denim collars. John Schneider had sparked
his calling. The other personas were the veneer he wore to protect his Hazzard heart.

  The doors on the back of the van swung open with the slightest of squeaks. Three masked figures emerged. Two activated a hospital-style gurney, which sprung up on casters for easy maneuvering. The gurney driver tripped, then the wheels of the gurney got stuck in a sewer grate. The third carried an acetylene torch and a matchbook from Rock, Jock and Two Smoking Carols, a rough sports and karaoke bar near the abandoned Kmart that offered Christmas tunes all year round. Also, the waitresses were topless. The waiters would go bottomless, but only if you knew the password: “Guy Ritchie”.

  At any rate, the second figure was wrestling to get the wheels out of the grate while the first tended to a badly scraped knee (he was a bit of a germophobe and extremely concerned about an infection being downtown and all). Acetylene guy tried to figure out how to strike a match while holding the torch between his knees. Their amateurishness suggested nothing but pawns intended to distract the police from a real crime taking place elsewhere at the same time. Knowing she had an early morning, Captain Major deftly shot a plasma bolt to explode the left front tire and called the clowns into the police before heading home.

  She was blocks away wondering whether her flannel pajamas were clean when the sirens were close enough for the gargoyles to hear. Tragically, those PJs were still dirty.

  Randy Major didn’t know what he was watching at first; a fairly common experience with Internet video. Someone had recorded something from downtown Metroville and posted it to one of Randy’s favorite discussion boards with the innocuous and unhelpful title, “U Must Watch This”. When Randy found the video, it had four fans and one comment: “Be shure to watch to the very eNd.”

  Randy was barely paying attention as three masked figures exited the back of a van and proceeded to fall over themselves as they tried to break into a downtown Metroville storefront. It was amusing, sure, but despite all the clumsiness, no one took a shot in the face or the balls. Just a boring, stupid tease.

  Then it happened. At the end of the video, a flash of navy that he recognized instantly. Captain Major was fleeing — FLEEING! — the scene. Instead of stopping a very serious crime, Captain Major was abandoning her duty, abandoning her city, to go somewhere else, her tail tucked between her legs, frightened even before a confrontation.

  What the hell was wrong with her?

  Randy immediately reblogged the video from his personal account, with a deep sense of his own duty:

  This has to be the most disgusting scene I’ve ever witnessed. While her city sleeps all around her, the supposed hero known as Captain Major lies in wait for crime to happen, only to turn her back on the crime and her city. Like all bullies, she turns out to be a cowerd when she doesn’t have someone strong to protect her. Someone like Amazing Man or The Immortal, who have been true heroes for the city.

  There can be no excuse for such behavior. If any man showed up for his job, then turned his back on it out of cowerdice or for any other reason, why he’d be fired in favor of a woman just like this who has neither a sense of duty or shame or responsibility. When the whim strikes, she attacks. Like a viper. When you least expect it. But when she doesn’t feel like it, she’s off into the night to go buy another pair of shoes or a looser sports bra.

  It sickens me to the core to think that some people think of Captain Major as a hero. She’s the worst. She does nothing for the city or its inhabitense.

  Let me be the first to say this: fuck her and every pretender like her, who takes the place of true heroes, heroes that kids one day used to look up to and now they look up and just see a bitch in a stuipd costume running away from a fight with a few bumbling crooks.

  Finishing up, Randy immediately went to his minifridge for a beer. By the time he got back to his computer, he was ready for another one. In his short time as a single man, mostly without his kids, he had become very good at drinking many beers very quickly. Wishing to be efficient, Randy returned to the fridge, grabbed the rest of the six pack, and sat back at his computer, only to realize that he had to pee.

  Finishing up from that, Randy sat back at his computer to find that his post had several comments that required moderation.

  As an unpopular, neophyte blogger, Randy was accustomed to moderating comments. Over 98% of the comments on his site were spam. Either link spam, where the comment itself contained links back to a malware website, or name spam, where the comment was generic praise, but the commenter’s name was a link to a malware website. Randy, then, was thrilled to see that four of the six comments awaiting moderation were, in fact, from human beings. Human beings of the basest sort, but at least entities capable of possessing a soul. At least in theory.

  Randy was flush with excitement. He immediately approved the comments and hurried to reply:

  Hey, I appreciate allt he comments. Not to pat myself on the back to hard, but I think this is the best thing I’ve ever written maybe. Sometimes humor is the best way to take down powerful people. Glad everyone is getting a laugh! But I won’t be happy if we just laugh about this in our homes. We need to get out and take the fight to Captain Major. We can’t let her think that she’s beating us. We need to stand up, together, for together we are strongest. And that dumb bitch will understand that she can’t just pretend to be a hero when she wants to and then run off when she’s too scared to fight. We need to fight and fight and fight until Captain Major and all the other phonies understand that we’re not going to take it anymore.

  Because I want to say this. If that store lost anything, that’s Captain Minor’s fault. She should have to pay that store to make up there losses. And if any cop gets injured by those criminals she let go away, then that’s on Captain Minor too. She failed to do her duty. So we must find out if any good cops got hurt because she’s a punk bitch and it’s on her.

  I’ll just say one more thing. Captain Minor is a little pussy. Her name should be Labia Minor more like. And if she ever comes after me I’ll punch her write in the dick.

  Sorry if I misspelled anything. I’m real angry and a little drunk.

  Tuesday, August 30, 2011

  Dee Major had so many things she should be doing that she gave up on all of them and went about cleaning her work space. She had been assigned to the same cubicle at Venn Diaphragms, Inc., for the last 16 months. A personal best for cubicle consistency in the fast-changing world of pressure-responsive rubber widgets.

  Dee didn’t squeeze the trigger hard enough, so the whistle from the can of compressed air startled her and those nearby who weren’t wearing noise canceling headphones. Most of her co-workers wore headphones most of the time. The steady white noise they endured otherwise reminded them of waiting in a dentist’s office with a telemarketer.

  Once Dee had the hang of the can of compressed air, she marveled at the distance she was able to achieve as she shot detritus from the spaces between the keys on her keyboard. At one point, she was fairly certain she saw a dime shoot out from between the T and the 6 and bounce under her desk. She descended to her knees to scope out the situation, but didn’t find anything silvery at all.

  Instead, she found that the carpet was horrifyingly dirty. She moved her wastebasket aside and was shocked to see the difference in color between where her wastebasket normally sat and the carpet surrounding it. Dee was familiar with carpet fibers fading in bright light, but in this case the carpet all around her workstation had absorbed so much filth that it had shifted from grey to nearly black. Using her phone as a flashlight, Dee peered around the corner to see how Tom’s cube fared. His carpet was more orange than black, but then Tom loved his Cheetos.

  Venn Diaphragms, in an aggressively short-sighted cost-cutting measure, had virtually abandoned all carpet cleaning activities. In early 2010, facilities management had planned to replace all the carpet by the end of the year. Since they were going to have to pull it up soon enough, it just made financial sense to let it absorb all the filth the employees could generate u
ntil carpet judgment day. When the facilities budget was further reduced during the mid-year planning session, the carpet replacement was deferred. The carpet cleaning was not restored, of course, because those savings had already been baked into the latest estimates for the current year fiscal plan.

  The environment beneath her desktop was, on the whole, slightly less sanitary and safe than a fire-proof storage area in a condemned lead paint factory. Dee tried to brush some cobwebs away from the cords connecting the pieces of her work station together and felt ready to vomit when her fingers seemed to stick to the cords. Abandoning the proper shutdown procedure, Dee unplugged every cord, pulled the monitor away from the wall and sprayed all-purpose cleaner on everything until the bottle ran empty. Dee used an entire box of disposable wipes scrubbing the bits and bobs until they were clean enough not to haunt her nightmares.

  Dee was using the last wipe to brush the grit from her slacks back onto the carpet and muttering to herself about how disgusting the whole thing was when her supervisor, Paula Dundas, appeared behind her with a polite reminder. Paula was always pageant ready-beautiful and her practiced smile made most news seem pleasant. Dee still couldn’t suppress the groan as Paula reminded her that the all-hands webcast was starting in a few minutes.

  Dee looked at the state of her computer and asked if it was important. Paula assured her that it was terribly important, as well as mandatory. Dee didn’t get the chance to object further, for Paula was moving on down the aisle, checking on Tom, then Archer and the rest of the team to remind them to attend.

  Despite reassembling her computer as quickly as she could, Dee was still several minutes late for the start of the webcast. Initially, she struggled to find the email announcement, buried as it was in her inbox below all the spam and special offers. Then she had trouble remembering her login for the webcast service. As it turned out, the password was the same as she used for the local network, but the username required that all employees insert the last letter of their first name into the middle of their network id. For their security vendor, it was a very convenient way to simulate double mega security for marketing purposes.

  Dee bounced in in the middle of the gist which was described, excitedly, as an opportunity for Venn Diaphragms to expand into the lucrative market for supersonic aircraft which had, apparently, specific diaphragm needs for their air intake and cabin pressurization systems. Dee actually knew a lot about supersonic flight and the rationale didn’t make a lot of sense to her, but she decided to just go with the premise and hope for the best.

  The best way to break into this market was to merge with an existing supplier. Technically, Venn Diaphragms would be absorbing Fast Airborne Supplies, but due to the relative size of the businesses, the decision had been made to combine the businesses into a new entity. In fact, the CEO of Fast Airborne Supplies, Michelle Bassfender, had already been named to lead the new entity, which would be called Fast Airborne Venn Diaphragms. The original name, Fast Airborne Venn Diaphragms and Supplies, was rejected for being stupid.

  Bassfender’s first order of business as the new leader for Fast Airborne VD was to consolidate redundant services into new centerships for excellentness. The leader of the gaggle of centerships would be Venn Diaphragm’s CEO, Evan Venn-Trickle. Venn-Trickle was a descendant of NASCAR royalty who married into the diaphragm business after accidentally knocking up the scion of the Venn dynasty, Vivian Venn. Evan’s decision to join Vivian in taking both surnames upon marriage was strongly influenced by his desire to promote inequality among the potential successors to the VD helm. Venn-Trickle was very disappointed by the way Bassfender outmaneuvered him for leadership of the new conglomerate and had secretly, publicly, and redundantly announced his desire for revenge.

  The gaggle of centerships for excellentness would unleash opportunities for diminishingment of redundancies impeding progress toward the unleashmenting of growth opportunities. It was only the super powers she obtained by swimming into a nuclear reactor to save a school bus full of children from lethal radiation exposure that prevented Dee Major, former English major, from suffering permanent damage to her cochlea and frontal lobe as she suffered through the continuing onslaught of nonsensical jargon.

  Dee logged off when the webcast seemed like it was just about over. In fact, she logged off with twenty minutes left to go. That time was reserved, per tradition, to reward the middle managers who didn’t yet realize they had no real career prospects with the opportunity to either offer obsequious comments or ask fawning questions. Needless to say, the only thing Dee missed was the opportunity to fail to demonstrate her super-human patience, a trait she selfishly reserved for her children alone.

  Despite the recommendation that everyone return to their normal work and wait for additional information from their leaders, Dee soon found herself in the usual position of being surrounded at her cubicle while her teammates griped about a change. But, she also found herself in the unusual position of being worried about how this change might affect her and her family.

  Archer was the first to reach her cube. There was something to be said for the eagerness of youth. Archer was struggling with the realization that he was in his late 20s and no longer had much in common with the college students he lusted after. His prize possession was a heavily waxed mustache which he always referred to in the plural, rather than the singular, which is dumb. It was thick and black with a well-tempered sheen. His most immediate goal in life was to grow his bangs out long enough so that he could pin them back in a handsome man bun.

  While he took pride in having a job that kept him in his own apartment, he certainly didn’t take it as seriously as the music reviews he authored for HayRide.com, which he wrote under the nom de rock of Roland Fingers. Archer was also the only person ever to flunk out of piano lessons for refusing to play the notes designated in the “puerile” treble clef. At the time he lodged his complaint, Archer didn’t know what the word meant. No harm done as he never bothered to learn the word or the piano.

  “What division are we in?” Archer wanted to know.

  “We’re called Operational Administration,” Dee explained. “But we’re not really operations and we’re not really administration.”

  “Do you think we’re in danger of losing our jobs?”

  “Because we’re redundant?” Dee asked. Archer nodded. “Honestly, if there’s anyone else who does what we do, I’d be stunned that they would admit it. We’re not redundant, Archer. We’re useless.”

  Archer took this information in stride, matching, as it did, everything his parents had ever told him about himself. Also, he was adopted, but by mistake. He blinked a couple of times while he was processing.

  “So what do we do?” he asked.

  “We do what we’ve always done, just more of it, but with a lower profile,” Dee counseled. At the end of Dee’s thought, Winthorp wandered over to join the conversation. Winnie had been with the team the shortest amount of time. Her normally cherubic face was ashen with worry. Even younger than Archer, this was the only job Winnie had ever held. She had focused on schoolwork and extracurriculars in order to be accepted at colleges she couldn’t afford to attend. Once the pattern was in place, Winnie spent three years studying hard and filling her free time planning charity events. Her world caved in around her during her senior year, at which point she coasted to graduation on a sea of Southern Comfort only to land on the shores of the worst job market for college graduates in Metroville’s history. Without ever holding a paying job to that point in her life, she more or less had to take the first thing offered to her.

  This was how Venn Diaphragms recruited all its best talent during the 2000s.

  “Are you saying we should hide in plain sight?” Winthorp asked.

  “I’m saying,” Dee paused to wonder what, exactly, she was saying. She guessed, and at some deeper level knew, that when she had the support of Confederated Justice, her job with VD, Inc. had always been protected. Without their influence, whether as shar
eholder or secret director, her job, and therefore all their jobs, was at a significant risk. Her instinct was to be reassuring; why encourage worry if there was nothing they could do to influence decisions that would be made far elsewhere? On the other hand, certainly there were things that could be done. Résumés could be polished, if nothing else, and they could maybe be first in line for some other dead-end job for another mediocre business. Maybe they could reinvent themselves on the fly and create some useful, greater purpose, or at least demonstrate just how efficient and valuable they could be. Her answers were so ambiguous and conflicting that she began to lose sight of the question.

  Dee did the thing that sometimes made her love her job, because it was a thing she couldn’t do anywhere else in her life. She couldn’t do it as Captain Major and she couldn’t do as a mother. But as a worker bee for the newly minted Fast Airborne VD, she most certainly could. Dee Major gave up. She even refused to feel bad about it.

  “I don’t know, Winnie,” Dee explained. “It’s probably something you should ask Paula. That’s why they pay her the big bucks.”

  Winnie argued: “You know I’ll never get a straight answer out of Paula.”

  “That assumes she knows something to tell,” Archer took the opposite point of view. “I bet she doesn’t have any better idea of what is going to happen than we do.”

  “Hey, guys,” Kramer sidled over to escape the lonely terrors of his cubicle for a few moments. “What are you talking about?”

  “The announcement,” Winnie explained.

  “And whether we’ll still have jobs with Fast Airborne VD,” Archer continued.

  “Was that today?” Kramer asked.

  “Paula came over and reminded us right before it started,” Winnie reminded him.

  “I guess I wasn’t listening,” Kramer shrugged.

  Dee’s phone began to ring. “I’ve got to take this,” she explained before looking at the number. She turned her head and pressed a finger over her ear as she answered with a grateful, “Hello!” Her gratitude for the interruption immediately disappeared as she recognized the voice on the other end of the line. “It’s a really bad day for that,” she said into the phone. She listened for a few moments before noticing her three teammates were still hanging around her cubicle. She shooed them away with a wave of her hand. “Listen. Listen. Listen,” she said to someone who wasn’t listening. “Fine. Noon. I’ll be there at noon,” she agreed before wishing for a landline so she could put her whole shoulder into hanging up.

  Dee Major, as Dee Major, had never been comfortable walking the halls of Confederated Justice’s regional headquarters in Metroville. She was always more comfortable as Captain Major. It gave her a sense of purpose and confidence that assuaged her concerns over not really belonging.

  Captain Major didn’t belong, either. She was a hero, that much was true, but she wasn’t quite the right kind of hero. She did her thing, but she didn’t deliver in the ways that mattered most to CFJ. Her memorabilia, for example, was never a big seller and her web promos were fair to middlin’.

  Also, she lacked balls. Not in a metaphorical sense. Confederated Justice was a man’s world where female super supers were mocked for their abilities and valued on two axes: the size of their breasts and their willingness to test the boundaries of bad taste in costuming.

  Dee avoided eye contact as she walked the familiar halls, not expecting to see anything other than contempt and the confused looks of people trying to remember an old roommate’s name in a photo album. She kept her eyes on the floor to avoid disappointment.

  Dean Panda, Captain Major’s former supervisor, was sitting impatiently inside the small conference room as Dee Major entered. He made a show of shuffling some papers after Dee seated herself, as if he had been right in the middle of something terribly more important when she arrived.

  “Just as punctual as always,” Panda said once he felt stalling had reestablished his authority.

  “Good to see you, too,” Dee replied. “Please tell me this is a joke so I can get back to my real job.”

  “Yes, you still do work at Fast Airborne VD,” Panda mused. “Well. What’s the saying? Enjoy it while it lasts.”

  “You terrify me,” Dee absently replied. “I thought they fired you right before I quit.”

  “This isn’t about me,” Panda interjected. “I’ve been asked to conduct your six-month check in as your last supervisor at Confederated Justice.”

  “But I quit.”

  “Believe me, I almost wish you would have,” Panda smiled. “Your performance over the last six months has been just terrible. Truly awful. I’d say the absenteeism is the best part of your overall performance. Your justice metrics are as bad as I’ve ever seen.

  “You're the lowest rated super super on my team. I'm not supposed to say this, but you're actually the lowest rated super super in the department. Lucky for Barry Ometer. Wielding the power of slight changes in air pressure. He's a glorified oboe and half as smart.”

  “Listen to me, Panda. I don’t work here anymore. Why the charade?”

  “Oh, but you do work here,” Panda said. “You say that you quit, but you didn’t. The recordings clearly show that you were offered a different position, a different opportunity, and turned that down. You didn’t quit your old job, you just turned down a different one.”

  “That’s not true at all. You paid me severance.”

  “That was a bonus, for helping The Immortal save the city,” Panda said.

  “I returned my equipment,” Dee argued.

  “All of it?” Panda asked while scratching his head.

  “Everything I could find,” Dee responded. “How can you pretend like you think I still work here when you haven’t been paying me?”

  “If you’re not getting paid, that’s the first you’ve told me about it,” Panda said.

  “You think if I contact finance they’ll send me back pay? Let’s call them now. I won’t say no to a check.”

  “I suspect you will not be getting a check,” Panda resumed his air of confidence. “You’re definitely on the do-not-pay list. You’ve been expunged from the payroll system.”

  “Then why,” Dee took a deep breath to keep from strangling the functionary in the manner he deserved, “am I here for a mid-year review?”

  “Payroll and performance have different systems,” Panda said. “You’re still in our performance systems. You're actually quite valuable to me, even though the terribleness of your recent performance has been very taxing on the reporting subroutines.”

  “Why,” Dee repeated to herself, “bring me here?” The air about her glowed as she subconsciously gathered the ionic energy around them and charged it within her body.

  “As I say...” Panda started to reply, but Dee shushed him, murmuring, “Let me think.”

  She knew there was no reason for this. No apparent reason anyway. It was petty and ridiculous, which was Confederated Justice’s bureaucratic raison d’etre. This, however, had required extra and specific effort. She wasn’t special enough to Panda that tormenting her would be a special treat. He could torment dozens of others at the drop of a hat, with far more effectiveness. She recalled her last performance review, though few others would. Panda would recall that Amazing Man interrupted the review before it got very far. Dee recalled the first review, where she accidentally released an electromagnetic pulse that wiped out data throughout the building. An accident serious enough that Staphon Clork, CFJ regional manager, had sent Amazing Man back in time to stop the performance review from happening.

  Dee got up. “We’re not finished,” Panda insisted.

  “We’re finished,” Dee assured him. “We know I quit and it’s pointless to pretend otherwise. Don’t summon me again unless it’s to apologize.” She walked to the door, turned and finished her thought: “Apologize properly. With cake.”

  Dee released a deep breath as she exited the room and began to walk down the hall and toward the exit. Something was amiss,
but as long as she kept to herself, chances are it would go away. She smiled reflexively at the guard who took her visitor’s badge and signed her through the security door.

  “Thanks,” Dee said.

  “No, Captain Major. Thank you,” the guard said. He smiled genuinely and gratefully. Then darted his eyes left and right before putting his head back to his work as if she had already disappeared.

  Dee Major’s thrill at reaching her comfortable home lasted all the way from her car to the living room, where the state of the room seemed a perfect cap to her lousy second day of school.

  Though the room had been in decent shape when she left for work in the morning — decent being a relative term for everyone, but for Dee it meant that in an emergency she could shove all the extra clutter from the living room into a single closet and that there was nothing growing in the guest bathroom — it was a disaster as she returned from work. Not as bad as Middling Park after The Immortal’s battle with Amazing Man, but a close second in Metroville history. The kids had managed to remove every dish from the cupboards, dirty each dish in whole or in part and balance them all in precarious stacks on every flat surface of the living room save the floor itself. The floor was covered with colored pencil shavings, as if a gerbil and a hamster had a sharpening contest in an art supply store on Fleet Street. But the center piece of the awfulness was a stack of half-wrapped chocolates melting in the living room carpet.

  Dee was nothing short of furious when Lou bounded down the stairs and loped past her into the kitchen. She called over to him, not ready to risk walking across the living room just yet.

  “Lou?”

  He didn’t answer, so she raised her voice.

  “Lou? Lou?!”

  His head didn’t budge from the fridge, where he was rooting around for yet another snack. Dee shouted, “LOU!”

  “God, mom. Take a pill.”

  “What happened in here?”

  “I dunno,” he said. “Must have been Leigh.”

  “Your sister did all of this?”

  “Yep. Think so.”

  “None of it is your mess?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not the chocolate?”

  “Not mine.”

  “Not the colored pencil shavings?”

  “I don’t ever use colored pencils.”

  “And none of these dishes are yours?” Dee gestured broadly at the stacks of dishes scattered about the room.

  “I guess some of them are mine,” Lou conceded.

  “Will you pick them up please?”

  “Sure, after my snack.”

  “No, pick up your dishes and bring them to the kitchen. Now.” Dee demanded.

  “Whatever, mom. Jesus.”

  Lou walked to the closest pile of dishes. He examined the individual dishes carefully. He took a plate, which supported a bowl with a few Lucky Charms floating in a puddle of pink-gray milk, as well as a two forks and knife, and lifted it off the short glass beneath it. He took the glass, set the plate, bowl and flatware down and returned the glass to the kitchen.

  Dee put her fists on her hips and shook her head. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Lou said. “Oh, also, I invited the cross country team over Friday night for spaghetti dinner. We have to feed the team before the meet on Saturday.”

  “No,” Dee said. “I can’t have them all over on Friday. Another day, Lou. I don’t have time to get ready.”

  “It’s spaghetti, mom. Not a chocolate fountain or whatever. Pasta, pasta sauce and milk. It’s like fifteen minutes at the grocery store and then you boil some water.”

  “It’s more than that, Lou,” Dee began to explain. “But you have to ask before you invite the entire team over to the house. I need to agree to that in advance. Plus, we’re not set up to do that. We don’t really have enough room.”

  “I bet dad says he has enough room,” Lou said before storming back upstairs.

  “That went well,” Dee said to herself when the room was her own. She looked around her. Despite her fervent hope, the room was still a disaster. She gave up, vowing to deal with the mess after she ate. But she wasn’t feeling up to having something to eat until she had something to drink.

  She tippled herself a glass of Flapping Cape Red Wine and tried to relax while thinking about what ingredients she might be able to throw together to make a semblance of real meal. She was about to give up and order Thai food for the family when Leigh floated through the room.

  “What can you tell me about the disaster in the living room?” Dee asked.

  “I thought Lou was in his room?”

  “Ha ha, Leigh. The dishes, the pencil shavings. The chocolate mountain. All that?”

  “That’s not mine,” Leigh said. “Lou did that.”

  “He said it was your mess,” Dee said.

  “And you believed him?” Leigh relaxed into the favorite part of her indignant stance.

  “You just go and clean up what’s yours. Please,” Dee said.

  “While you clean up that box of wine?” Leigh asked.

  “We’re all doing our part,” Dee tried to sound bright and cheerful despite anticipating the whirlwind of ass-thrashing she would have to undertake to actually get the living room cleaned up. She didn’t need a nanny. She needed an foreman. Or a Pharaoh.

  Leigh left the kitchen for a few minutes. She came back with a glass and a spoon, which she set in the sink before walking away. Dee finished her glass of wine, filled it half-way, then walked back through the disastrous living room to find Leigh, who was using the laptop in the office.

  “What was that?” Dee asked.

  “I made myself chocolate milk before,” Leigh explained. “Those were my dishes.”

  “And everything else?”

  “It must be Lou’s.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, mom, really. Did you look? I trashed all the spammers and finished an adventure right for you. You have three decent matches. I think you should go out with all of them.”

  Dee walked over to the laptop to see the results. The pictures were acceptable if not promising. She vowed to read their character sheets later. “That’s not important now. First, don’t use my account without asking. Actually, don’t use my account ever. Second, I need you to clean up your part of the living room before I lose my flippin’ mind.”

  Lou walked out of his way so that he could storm past the door to the office and heave an exasperated sigh. When no one noticed, he stormed and sighed louder. He was momentarily satisfied when Dee reacted.

  “What’s going on, Lou?” she asked.

  “Dad says he won’t have the team over Friday, either.”

  “I’m sorry, dear,” Dee commiserated. “It’s hard on such short notice. And neither one of us really have enough room.”

  “We’ve got more room since Dad left.”

  “I’d be willing to talk about having the team over later in the season. When I have some notice.”

  Lou didn’t respond. He glared. At the floor. At the wall. At his mom’s shoes.

  “How about we go for a run Sunday morning? We could go to the track together, run some intervals.”

  “Sorry, mom, there’s not enough room at the track for me and you and your notice.”

  Lou stormed to the kitchen where he banged all the cabinet doors, pretending to look for something to eat.

  “Come with me,” Dee ordered Leigh. She led her into the living room. “Stay here. Don’t move.”

  Dee moved on to the kitchen. Lou was elbow deep into a bag of potato chips. “Put the bag down,” she said. Lou slowly nibbled at the chips in his hand, otherwise not moving. “Now,” Dee demanded. Lou, as slowly as he could, set the bag down and began to languidly lick the salt and vinegar from his fingers. “Follow me,” Dee growled.

  Lou followed at a snail’s pace. As soon as he entered the living room, Dee erupted. “This is not okay. This room would let protective services place you in foster care. Lou, you want to have the team over wh
en the house looks like this? You both need to show some responsibility. Look at this,” she pointed at the pencil shavings. “Who was sharpening pencils?”

  Neither child was willing to accept responsibility. “Leigh, were you sharpening pencils today?”

  “Maybe,” Leigh offered.

  “And did you spill the sharpener?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And did the shavings fall all over the carpet?”

  “I guess. But it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Are you four? Never mind. Don’t answer that. I don’t care if it was a cruel twist of fate that no one could have predicted. It happened. It needs to be cleaned up. Get the vacuum from the closet, plug it in, and vacuum up all the shavings.”

  Lou smiled and Leigh shot him a look. “Have fun cleaning up your chocolate pile,” Leigh said.

  “Are these your chocolates?” Dee asked.

  “Yes,” Lou admitted.

  “Then why did you say they weren’t yours before?”

  “I thought you meant different chocolates.”

  “What? What different?” Dee stammered. She clapped her hands over her face and shook her head until she felt ready to continue. “Okay, here’s what you’re going to do.” Leigh began to vacuum and Dee raised her voice to be heard over the electric motor. “You’re going to pick up all the chocolate and all the wrappers. Then wipe everything up with a wet rag. Then, then, spray the carpet with the carpet cleaner and scrub it. When you’ve done that, you need a clean, wet rag to soak up all the cleaner.”

  Dee looked from kid to kid. Neither was looking back at her. Leigh maneuvered the vacuum head like it was a cobra trying to strike a mongoose made of pencil shavings. Lou was picking up the chocolate with dainty fingers, like a proper English lady picking good crumpets for those what gone bad. Dee walked to the wall and unplugged the vacuum from the outlet. Leigh turned on her as the vacuum whined to a stop.

  “I thought you wanted me to vacuum!” Leigh snotted.

  “And finally,” Dee ignored her and continued in a voice full of quiet menace, “when you’ve done all that, you will both work together to get all these dirty dishes into the kitchen. Carry them one at a time if you like, but neither one of you is doing anything else until you’ve remediated this before the EPA has to.

  “And while you do that, I will be checking the school’s website for any assignments you need to be working on tonight.”

  “We’re not babies, mom,” Lou yelled.

  “Then act like it, Lou,” Dee replied.

  “You act like it,” Leigh rallied to Lou’s side. “You’re not making any sense. First you tell me to vacuum, then you unplug the vacuum. On what planet does that make sense?”

  “Just get this done,” Dee said. “Do what I’m asking, no more arguing, and get this done.”

  Dee walked away. As she entered the office she noticed the small sparks of energy riding along each time she took a breath. She slowly relaxed, gently releasing ionic energy back into the atmosphere. She felt ashamed.

  When she was neutral again, she turned to her computer. She confirmed very quickly that neither child had any missing homework. Or, if missing, not logged in the school tracking system. She switched back to the tab with her profile and skimmed through the new matches. She accepted all of them and even requested dates. If she could handle nonsense this, a few random dates should be a breeze.