Rivals Read online

  Maggie’s brain spun around in her head. “I know I’ve been kind of distant, lately, but—”

  “It was more than a year ago! You turned into something weird after your Mom died. You deserted me, even though I could have been such a good friend to you, even though I wanted to help you through your grief, you just deserted me. And now you come here, today, less than a month before Homecoming and you want me to run away with you? Just like that?”

  “It’ll be just like old times. M and M against the world.”

  “I won’t do it. I just won’t. I know I owe you. I know you need me right now. But I won’t do it. Give me that!” Mandy grabbed the halter top out of Maggie’s hands and threw it behind her. “I can’t do it. I’m not strong enough. I’ve already been accepted at Northwestern for next year! I can’t be homeless. I can’t be broke all the time. I don’t have superpowers like you.”

  Maggie stood up and took a step toward her friend. She just wanted to hug her, to tell her she understood, that it was really okay—anything to get her to stop crying, even lies. Like, I’ll be fine on my own, or, I’m sorry, it wasn’t fair even to ask.

  But when she got close enough to touch Mandy shrank away from her. Mandy’s eyes went very wide as she backed right into her bureau and knocked a set of silver hairbrushes to the floor.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” she said, in a very small voice.

  Chapter 18.

  Brent would have driven Grandma to the hospital, learner’s permit or not, but Maggie had taken the car. He didn’t know what had happened between her and Grandma but it had to have been bad.

  Really bad. Grandma’s fingers were sticking out in random directions. He was pretty sure all of them were broken. “I’ll carry her,” he told Lucy. “I’ll just pick her up and run to the hospital—I can get there faster than with the car, anyway.”

  “Sure,” Lucy said. She was very calm. “Except, when you were carrying me before? You were just walking, and still I bounced up and down with every step. If you run with her, she’ll be shaken up like a bottle of soda. I don’t think it would help.”

  “There must be something I can do! What good are these powers if I can’t help my own family?”

  “Chill, Brent,” Lucy said, and pulled her cell phone out of the outside pocket of her backpack. She dialed 911 and told the operator what was going on. An ambulance was there five minutes later.

  Grandma was screaming the whole time. She couldn’t seem to stop. She was in a lot of pain. When Brent climbed up into the ambulance beside her, she lifted her head and looked down at Lucy, who was about to get in, too.

  “Your little girlfriend should go home, Brent,” Grandma gasped. “I don’t want her seeing me like this. It’s bad enough the doctors will see me.”

  Brent apologized to Lucy with a look. “I’ll see you there,” she said. She shrugged good-naturedly and started hobbling home as the paramedics slammed shut the rear doors of the ambulance.

  There was more screaming. A lot of it—until the paramedics gave Grandma something for the pain. When she settled down and her eyes started drooping behind her thick glasses, she reached for Brent’s hand with her good left hand and he felt the diamond scratch his skin.

  Oh no, he thought. Oh no. Not today—not when Mags was so upset already.

  Grandma must have hit Maggie with the diamond. Just like she’d threatened to do so many times. What had Maggie done that was so awful to deserve that? Brent supposed it didn’t matter. It could have been anything. As far as Grandma was concerned Maggie couldn’t do anything right. “Grandma,” he said, softly, “you have to forgive her.”

  “I’m going to press charges,” she told him. “You saw what she did.”

  Yeah, but you hit her first. Except—that wasn’t good enough, was it? Perkins the bully had hit Ryan Digby first. That hadn’t made it okay for Brent to beat him up. Still—it was his sister this time. That made it different, somehow. Not in a way that was fair, but a way that mattered nonetheless. “If you don’t forgive her, how are we going to work as a family? You don’t know what she’s going through. Please.”

  “I won’t have her in my house anymore,” Grandma insisted.

  Our house. Not yours.

  “She’s wild. Like an animal. Just like her father.”

  Our father. Our father who just died.

  “She’s a spoiled little brat and she needs to learn discipline or she’s going to get herself in a heap of trouble,” Grandma finished.

  Too late, Brent thought.

  The ambulance reached the emergency room and there was more waiting, and the pain medication wore off and Grandma started screaming again. Eventually, though, a doctor came and took her away. A nurse took Brent by the arm and lead him toward a waiting lounge. “Your friends are already here. They’ll take care of you,” the nurse told him. He pushed open the door and saw Lucy inside—talking to Weathers.

  “Brent,” she said, and jumped up to hug him. He gently pushed her away.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked the FBI man.

  “Investigating an assault on an elderly woman. That’s the kind of crime I take pretty seriously,” Weathers told him. “I might have to make an arrest.”

  “Not unless she presses charges. That’s—that’s how it works, right? She has to actually accuse Maggie of a crime.”

  “So you’re definitely certain it was your sister, Maggie Gill, who broke your grandmother’s hand?” Weathers asked.

  Brent frowned. That was a weird way of putting it.

  “Are you recording this?” Lucy asked.

  The special agent smiled and opened up his jacket to show them a miniature voice recorder in his breast pocket. “Yes,” he said. “Very astute, Ms. Benez. I have a terrible memory, you see, and this helps me recall everything exactly as it was said. In case, say, I need to provide evidence in a court of law.”

  “Don’t tell him anything, Brent. Not until you have a lawyer,” Lucy said.

  Brent shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not like he doesn’t know exactly what happened. The question is what happens next. Look, Weathers, I can fix this. I can talk my grandmother out of pressing charges. And I can talk to Maggie, make her understand that we can’t go on like this. I’m the only one she’ll listen to. But you have to help me, too. You have to promise you’ll go easy on her.”

  “I just want to make sure nobody else gets hurt,” Weathers told him. “Alright. You have a deal. If you can defuse this situation, if you can bring your sister in so I can talk to her, I’ll make sure she gets full marks for cooperation.”

  That wasn’t what Brent had been asking for, but maybe it was the best he was going to get.

  “Of course, you’ll have to find her before you can talk to her.”

  Brent scowled. “You don’t know where she is?”

  “As I’ve said before, the Bureau don’t waste its time following around American citizens. Though in Maggie’s case that may have to change, now. No, I have no idea where she went after leaving your house today.”

  Brent bit his lip. He had no idea, either. He tried to put himself in her shoes. Where would Maggie go if she felt like everything was crashing in on her? Mom’s grave? Starbuck’s? Nothing seemed right.

  Lucy put a hand on his arm. “Where would you go, if you’d just hurt your Grandma?” she asked.

  He closed his eyes and tried to imagine it. He had to fight his own instincts, which told him that he would never, ever hurt a member of his family. He had so few of them left. But when he got past that, the answer was clear.

  “I’d go see you,” he told Lucy.

  She nodded. “So who’s your sister’s best friend?”

  Chapter 19.

  Special Agent Weathers drove them straight over to Mandy Hunt’s house—or what was left of it. Brent could see right away he’d picked the right friend. Maggie had been there, and she hadn’t left through the front door.

  Not that he could see a front door. The ent
ire front side of the house had collapsed inward, broken boards and sheared-off rebar sticking up at crazy angles, the roof slumped over a gaping hole where the front wall had been. Water sprayed diagonally across the street from ruptured pipes and fires were starting to smolder in the heaps of shingles and broken plaster that spilled across the driveway and into the road.

  If Maggie had dropped a bomb on the place, it might have done less damage. But Brent knew instantly what had really happened. She had been in such a rush to leave she had punched her way out right through the house. It didn’t surprise him that she was capable of wreaking such havoc. He knew her strength, since he shared it.

  “Stay in the car, I’m calling the fire department,” Weathers announced, but Brent had already pushed his door open and jumped out onto the sidewalk.

  “Come back here, Gill,” the FBI man shouted, lowering his window. “I can’t let you go in there! It’s an insurance nightmare.”

  “There might be people in there, and they could be dead by the time the firefighters get here. Stay with him, Luce,” Brent said, and in the backseat Lucy nodded. Her face was wide open, her eyes locked on the destroyed house.

  Finally, he thought. A chance to do some real good. Nobody could debate that saving people from a collapsing house was heroic, or noble, or worth doing. Standing by and waiting with Weathers would be unthinkable.

  Brent jumped into the mess and grabbed a steel beam that had fallen across the front of the house. Straining a little, he pushed it up over his head and then jumped inside. It fell back behind him and the whole house swayed, but he was inside, in what might have been a living room once though it was hard to tell. Ahead of him was the kitchen, still largely intact but wreathed in flames.

  “Hello!” he shouted. “Is there anyone in here?” He would feel pretty stupid if there wasn’t. There was no answer, but anyone in the wreckage might be unconscious. He pushed through the kitchen, flames licking at his clothes. Part of his sleeve caught on fire so he slapped it out. To his left was a stairway leading up, to the right an empty bathroom. He headed for the stairs—and then jumped back as half a ton of bricks and girders came crashing down from the upper floor, smashing the risers and filling the air with red dust that made him cough.

  He didn’t have much time. The ceiling above him was sagging, water dripping across the plaster and then down the kitchen wall. He bent his knees and sprang upward, smashing through the ceiling and the hardwood floor above, grabbing at anything he could hold onto and pulling himself upward through the hole he’d made.

  He found himself in a master bedroom, pale blue paint on the walls and satin curtains covering the windows. The floor sloped to one side and the bed had rolled down to smash against the far wall. It was partially blocking the doorway so he grabbed it and hauled it out of the way, then jumped out into an upstairs hallway. There were doors on three sides of him, then, and they all looked like they’d jammed inside their crooked frames. He kicked one open and found a bathroom with no ceiling—the floor was littered with broken wood and burning shingles. The next door was a linen closet with all the towels and sheets in a pile on its floor.

  One more door to go. He got a good run up and hit it hard with his shoulder. It collapsed instantly under his momentum and he rolled through into a girl’s bedroom with horses on the walls.

  In one corner of the room Mandy Hunt was curled up in a ball, wheezing and shaking. She didn’t react when he shouted her name.

  Brent took a step toward her—and the house shifted over to its right. The wall above Mandy tilted inward and started to collapse, while all the furniture in the room started sliding across the floor, squeaking as it ground its way down toward the lowest part of the uneven floor.

  Plaster and sheared-off sections of lath showered down on Brent’s head. He could hear nails popping as they were pulled free of the floorboards, and downstairs he heard a whoomping roar that he thought might be a gas line catching fire.

  At any second the house was going to collapse under its own weight. He could hear the sirens of a fire truck in the distance but he knew it would never arrive in time. “Hold on, I’m coming,” he called, in case Mandy could hear him.

  The wall above her kept collapsing piece by piece. A huge chunk of plaster pinwheeled down from the ceiling and struck her on the shoulder, striping her pale skin with blood. Brent dove across her just as the entire wall gave way and came crashing down.

  He was instantly buried in broken plaster and roof shingles. A length of metal guttering whipped across his back and cut his shirt open but it only hurt for a second before his body got its strength back.

  Beneath him Mandy wasn’t breathing.

  Oh, no, he thought. No. I was so close.

  But maybe—if 911 had sent an ambulance as well—maybe she could be revived. Brent scooped her up in his arms and staggered upright to his feet, shedding hundreds of pounds of dusty plaster and broken boards. He had to struggle to breathe himself. The air was so thick he couldn’t seem to get any oxygen. He couldn’t see anything and his ears were ringing.

  He could jump straight up in the air, through the collapsed roof, but if he did he would have to drag Mandy up through the rafters with him and she might get hurt. He pushed through waist-deep debris instead, holding her up so her feet didn’t drag in the jagged and broken mess, and shouldered his way back out into the hallway.

  The fire had spread while he was in Mandy’s room. It was racing up the walls, following the wires hidden behind the plaster, and was dripping from the ceiling. There was plenty of fuel to feed it and he knew if he wasted another second he would be engulfed in flames. The bathroom, he thought—he had seen blue sky through the broken walls of the bathroom. He rushed forward, holding Mandy well clear of the burning walls, and didn’t even stop to look when he got through the bathroom door. He just ran and leapt and hoped he could find a soft place to land once he was outside. Behind him the house shifted again, walls falling in on themselves, the entire stairway collapsing and taking most of the upstairs hall with it. By then, though, his feet were pedaling at empty air and he was soaring, gliding across the street to land in a row of bushes that felt a lot harder than they looked.

  Just before impact he lifted Mandy up in his arms to keep her from being crushed. When he had his feet back underneath him he laid her down gently on a freshly mown lawn and dropped to his knees beside her.

  Her clothes were torn. Her hair was a mess. She had streaks of white dust across her face and her bare arms. Blood welled from dozens of cuts and abrasions all over her exposed skin. And she still wasn’t breathing.

  “Get back,” Weathers said. He pushed Brent away and bent over the unconscious girl. Putting his hands together on her chest he pushed down rhythmically as he blew air into her mouth. Looking up for a second he said, “Pinch her nose shut. Yeah, just like that.” He bent to blow air into her lungs again and then repeated his chest compressions. “Come on,” he said, and scowled at her.

  Mandy reached up one hand and slapped weakly at Brent’s fingers. He let go of her nose and she made a horrible wet gagging sound. She rolled over on her side and was violently sick, but then she pulled her knees up tight to her chest and started gasping for air. “Maggie,” she croaked. “Maggie Gill—she’s gone crazy.”

  “Don’t try to talk. You,” Weathers shouted, gesturing at a firefighter standing in the street. “Over here!” He looked back down at the girl as the firefighter brought over a silver survival blanket and wrapped her up in it. “Was there anyone else in the house? Any brothers or sisters? Were your parents home?”

  Mandy managed to shake her head no before the firefighter put a mask over her face and started pumping her full of oxygen. Two more firefighters came up with a stretcher and lifted her up gently, then wheeled her at top speed toward a waiting ambulance.

  “Holy hell,” Weathers said. His tie was shoved over to one side, and he fixed it with one hand while he stared at Brent’s face.

  “What?” Brent
asked. “Did I do something wrong?”

  Lucy was hobbling toward him. “Not at all, Brent. He’s just never seen anything like you before.”

  Brent shook his head. He felt like he’d eaten an entire box of chalk and his eyes were burning. His clothes were in tatters, barely hanging off of him. Otherwise he thought he felt fine. “Huh.”

  “It’s official,” Lucy said, grabbing Brent around the chest and leaning her head on his shoulder. “You’re a hero!”

  Chapter 20.

  It’s official, Maggie thought, staring at her face in a gas station restroom mirror.

  You’re a villain.

  “What a stupid thing to think,” she told herself. But it was getting harder to deny. She’d stolen food that morning. She’d been so hungry she hadn’t even thought about it. Just walked into a bakery, asked for a half dozen croissants, and then refused to pay once the clerk handed them over.

  A kid about Brent’s age had been standing by the door, sweeping dust out into the street. He’d had freckles, she remembered, and he was wearing a really stupid paper hat. He tried to stop her. Told her she was a thief.

  She had flung out one hand and knocked him into a row of tables hard enough to snap his broom. She only used one hand because the other one was holding a half-eaten croissant. If both hands had been free she probably would have crippled him.

  With the door clear, she just walked out and down the street an no one tried to stop her at all. And the croissants tasted so good.

  Of course, anything will taste fantastic when you haven’t eaten in days.

  Maggie washed out her field hockey uniform in the sink with some of the nasty pink soap from the dispenser. She used some more of it to scrub under her armpits and wash her face. There wasn’t much she could do about her hair—the soap would just make it more tangled and nasty, so she left it. God, what she wouldn’t give for a shower. And her own bed. She’d been sleeping in the bus station with all the other homeless people and it was getting very old.