[hr][Center] [i][b][s]Home Sweet[/s] Home, Pointe Bordeaux[/b][/i] |[i][b] Grace Kennison[/b][/i][/center]
[center][i]March, 18 2016[/i] - [i]1 Unread Message from Verse2Text[/i] [/center]
[center][i]"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." - 1 Corinthians 13:11[/i][/center]
[center][sub]"Hey brother, wanna grab some slushies and play Mario Kart?" - The Book of Grace 1:1[/sub][/center][hr]

The old wooden floor of their studio apartment groaned in agony. It creaked even when her brother walked upon it, but when Grace stepped across it sung like it was like that horrifying yodeling from that creepy mountaineer as he hiked up closer to his doom on that game show she used to watch as a child when she was home sick. Each and every trip from the bathroom to the kitchenette was a waking nightmare as Grace envisioned the floor joists finally throwing off the burden of their responsibilities and taking a break as she plummeted through the apartment belonging to the old couple below her before finally creating a teenage girl sized hole on the concrete foundation in the basement. It was an irrational fear, of course, and the girl knew it. She wouldn’t claim to even possess the knowledge of a structural engineer, but she had acquired a knack for guessing what could and could not hold her weight. Nevertheless, she still took wide strides around any grates in the sidewalk and nervously clenched her teeth when she walked up wooden stairs.

The apartment that Grace shared with her brother had all the tell tale signs of a first apartment. It was small. It had a weird smell to it that seemed to have instantly materialized exactly after they had signed their lease. The shower only ran at two temperatures, the first being boiling molten magma hot and the second turned it into a miniature snow cannon, and had about as much water pressure as a dollar store squirtgun. The walls were as thin as cardboard and Grace could hear her neighbors fighting and having make-up sex every other day, and just having obnoxiously loud sex on the days between. The other neighbor was even worse: he dreamed of being whatever a post-post-dubstep artist was. Apparently the first step was to not invest in headphones. The stove didn’t work. The A/C sucked. The walls were so white except for the spots where they were stained a dark yellow with a substance that Grace decided to prefer to keep a mysterious. And, like all good first apartments, it was sparsely furnished and utterly barren of any art or personal touches. 

Her brother was on the couch buried in his phone’s screen while some shit on the TV that had the moxie to call itself news played on the larger screen in front of him. It was the first time Grace had seen Joseph in a week; he’d been pulling doubles to make enough money to pay off the late fees from their last string of bills. They looked alike unless you asked the girls Grace used to hang around with after school; then one was a weird, frumpy loser with no sense of fashion and the other one was, like, oh em gee, just so ridiculously hot, like, no offense but how are you related? Grace was the former; she did not have any better friends. She imagined they’d been as disappointed as Dad had been if not more when Joseph had confirmed his bachelorhood. 

“Morn’,” said Grace, the word escaping dryly out of her throat after a little bit of a struggle. She wasn’t a morning person in general.

“Afternoon,” replied Joseph.

“Mm,” said Grace. She supposed she also wasn’t an afternoon person either then, all things considered. Mechanically she popped some stale slices of bread into their toaster and, with a feather touch, pushed the button down. Grabbing a dish and a mug from the drying rack, she half-listened to the TV as she poured herself a lukewarm cup of coffee. The girl opened the fridge; she was greeted with a depressing sight. “Creamer?”

“We’re out,” said Joseph.

Grace let her disgust be known, her tongue clicking disappointedly against her teeth. She drank the sludge anyway and went back for a second cup as the toast sprung up out of the toaster. She put them back in. Unlike her coffee, she enjoyed her bread black.  “Jam?” Out. “Butter.” Out. “Peanut butter.” Are you kidding, allergic and out. “Do we have anything?” Joseph announced her there was hotsauce. She’d pass. 

Nibbling on the charred toast, Grace hovered behind her brother and sneaked a peek at his phone. He was scrolling through his status updates--none of her business. She turned her attention to the TV; she knew the person on the screen. Okay, well, she didn’t know them know them, but she had absorbed enough episodes of TransAmerica vicariously through Joseph while she had been reading in the same room or, more often than not, fucking about on her phone. She didn’t have enough appreciation of irony to get a bitter enjoyment from watching someone who was occasionally to frequently ridiculed for the being different than others ridiculing and outright hating someone because they were now different than them. Joseph softly chuckled and shook his head. Grace furrowed her brow in annoyance.

“Why are you watching this?” she said, the caffeine kicking in enough to now enable her to complete full sentences. “This is stupid.”

“That’s the point,” said Joseph, absently thumbing through his phone. “And she makes a good point. Janelle was a total bitch.”

“That’s not--okay, well, maybe, I mean, they’re both the absolute worst, but that’s not what’s stupid about this,” said Grace. “A ton of people for, whatever reason, idolize these reality show jerks. It doesn’t matter if they say they do it ironically, they still let their mind be filled with trash and garbage and eventually just--”

“Sis, you’re doing that thing again,” said Joseph, interrupting her.

“What thing?”

“The annoying preachy thing that happens when you open your mouth.”

“I’m not preachy,” said Grace. 

“Hah!” said Joseph, briefly breaking eye contact from his phone to give his sister a look before returning back to his tiny screen. He held up his phone so that she could see the picture he was looking at. It was of a woman in helmet wearing a blue tracksuit standing over two men in ski masks tied to a lightpost by a steel beam. One of the woman’s hand was resting on the palm of the other, her finger pointing accusingly at the men as if she was a teacher giving a lecture to bratty students. “Whatever you say, Thumper.”

Grace frowned. There was actually a video to that encounter floating around the Internet. If she remembered correctly, she had quoted some line she had preloaded from Proverbs that day. 

“That doesn’t count. You’re the one who said I should lean in to my image,” said Grace, folding her arms.

“Well, what do you think it is that Veronica, Janelle, or any shitty reality star is doing? They’re just playing up the part of them that they know the media wants to see,” said Joseph.

“Sheesh, I know where you’re going with this. And you say I’m preachy,” said Grace, her shoulders slumping ever so slightly. Actually, she did not quite get it, but she did not want to hear the stupid not-so-different line from Joseph. If there was any actual truth to the idea that people become what others want and project them to be Grace did not reflect upon it. She knew Joseph her entire life. He wasn’t trying to be enlightening; he was trying to get under her skin.

“Look, I’m just saying that you should see if you can get a sweet TV deal and start pulling in some mad reality dollars,” said Joseph. “Trust me, it’d be a hit.”

“That’s so--, do you--, could that work?” asked Grace.

Joseph stared at her like she had just asked the stupidest question in the world. “Seriously?”

“No, nope. Nah, I mean, nah,” said Grace, breaking eye contact and forcing a laugh.

 She could not tell if it had been on purpose or not, but her brother bringing up money hit her right in a sore spot. As it turned out, being a cape was not as lucrative of a profession as the comics and movies made it seem. She’d always assumed the reporter jobs or the oodles of inheritances had always just been part of their cover, not an actual means to an end. In the past fiscal year as a quote-unquote superhero, Grace had actually managed to go about a hundred dollars in the red (mostly in expenses for her homemade costume).

Not to say that it would have been impossible to make some easy money. She had foiled a few robberies; nobody would have known if she had helped herself to a few greenbacks. Maybe she could have lightened a few pockets of disorderly drunks or violent criminals. It wouldn’t be much, but it’d be enough to help Joseph pay the rent. But she wouldn’t; she couldn’t. She had seen the tweets; she had read the threads. People were just waiting for her to fuck up. Joseph did a pretty good job of moderating her feed, but on occasion something would slip through claiming that she had sent someone to the hospital or had ruined a bystander’s property. If they saw her stealing? By golly, everything she had worked for would be ruined! And, more importantly, stealing was just wrong. Although it did absolutely suck being a walking charity that seemingly everyone fucking hated for being a Hyperhuman or for being too religious, or a girl, or for not wearing a slutty schoolgirl outfit.

 [i]Maybe TV is ready for its first Hyperhuman star,[/i] thought Grace. [i]Or Joseph and I could start a web series or something. There’s money in that stuff, right?[/i] She envisioned the two of them in their kitchen with her pointing a webcam at her hand and Joseph jamming a knife into it only for the blade to bend. Would people just think it was a fake prop knife? Maybe she could strap a camera to her head while she fought crime and upload the videos...except cameras cost money. Her phone, maybe? Wouldn’t that just look terrible? Maybe she could do a podcast and run ads for underwear shipped through the mail. Oh, oh, perhaps she could kickstart her career? Or what is that thing called? Patreon? People would pay for that, right. It’d just be like how taxes went to the police, except she was way, way cooler than any cop. Unless that cop was a Hyperhuman, too. Maybe she could just become a cop--except wait, everybody now hated cops and they would probably just arrest her. Wait, what if she...

“Aren’t you going to be late?” said Joseph, pulling Grace out of her daydream. She gave him a confused look, her bottom lip dipping open slightly. “Don’t you have a hate rally to attend?”

“I don’t...oh, oh!” She looked at her phone as her eyes grew wide. The Fairchild thing; she had completely forgotten about it. Any large event like this could draw unsavory types; she intended to be there to stop them. Grabbing her backpack off of the counter, Grace clawed at the handle to their front door without restraining her strength. A wave a fear and cold sweat ran through her body as the knob broke from its spot on the door and bounced against the floor towards the couch.

“Door’s faulty, sorry, love ya, bye,” said Grace as she bolted out the front door and thundered down the stairs into the streets below. As she moved through the streets, Grace couldn’t help but think that she was forgetting something. It was that feeling you got halfway through the day when you have a quiet moment of reflection followed by the horrific realization that, shit, you totally forget to turn the stove off that morning after making eggs. [i]Except that’s not it,[/i] thought Grace, dipping through a side street and making great effort not to run into anything, fearing she would have the same effect on it as if it had been hit by a tank. [i]That’s not it at all. The stove doesn’t work.[/i]

Whatever. It couldn’t be important, right?