A Short Story by O.G. Rose
The Opening Story of Under the Wing
Eve threw the sheets off her bed with a smile, whirled into her school clothes, and skipped every other stair on the way down to the kitchen. She found the cornflake supply low. She liked saving the world but not scrambled eggs. “Later, Mom!” Eve raced out the door with an empty stomach, then ran back in to slip on her shoes.
Other teenagers identified as superheroes and told everyone to make it seem like they were crazy, but Eve — who used her long hair as a black shield to block bullets, whose bright blue eyes turned red for heat vision — hated reverse psychology and kept everything inside. Just last week, she remembered fighting a knife-wielding, shapeshifting, dimension-hopping, monstrous figure who smiled and vanished into thin air after Eve asked him to turn over a new leaf and help her change the world. He was probably already working alongside her five years in the future; after all, it was obvious he liked her.
Eve raced out of the house and jumped on the bike she found abandoned on a street corner; her flying abilities only worked when no one was looking, and she didn’t fancy dropping out of the sky. She brushed rust specks off her plaid skirt, adjusted her white button-up shirt, and pedaled.
High school: the ultimate superhero sacrifice. Eve mastered quantum mechanics, chemistry, and physics long ago but failed tests on purpose. If she earned all As, the villains would find her quick, even in New York, the city where anyone who wasn’t a hero felt like an ant. Eve lived in poverty — again, to throw off the villains — and at night, after locking the door and waiting in bed until she closed her eyes and her Mom was clueless, Eve went to work.
Villains feared Eve throughout the galactic underbelly — she thwarted countless alien invasions — and every cosmic creature knew she wouldn’t rest until she found her Dad. Years ago, a supervillain invaded and ruined Eve’s memory, and Eve didn’t realize what had happened until she saw that her friends had fathers. Eve always thought her mother suffered mental breakdowns because she was crazy; now, Eve knew her Mom didn’t think she was loved. Eve would find the slimeball who did this, fix her family, save Dad, and win Lady Justice — a close associate — another victory.
Eve attended a school where whites were rare to avoid spies and to stay briefed on galactic gossip, because blacks regularly updated their manga collections. Manga was distributed by the Cosmic Police Force across dimensions to pass along secret messages about new weapons, new threats, and new missions, though only superheroes could read the signs.
John Smith approached down the hall. “Hey Eve” — he gave a quick nod — “great job yesterday.” Eve nodded back. He wasn’t woke, but Eve saw potential and needed another team member for fighting aliens. She already had two, Paul and Ford, who she saw sorting through their lockers. She strutted right up.
“You ready for tonight?” she asked. “It’ll be fun.” Paul and Ford always carried the latest editions of Attack on Titan. Eve studied both of their broad shoulders and smacked Paul in the back of the head. “Hey, I’m talking!”
Paul faced Eve and told her that the world would be better once she was dead.
He turned back to his locker.
Under Eve’s right eye, welling — she quickly reached up and rubbed it away. “Paul,” she swallowed and whispered, “what’s going on?”
“Just because you’re hurt doesn’t mean you can get away with murder.”
Were these clones? Cyborgs? “What do you mean?”
“Go learn something from that woke runner,” Paul told her. “The whole school knows. Sorry your Dad left you and your white Mom, but it’s no excuse.”
Was there a rumor? She was one of them. “I’m going to count to three, and if this doesn’t stop, I swear, I’m going to melt you with heat vision.”
Paul and Ford stared at her.
Ford shook his head. “White girls would kill themselves before admitting they were wrong.”
Eve hissed and lifted her fist to punch and saw her hand. It was snow. She pulled up her sleeve; she shook.
“This isn’t me.” Eve reached back and felt that her hair was straight. “God.”
“You changing identities again?”
“We’re under attack!” she yelled. “Ford, I need a data analysis on the area, stat! Is it the Master Computer? Time and space were altered!”
They were vulnerable, in the open.
“Stop acting,” Ford said. “You did what you did.”
“You’re a superhero!” Eve shouted. “One of the best!”
Students gathered in a circle around them; the halls closed in. Paul blinked; his cheeks loosened.
“You okay?” Paul asked. This was bad: they had forgotten they were superheroes. Eve looked to her right and spun around, ready for battle but unsure who to fight. What happened yesterday? Had the Master Computer infiltrated her mind too?
“I’m fine,” Eve lied. “Just tell me what happened twenty-four hours ago.”
Ford shut his locker. “She’s always lying.”
Eve stopped a Zombie Apocalypse during the night, but during the day — during the day — what did she do during the day?
“Refresh my memory,” Eve asked. “That’s an order!”
Paul opened his mouth and Eve could tell soul-knives were about to shoot out again, and she quickly ducked and weaved away and, where the weak freshmen collected, burst through the encircling students. She ran down the hall and felt her lungs falling behind. She never breathed this hard.
“This is bad.” She couldn’t reach Mac 4. She tapped her wrist, activating a call to the space station. Nothing: the enemy must have downed the satellites. Eve used her shoulder to push open the bathroom door into retro tiling, and that’s when she saw it. Her face. Pale. Tired. Eve punched the mirror. This was the most powerful villain she had ever faced. Not only had he made Eve look terrible, but he had also altered space and time to make her responsible for doing something awful. Now, her friends hated her, and divided, the enemy would pick them off one by one. She needed a weapon — a pistol, a katana — something banned from school property. Whatever the enemy made everyone think happened yesterday must have been traumatic: Eve had never seen Paul and Ford with flaring nostrils. After all the zombies they decapitated together, all the interstellar ghosts they exorcised — hatred.
Eve needed a plan. To regroup. To blend in. They’d find her in the bathroom; she needed to think. Who could have done it?
She smacked her forehead.
“The Bookworm!” Eve blurted. Should she kill him now? Yes. The sooner he was dead, the sooner she could get back to reality. Where was he? The library! But the library was on the other side of the school; students crowded the halls. She needed a gun. No, heat vision.
Footsteps. Eve slid into a stall and held the door to keep it from banging shut. The entrance swung open; two black girls entered.
“You here?” one asked. Eve moaned and, with years of training under her belt, stumbled out of the stall dramatically and collapsed to her knees, hugging her stomach.
“Internal bleeding!”
“You weren’t sick yesterday when you — ”
“Give it a rest,” the other girl with dreadlocks chimed in. “She’s always acting without paying attention.” She held out a hand to Eve. “You need the nurse?”
Eve nodded, accepted the help up, and draped her arm over the black girl’s shoulder for further dramatic effect. They shuffled out of the bathroom, and Eve found the whole school waiting. Paul and Ford stood in front, and Ford pointed at the floor. “Let her crawl.”
Paul tapped him in the chest. “She’s not herself,” Paul said, feeling bad for earlier and proving himself as Eve’s second-in-command.
“You know what she — !”
Paul stood his ground. “Just let her see a doctor.”
Eve coughed, covered her mouth, and slid a finger down her throat. Vomit burst between her hands — perfection — the students screamed. Stupid Bookworm, that personification of evil thought he could defeat Eve by turning the school against her, but Eve outsmarted him. Books never got people as far as acting.
Loyally, Paul dragged Ford over and traded off with the dreadlocked girl to prop up Eve from under her shoulders. At the nurse’s office, with a little more vomit and claims she possessed heat vision, Eve successfully got herself submitted to the hospital and struggled to conceal her glee. She decided to act like the whole “superhero thing” was a joke and to not use any of her powers. If the Bookworm was behind all this, he would have already programed his satellites to detect any trace of superhero activity around the globe. One leap over a building, and the satellites would pinpoint her location and use a laser blast to erase her with New York.
The gray drapes over the hospital window blocked out sites of speeding taxis and couples searching for a bite; the old nurse asked Eve if her mother was coming. Eve asked that the lights be turned off, and around midnight, her cheek sinking into the pillow, sweat beads dotting her arms under the weighted blanket, Eve ordered her thoughts to form into a plan. For now, she needed to get used to being like everyone else. She immediately failed, and so instead thought about killing Satan. It wouldn’t be easy: the Bookworm was smart. But he was also geeky: he read more manga than her and seemed to do it for fun versus duty. He also wore contacts: poke attacks wouldn’t work. Eve rolled in bed from one hip to the other, feeling an ache, further proof of her mortality. Before the Bookworm could speak, she’d kill him. He wielded a silver tongue and could talk angels out of Heaven. If only she could use heat vision! No superpowers: she needed to hide, act like everything was normal. Eve would pretend like she remembered what happened yesterday and apologize, claiming she acted like a superhero to avoid accepting fault. She was a good actress (she learned from studying married couples): the trick was to think things she didn’t believe, to feel things she didn’t feel. In Romeo and Juliet, when Eve was on an undercover mission (which often lasted up to five years, except when Mission Control felt generous) to see if a monstrous, shape-shifting alien was using theatre as a cover for his plot to fill society with hallucinatory, amnesia-causing trauma, Eve played Juliet, and when she screamed for help (to make sure the coast was clear) and stabbed herself (with a retractable blade) to convince the alien-disguised-as-Romeo-who-didn’t-know-the-script to desire death because the girl he loved was gone, everyone in the audience thought she was dead. Eve didn’t know if she would be able to get used to Paul and Ford being powerless, but she’d have to try. In their altered state, they couldn’t handle the truth.
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For the rest of the story, please see Under the Wing by O.G. Rose, available on Amazon in both Paperback and Kindle.
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