This story contains characters that belong to Marvel, and some song lyrics that were written by Janis Joplin and are probably now owned by some massive media megacorporation.
This story was jotted off on the spur of the moment as a response to M Lever's Tristan Brawn Challenge.
The End of Innocence
by D. Benway
Amanda Kettering was a bitch.
Her fist smashed into the hanging bag.
Amanda Kettering was a bitch from the day school.
She hit the bag harder.
Amanda Kettering was three inches taller than she was.
She hit the bag again, this time feeling the impact in her elbow and shoulder. She tried to scratch where the sweat was running down back behind her bra, but the boxing gloves hindered her efforts.
Amanda Kettering was ten pounds lighter than she was.
She hit the bag and something cramped in her back. She folded forward, stretching. She cursed. She wished that she had changed out of school clothes before attacking the bag, but she was too damned angry for that. She was alone in the secret gym, underground. Alone with her rage.
She hadn't suspected him, even though Tristan was always looking at other girls. She would not have seen him if she had not been two minutes instead of the usual ten early for class and had seen them both biking out the gate heading west, side by side. She had skipped the class altogether, and had gone to hit something instead. Sam had always told her that there were some times when you just had to hit something. Actually. he had said that it would be better to talk to someone else, unless there was no-one else to talk to. But who? The normals? Her team-mates, who had all said in one way or another that Tristan was a shit? They didn't understand him, that was all. He could be so sweet and vulnerable, so easily manipulated.
She went to a terminal mounted in the wall and hacked into Emma's system. After taking a quick look at her own grades, she found Amanda Kettering's file. At least Kettering was stupid, she noted with some satisfaction. She found the girl's address and unlisted home phone number. The bitch lived three miles from the school. Too far to run to or walk to, if she wanted to be back in time for the extra physics tutorial. If she had a car, she could make it there and back in plenty of time.
There was a car. In fact, there were eight of them. Emma had left duplicate keys in the Down Under just in case of an emergency. If this wasn't an emergency, she decided, nothing was. Besides, Emma always said that in matters like these, good girls only got what they deserved if they went out and took it.
She had been tempted by the MG, but that might not have attracted the right kind of attention, especially since she didn't have a Massachusetts drivers license yet. That had rankled, especially since she had been driving for five years, starting in the old Jeep pickup with the wooden blocks that Sam had strapped to the pedals. She could navigate dark winding country roads in that old truck at seventy, but she had never been able to quite hide that sort of skill from the inspectors at the licensing centres on the three occasions that she had failed the test. Instead, she picked the black Mercedes coupe with the darkened windows and the HC 666 plates. The local cops knew not to mess with that car.
She left the garage at speed. She timed it perfectly, cutting under the still-opening door and missing the bottom by a safe 3 inches at least, just as Emma always did. At the curb, precision-engineered German disc brakes brought her to a stop inches from the legs of the passing students on the sidewalk. A few of them jumped aside in panic. She blasted the horn and cleared a path through them. She accelerated again, then made a satisfyingly squeal-free stop at the gate. She made a right into the main road and accelerated again. The power of it! A garbage truck blocked the road ahead of her, meandering along at the posted speed. She glided around it to the right, then passed back to the left lane, now empty ahead of her. As she put her foot down, she remembered an old song her mother used sing while driving four or six or ten of them down to town in their old brown '68 Fury wagon.
"Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends.
So Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?"
She couldn't recall the other verses, so she picked up her portable phone and dialed Kettering's number. Nothing. She dialed Tristan's mobile. Nothing. She was approaching an intersection. The light was red. She could wait and go over the bridge when the light turned green, or turn right and take the shortcut behind the mill. There was no time. She swerved into the right lane and then cornered at 30. All four wheels stayed on the ground. A pedestrian almost crossed her path but leapt out of the way at the last minute. She saw him in the rear-view mirror, flashing her a middle finger. The car was too well insulated to hear what he was saying, but she noted that it would be affected by the Doppler effect, rising or falling in pitch as she drove on. She opened the window. The pitch was dropping. She smiled. It would be something that she could use in the tutorial to look good, although some of the circumstances might have to be moved to Kentucky. She almost missed the turn for the short cut, but not quite. She kept at least two wheels on the ground during that turn.
The short-cut was a good place to make up time. It wound up and down along the edge of a ridge overlooking the river, with heavy woods on one side and an abandoned mill down below. There was hardly ever any traffic, and excellent pavement. She gunned the engine as she mounted the first hill. The trees were just beginning to turn. It was all quite pretty as it sped by at 50 mph. She picked up the phone and dialed Tristan's mobile. Nothing. She dialed Kettering's number.
"Domino's," said a heavily accented Indian voice.
"Let me speak to Amanda, please," she said.
"There is no Amanda here," said the voice. "Would you like to order a pizza? We have two for one special."
She rang off. There was a car parked at the top of the next hillock, blocking half of the right lane. She swung out wide to avoid hitting it. There was plenty of room.
She found the piece of paper with Kettering's phone number and had reached the fifth digit when the wheel jerked from her grasp and a shadow passed overhead. Had there been a thump? She dropped the phone, wrestled the wheel back under control, and slammed on the brakes, leaving a trail of rubber. She looked up at the hood. There was a dent. She decided that she must have hit a deer. They were rutting at this time of year, and were all over the place. She looked back through the mirror towards the top of the hill, but could see nothing. She put the gears into reverse. The grinding noise started almost immediately and the wheel slewed to the left. She slammed on the brakes and put the car into forward. The noise came again and the car barely moved at all. There was a loud metallic snap and it stopped.
The antlers must have gotten caught in the brake rotor, she decided. She looked in the rear-view mirror again. No antlers, only part of a bicycle wheel just visible over the crest of the hill, turning slowly. She opened the car door. It fell all the way open under gravity. She sat there, wondering why someone might be lying in the road. She thought about it for some time. It occurred to her that they might need help. She picked up the phone in case an ambulance might be needed and got out of the car. She stood in the road. It was unusually warm for an autumn day, so she was sweating. It was unusually cold, which was why she was shaking. She walked slowly up the hill, which was very steep. As she did, the bicycle wheel came into view. It had stopped now. She stopped too. Another step...
She took another step and could now see beyond the crest of the hill. There was someone laying face-down in the road. Her breath caught in her throat. She saw its leg twitch. This was a good sign. She knew that people often twitched spasmodically in shock after they were hit by a car while laying in the middle of the road. She decided that it was a girl, and that the girl was wearing gray wool slacks, just like those in the school uniform. Girls from the school sometimes wore boys' slacks when riding into town. They even rode boys' bikes like the one laying crushed in the road. That way, they avoided getting hit on by the townies.
She walked around the side of the body. It was folded in a nasty way. The leg twitched again. She froze. There was a wasp nest in the road. The girl must have been attacked by a swarm of wasps and then fallen in the road, except that the only wasps were the eight or nine on the wet gray thing in the road and they weren't swarming. Instead, they appeared to be eating. Her strength left her. She wandered over to the curb and collapsed. She dialed Kettering's phone number. No answer. She dialed Tristan's number. One of those little birds whose chirping was so like that of a portable phone was trapped in the wicker basket on the bicycle. She didn't go to free it. She was afraid that she might scare it, and that it would die. Instead, she dialed Kettering's number again.
"Why do bad things happen to good people?" she asked.
The man at Dominos had no answer to her question.