Jackson Ford - The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind

“Listen to me.” I force my voice to stay steady. I’m not letting this happen—not after I nearly died. “Why don’t we just… try? It doesn’t have to be perfect. I don’t care if it isn’t, as long as it’s you.”

There’s a moment where I think he’s going to relent. That he’ll take me in his arms and we’ll pick up where we left off, and everything will be fine.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

He leans forward, plants a soft kiss on my cheek.

Then he’s gone.

I sit on the couch. Staring at nothing. After the longest time I realise that my face is wet. I don’t know when I started crying—maybe it even happened while I was speaking to Nic. This time I let the tears come, let the past two weeks, two years, two decades just pour out of me. Tears fall into my lap, the sunlight turning them to glittering jewels.

I want to throw something. Everything. Just smash and smash and smash until this entire apartment and city and the whole fucking world is dust.

I don’t.

After what feels like a century, the tears finally stop. I lie down on the couch, arms wrapped around a cushion. When I wake up, the sunlight has got longer, softer, climbing up the kitchen wall.

Nic’s words are still in my mind. His words, his face. I don’t love you . But this time the anger doesn’t come. It’s drained out of me.

I don’t hate Nic. I want to, for what he did—for how he turned me down. I hate what he said, hate it with every atom of my being…

But that doesn’t stop it being true.

I could fight it. I could cry, beg, scream, tell him he’s being an asshole. But he’s not. And doing any of that… treating him like that… would be the worst thing of all.

I’m allowed to live my life. Just like he’s allowed to live his. I can’t force him to feel something he doesn’t. And if we had slept together, it wouldn’t have changed the way he felt. In a way that might have been worse; seeing what we could have been and then having him turn away.

His hand on my back, his lips, his skin touching mine …

I’ve never felt so alone. Carlos betrayed me. Nic left me. There’s no one else.

Except… that’s not true, is it?

There’s Annie.

And Reggie. And Paul.

China Shop.

I never thought of them as friends. They were people who’d been forced to work with me, all of us conscripted in a war against Tanner’s shadow enemy. But that’s changed. They’ve got my back. I’ve got theirs.

And I have more than that. I have music, and food. I have the Batmobile. I have Los Angeles, an entire city to explore, a place that still hasn’t given up its secrets.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about Nic leaving. He can’t cut me out of his life completely—if he wanted to, he would have said so. I’ll find a way to convince him that we can be together. He needs space and time—maybe I do too. I don’t know how I’m going to make him fall in love with me, but I’ll figure it out. And there are plenty of things to do in the meantime. Like take out bad guys. Fuck with those who deserve to be fucked with.

As jobs go, it’s pretty good.

But that’s for later. The evening stretches ahead of me. A baking summer night in Los Angeles, with nothing to do and nowhere to be.

First I’m going to clean my place. Get some of the dust off. I’ll put a record on—something calming, De La Soul maybe. No, some soul. Aretha. Isaac. Earth, Wind & Fire. Then I’ll make breakfast—yes, you can have breakfast at 5 p.m. Or at least I can. I’ll have to check my food situation—I’m pretty sure whatever is in my fridge has spoiled, but I might get lucky. And if not, it’ll give me an excuse to run down to the Brooklyn Deli on Crenshaw, get a smoothie and a pastrami sandwich…

I stand. My feet are unsteady, so unsteady that I almost sit right back down. Almost. I take a deep breath, then another.

I’ll be fine. After all, I have superpowers. I survived a fall from the top of a skyscraper with no parachute. I can sure as hell survive this.

As long as I have some breakfast inside me.

The man known as Harry watches Nic Delacourt leave the house of the woman who calls herself Teagan Frost.

When she’d crashed into him as he rattled past her house at four in the morning, he’d thought for a horrible moment that she was going to see who he really was. She didn’t. And even though she was gone for a couple of weeks, she’s returned to the little house on Roxton Avenue, like he knew she would.

The only person in this entire city who doesn’t look through him, who acknowledges him… and it has to be her.

He’d been worried, early on, that someone would try to have him moved—arrested, taken to a shelter, Lord knows what else. But he smiles at everyone, doesn’t leave a trail of litter behind him and sometimes helps out by watering the jacarandas with an old paint pot he takes to a nearby public tap.

He’s had to be so careful. He’s taken great pains to hide his face, growing the massive beard, letting his fringe hang down, always dropping his head. He changed how he walked, made sure never to speak, never looked her in the eye. He’s older. His body and face have filled out. Nobody minds him. And it certainly helps that he can come and go at odd hours, that nobody ever questions the sound of his tinkling, clattering shopping cart at three in the morning.

After all, he doesn’t need to sleep.

He pushes his cart down Roxton, shredded shoes smacking against the tarmac. One of them has almost disintegrated, the upper held in place by a dirty flap of duct tape. He hates it, wishes he could buy new shoes—a pair of boots, thick and strong and warm. He has plenty of money, hidden in greasy rolls in the innermost bottles in his cart. But he can’t. He is a homeless man now, that is what he is and what he does, and She wouldn’t let him anyway. There’s no point even asking.

And he has to do what She says, even if his feet hurt, and his skin burns, and the scars on his back from the fire itch and itch and itch.

At the corner of Roxton and Dublin there’s a school—one which the students and teachers have long since abandoned for the summer. Its brick facade bakes in the afternoon sun, the windows dusty. The man known as Harry wrestles his cart up the quiet walkway until he’s out of sight of the street, in the shade of a stone archway leading to the school’s inner courtyard. Once he’s there he digs deep inside his cart, fingers pushing through familiar territory, and pulls out a cellphone.

It’s a special phone. A black slab, sleek and strong. It has only one number stored in it. He turns it on, waits for it to boot up, taps the lone icon in the middle of the screen.

She answers on the second ring. “Adam.”

“She’s back,” he says. It’s all he dares to say.

“And does she know?”

He must be very careful. Very, very careful. He must be sure. He thinks back to everything he’s observed, all the information he’s gathered. He cannot get this wrong, or She will be very, very angry.

“Adam,” Chloe says, impatient.

He finds himself glancing back in the direction of the house. The house he’s watched for over a year now.

“No,” he hears himself say. “She doesn’t know.”

Hey. Teagan here.

Jackson Ford has a bunch of people to thank, and given that he’s never going to get around to writing this himself, I figured I’d do it. Let’s be honest, it’s not like he’s much of a writer anyway. Did you see what he did to me back here?