K Breese - Future Imperfect

“Who?” Liz laughs. “Who else?”

“Uh, yeah, she’s interesting,” I say, reaching around each of them, hands scouring the countertops looking for the bottle opener, desperate for the bottle opener. Gina has it. Has been holding it the whole time. She hands it to me and asks, “Ade, how did you get into the party, anyway?”

“I was invited. Me and Paige.”

They laugh like jackals.

Gina says, “You three-you, lesbo, and the new bitch-are like a perfect team.”

“How’s that?” I ask, eyes narrowing.

Chris, she says, “You’re all mutants.”

“Why’re you lumping Vauxhall in with…”

“Are you serious? Have you even seen her?” Chris snickers. “That crazy bitch is like the biggest-”

“Opposed to who?” I interrupt. “You ugly skanks’re just jealous. Maybe she wasn’t raised in Crestmoor. Maybe her dad’s not a doctor. Doesn’t make her any less-”

I stop when I realize they’ve all gone quiet.

Standing behind me, Vauxhall says, “My dad’s dead.”

Liz and Gina cringe, make sympathetic faces. Heather laughs uncomfortably. And then all four of them, moving like some trained acrobatic team, squeeze out of the kitchen in seconds. There was a magic trick and the bitches have evaporated.

“Friends of yours?” the mummy asks.

“Not at all.”

I’m thinking right here is the real beginning.

The way this story really truly starts.

Standing here, looking at Vauxhall in her getup, I’m imagining how we’ll reenact this story for friends years from now. In my mind I see us older and sophisticated, maybe at a restaurant sipping wine and eating strange cheese, and Vauxhall’s covering her mouth and laughing and telling our friends, also mature wine drinkers, that we met for real, really met, at a costume party at some dude’s house, some dude neither of us can recall. We’ll laugh about that. I’m sure of it.

Right now, me getting all dreamy leaves a wedge of uncomfortable silence between us. Vaux breaks it by leaning in and saying, “It’s not what you think it is.”

What a great opening line.

“What’s not?”

“My costume. It’s more complicated than it looks.”

I take a sip of cider, say casually, “Okay. Let me guess. Uh, a mummy?”

“Didn’t see that coming.” Vauxhall laughs.

“I got nothing.”

She looks disappointed. “Why are you drinking that bitch fizz, anyway?”

The cider in my hand, I shrug. “Tasty?”

I’m leaning against the stove and put my right hand down on the range and while it’s there, just fleetingly, Vauxhall puts hers on top. The touch is brief. I feel only the warm leather. The hand beneath is a mystery. I feel the shape, but without touching the skin, it’s like touching a picture.

This is our first official touch, as brief and unexpected as it is.

And this is exactly when some asshole barges in with a bottle of wine, splashing it everywhere. His eyes are bloodshot.

He sees Vauxhall, his face twists into a mischievous grin.

“Sorry.” He laughs. And turns and leaves.

“Know him?” I ask Vauxhall.

A silence follows. Both of us rocking in our shoes. I break the tension, ask, “Right, so, I think I should know, but what’s the costume?”

“I’m Negative Woman.”

“Who?”

“From Doom Patrol . Comic book. She has to wear bandages, otherwise this black energy spirit can fly out of her body and wreak havoc.”

“I never read Doom Patrol .”

“From the sixties. What do you read?”

“Usually new stuff. Recent stuff. Really, I’m more into the art.”

“Oh. One of those.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, most people read comics for the story lines. The characters. They’re like soap operas, only with big pecs and fancy suits and the ability to shoot electricity from fingertips. Then there are the people into the indie zines that are just like these examinations of human failing and stuff. And there are people like you. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all,” she says, and I don’t believe a word of it. She adds, “Personally, I like the most messed-up characters. The ones with demons. With secret powers that they can barely control.”

“You that way? Have some sort of energy being inside you just itching to get out and tear the world apart?”

Vaux’s bandage face registers nothing. “Aren’t we all like that? All of us with this powerful person inside that we can hardly control but can’t ever really let out. The consequences would be too great.”

I shrug. “I’m not sure I do.”

Vaux laughs. “You just might have lost contact with him. Or her.”

“Her?”

Vaux laughs again. “Why not? Maybe you’ve got some out-of-control bitch deep inside you. Some hellacious chick who’s just rearing to break out and break hearts and bring the world to tears.”

“I don’t think I do.”

“That’s lame, Ade. Come on, be clever with me for a few minutes.”

I take another sip of my girl drink. “Technically,” I say, “I’m a superhero.”

“Technically?”

“Yeah. Totally. I can see-”

We’re interrupted when Paige struts in. “Hey, guess who she is?” I ask.

Paige looks Vaux over, says, “The Question?”

Vaux shakes her head.

“Uh, some evil Charleston mummy character?”

“Nope.”

“That one mummy from Marvel Boy?”

“Negative Woman.”

Paige’s face lights up. “Ooh, an obscure one. Doom Patrol , right? What was her name again?”

“Valentina Vostok.”

“Damn, that’s good.”

They talk comics for twenty minutes. Bouncing from The New Mutants (“Is Wolfsbane the shit or what?”) to Avengers (“A baby with Vision? Huh? ”). I stand there transfixed. A butterfly pegged to a specimen board. They move on to school. Friends. Parents. Watching Vauxhall is like watching a mime. Her movements carry so much more weight since I can’t see her face.

Paige asks about her name. I find myself leaning in. Physically trying to move myself close so I can hear every word even though the party in the background isn’t that loud. I’m only an observer here.

A very biased one.

This story, I’ve been filling in the blanks of it ever since my first zit.

Vaux says, “My parent’s named me Vauxhall Renee Rodolfo because they were told it was a strong name. They were told that giving a baby a strong name ensures that she will grow up to be a powerful woman like Sojourner Truth or Isadora Duncan. These women were powerhouses. They were revolutionaries. My parents were told this by their guru. They always insisted that my name is the strongest name they could find. Dad said, ‘It’s the v and the xh combo. Those sounds, they’re like jumping into a lake of ice. You hear those sounds, and you wake up. That’s real.’ Bunch of New Age bullshit, if you ask me.”

Paige laughs. “Hippies, huh? Mine too. Named me after an actress.”

I say, “Hippies are so deluded.”

Vaux continues like she’s lecturing us. Only she doesn’t talk down and keeps it simple. Part of me thinks her lines sound rehearsed. There’s something very Jimi about it.

Vaux says, “My parents decided early that their daughter would stand out. They decided this the night they were married. At least that’s what they’ve told me. What they say is that they were married on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in Baja. The stars were out and there was a man with a ukulele. There was a rabbi and a Buddhist monk. After the brief ceremony, they jumped off the cliff hand in hand and swam naked while the wedding party rained daisies down on them. As they swam they kissed and talked and my dad said, ‘We will have a daughter. She will be incredible and have an incredible name.’”